Sound politics has the following article about diversity in science fiction:
Her piece begins with this paragraph:
The face of fantastic fiction is changing. More than just its face: This former locus of racial and cultural stereotypes, where Robert Heinlein’s spaceship pilots look, sound and act like 1950s Pat Boone fans and J.R.R. Tolkien’s doughty elves battle hordes of Asiatic Orcs, is undergoing a transformation that’s more than skin deep. Three recent novels demonstrate the genre’s growing ability to represent human diversity.
That made me wonder if she had ever read Heinlein’s 1954 juvenile, The Star Beast, where one of the principal characters is from Kenya. Heinlein introduces him as follows:
Back on Earth at Federation Capital His Excellency the Right Honorable Henry Gladstone Kiku, M. A. (Oxon) Litt D. honoris causa (Capetown), O. B. E., Permanent Under Secretary for Spatial Affairs, was not worried about the doomed crustaceans because he would never know of them.
Secretary Kiku, Heinlein tells us, is responsible for “[a]nything and everything outside the Earth’s ionosphere” — in an age when humanity has explored hundreds of other star systems.
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