Literary Biases in SF: Are they real?

[Shaun]

I was reading a post from Tobias S. Buckell's post the other day and one thing he was talking about was a panel at a convention discussing biases in science fiction against Blacks, Asians, Jews, Catholics, Muslims, and Buddhists.

So, I'm curious, do you feel these are real biases? Do you pay attention? Can you name any works recently that were SF or F that had any of those above categories of people?

[Andy]

The only thing I can think of is Pullman's blatant anti-Christian fantasy.

I'm a little curious about this thread. Do you mean that these writers are deliberately writing anti-religious stuff, or that the stuff in sci-fi naturally tends to contradict the beliefs of some major modern religions?

[Shaun]

No no, what I mean is that writers tend to NOT write those things. They don't write stories with black people as main characters or Catholics as main characters, etc. It's this idea that there is a bias in literature that prevents such topics from getting shown in stories. I sort of thing it's not true, but maybe it is.