Fantasy Fiction and Inclusion

Back when Greek mythology ruled and Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson was turning middle graders into reading addicts, the notion of fantasy and cultural diversity was nonexistent. Tim Parks asked morosely whether an upward pathway existed from pulp to Proust. If anyone thought about diversity in connection with popularizing mythology in fiction in the years since, it was more kumbaya than prediction.

But times have changed, thank heavens and the end of the year feels as good a time as any to be gtateful. Now Riordan's imprint at Disney-Hyperion is publishing exactly the diverse list that's been missing for so many years. Riordan writes:

Over the years, I’ve gotten many questions from my fans about whether I might write about various world mythologies, but in most cases I knew I wasn’t the best person to write those books. Much better, I thought, to use my experience and my platform at Disney to put the spotlight on other great writers who are actually from those cultures and know the mythologies* better than I do. Let them tell their own stories, and I would do whatever I could to help those books find a wide audience!

The first of these I came across was Roshani Chokshi's Aru Shah and the End of Time. Aru's a charming protagonist whose casual relationship with truth gets her, predictably, into trouble. A dare ends up launching her on a quest in the course of which she finds out that she's the daughter of Indra, king of the gods, and the reincarnation of Arjuna, one of the Pandava brothers of the Mahabharata.

Other series titles from the imprint weave Korean folklore and space opera, add Cuban flair to the space-time continuum, and reclaim and recast John Henry and Brer Rabbit along with Middle Passage villains.

Along similar lines, see Sayantani Dasgupta's Kiranmala books. And look for Van Hoang's Girl Giant and the Monkey King.