m. c. de marco: To invent new life and new civilizations...

SCI FI Wire has a review of Black Sheep by Ben Peek, another timely science fiction novel.

Peek said he’s always been interested in race, but writing the book got him interested in representation—and, especially, in the representation of the white figure, he said. “I’m a mean-looking white guy from the western suburbs of Sydney, and the thing that always got me about novels and TV and pretty much everything was how little whiteness was paid attention to,” Peek said.

Oftentimes, if an author has a black person in a story, when that character walks into a room, the author tells you that they’re black; on the other hand, when a white person walks into the same room, nine times out of 10, their whiteness isn’t even mentioned, Peek said. “I became interested in exploring why there was no weight for whiteness and how you could signify it and how you could give it weight: how you could make people have an awareness of their racial weight in today’s society,” he said.