Yeah, my reflexive suspicions roughly mirror yours, and while I presume that there's some bias in what I'm reading...it is one of those situations that kind of makes me go "What are you even reading?!" Even counting books that I haven't even read, but have just seen significant press or social media coverage of, like "On the Edge of Gone" and "An Unkindness of Ghosts," I...know for a fact there are non-cis/white/male autistic characters in SFF out there.
And then you also get into the question of how to count autistic-coded characters, which...I am not sure offhand whether autistic coding of cishet white men is more common than that of queer/trans/female/POC characters, but like, how do you even count characters like Elphaba and Rain in the "Out of Oz series," for instance? They most certainly aren't cis white men, and I think most autistic readers would probably identify with them as autistic even if the books never use that word about them, but...the books never use that word about them, and I think it gets very iffy to try to translate their "race" into any contemporaneous Earthly analog.
But yeah, I kind of went "wha??" at that statement, and it MAY just be that I gravitate towards authors writing really uncommon sorts of SFF, but I know that there isn't just a total lack of non-cishet white male autistic characters out there.
Hilarious indeed; in this country the only autistic SFF novel translated into my own lanquage is Rivers Solomon's The Unkindness of Ghosts. 100 percent of the authors and main characters are not white cishet men.
Why is Enga been left out of the data? How would Dr. Hoffmann categorize Yeti in Solomon' The Deep?
This is an excellent tutorial on data analysis as well as a fascinating result in it's own right. Some SFF conventions have academic tracks; have you considered submitting?
Autistic Book Stats
Yeah, my reflexive suspicions roughly mirror yours, and while I presume that there's some bias in what I'm reading...it is one of those situations that kind of makes me go "What are you even reading?!" Even counting books that I haven't even read, but have just seen significant press or social media coverage of, like "On the Edge of Gone" and "An Unkindness of Ghosts," I...know for a fact there are non-cis/white/male autistic characters in SFF out there.
And then you also get into the question of how to count autistic-coded characters, which...I am not sure offhand whether autistic coding of cishet white men is more common than that of queer/trans/female/POC characters, but like, how do you even count characters like Elphaba and Rain in the "Out of Oz series," for instance? They most certainly aren't cis white men, and I think most autistic readers would probably identify with them as autistic even if the books never use that word about them, but...the books never use that word about them, and I think it gets very iffy to try to translate their "race" into any contemporaneous Earthly analog.
But yeah, I kind of went "wha??" at that statement, and it MAY just be that I gravitate towards authors writing really uncommon sorts of SFF, but I know that there isn't just a total lack of non-cishet white male autistic characters out there.
Hilarious indeed; in this country the only autistic SFF novel translated into my own lanquage is Rivers Solomon's The Unkindness of Ghosts. 100 percent of the authors and main characters are not white cishet men.
Why is Enga been left out of the data? How would Dr. Hoffmann categorize Yeti in Solomon' The Deep?
This is an excellent tutorial on data analysis as well as a fascinating result in it's own right. Some SFF conventions have academic tracks; have you considered submitting?