Ursula K. Le Guin escribe sobre la adaptación para la televisión de su serie de Terramar, A Whitewashed Earthsea, para comentar la eliminación del cuidadoso tapiz racial de las novelas, sustituido en televisión por una uniformidad ajena al espíritu de los libros.
Most of the characters in my fantasy and far-future science fiction books are not white. They’re mixed; they’re rainbow. In my first big science fiction novel, The Left Hand of Darkness, the only person from Earth is a black man, and everybody else in the book is Inuit (or Tibetan) brown. In the two fantasy novels the miniseries is “based on,” everybody is brown or copper-red or black, except the Kargish people in the East and their descendants in the Archipelago, who are white, with fair or dark hair. The central character Tenar, a Karg, is a white brunette. Ged, an Archipelagan, is red-brown. His friend, Vetch, is black. In the miniseries, Tenar is played by Smallville’s Kristin Kreuk, the only person in the miniseries who looks at all Asian. Ged and Vetch are white.
My color scheme was conscious and deliberate from the start. I didn’t see why everybody in science fiction had to be a honky named Bob or Joe or Bill. I didn’t see why everybody in heroic fantasy had to be white (and why all the leading women had “violet eyes”). It didn’t even make sense. Whites are a minority on Earth now —why wouldn’t they still be either a minority, or just swallowed up in the larger colored gene pool, in the future?
Te hace pensar en lo poco que se preocupan los autores de ciencia ficción por ese aspecto del futuro. Buscan la verosimilitud tecnológica, pero rara vez aspiran a esa consciencia de las formas diferentes que pueden adoptar las sociedades. Es agradable saber que autores como Ursula K. Le Guin lo tienen se lo toman tan en serio.