Beth Cato is the author of The Clockwork Dagger and its sequel, The Clockwork Crown, newly released from Harper Voyager.From her Q & A with Sam Riedel for the B & N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog:
There’s a big push in genre fiction of all kinds for more diversity and varied characters. Did you feel pressured to do that or did it come as a natural part of world-building?--Marshal Zeringue
I wanted to do that, because I live in a colorful world. I grew up in California, and I moved from there to South Carolina and Washington, so I’ve seen the racial demographics across the country. When I lived in South Carolina, it was really weird to me, because for the first time in my life, I wasn’t surrounded by people speaking Spanish. And no mariachi music. But I was surrounded by more black people than I was used to. And then I went to Washington, and I told my husband—he grew up in New Mexico, and we’re like, “We are weirdly surrounded by lots of white people.” To me, it’s a colorful world, and you don’t see that on the covers of books so much. To me, it’s a no-brainer—there needs to be diversity.
Clockwork Crown has a huge number of characters of color. Throughout most of the first half of the book, the background characters—that’s what they look like. And it’s a subtle thing, it’s not something I dwell on much in the book, but I like that there’s an assumption there that you don’t always have to say what someone’s color is. They are who...[read on]