Representative Characters in a Novel

I went to a barbecue the other day and, as these things are wont to do, eventually someone asked me what I did for a living. 'Not very much, really,' I answered in a rare fit of honesty, 'but I do write science fiction novels.'

'Oh,' came the - genuinely - interested response, 'and do you have any Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander characters?'

Now as chance would have it, I do, and I told my interrogator that I did, and that I thought I had done a reasonably good job at integrating them into my book. 'Wonderful,' she said as she wandered away to make some other poor sod's life miserable, 'it's important we have novels that represent the Australian population correctly.'

Now at that point, I should've done the right thing and drowned my brain in beer and sausages but, oh no, I had to start thinking. Representative? Honestly? No, I had the Aboriginal characters in the book to make a point about something, to make my psychopath stand out, to let a non-Australian reader peek into an ugly little secret we've tried to keep over here. But to make sure the book's representative? Hardly. Can any novel honestly be representative?

Well, being an Australian in Australia, having the second book in my Descent series (Descent: Death) set in Australia in 2149, and being subject to a sad (nearly depressing) addiction to statistics, off I went - straight to our last census and some broad, demographic indicators.

So, here we go. Six demographic indicators for 2022 data vs Descent: Death. I'll keep it simple and, for you unfortunate non-Australians out there, yes, there is a salient lesson coming.

First up the easy stuff, sex and age distribution. We're nearly 50/50 male and female here but Death isn't quite there, having a rough 55/45 split and, worse yet, 5 main female characters and 3 main male, so it misses the mark. And as for age distribution it's a total wreck, I mean, the bulk of the characters are in the 20 to 40-year age bracket but I need (to meet the representative measure) to have 1 from each age cohort plus a few extras in the middle years.

So, feeling a touch discouraged, on to the more fraught stats - country of birth and religion. (A note here. ATSI in the charts means 'Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islanders', shorthand for the original inhabitants of this so-called Terra Nullius). Most of my characters are Australian non-ATSI born, so I nearly pass, but there is one North African born character so, clearly having over-represented that cohort at the expense of others, Death should have one character born in the Americas, one from North-West Europe, one from Oceania and Antarctica ... well, you get the picture. So on this stat, I'll give myself a pass conceded. Religious affiliation is a total disaster, none of my characters have any belief system but, here again, only 11% of Australians line up with Death in that respect so here it's a fail, totally.

Even more discouraged now, perhaps, on to the final two stats, gender identification and sexual preference. Oh dear oh dear, Death's a disaster here. Somewhere in the character list I have to make 0.30% of my characters transgender men, transgender women, and non-binary/other. I'd need upwards of 1,000 characters in Death to manage that and, apart from not wanting to give The Gatekeeper apoplexy, I don't think I could come up with that many personalities. Sexual orientation is hardly more reassuring, straights having to be 96% of the book, but again the representative need to shunt in 1.73% bisexual characters, 1.52% gay and lesbians, plus 0.41% 'others' means I'd only need around 300 main characters in Death. Not highly improbable, just impossible.

So Descent: Death fails as a representative novel and, in the court of small-l liberal judgement, I should be hung up, drawn and quartered or, preferably, burned at the stake with every copy of Descent: Death used to fuel the flames.

So, by now you're wondering what I've been smoking/drinking/injecting to get to this point and why I've bothered. It's simple. Building correctly representative characters in a novel is idiocy. It can't be done, simply because society - mine and yours - is just too diverse, too broad to be stuck between two covers. All we can hope to do is to shine a little light (or darkness) onto one corner of life as we write, and wait for the brickbats to follow the bouquets. I didn't try before, and I won't try now, to meet my BBQ inquisitor's standards, standards that can never be met. Someone, somewhere, has or will write the non-CIS other-religion bisexual octogenarian-charactered South-East Asian Australian science fiction Nebula prize-winning novel.

It just won't be me.

Diathesis: Descent Book 1

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