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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6209646" data-attributes="member: 4937">I completely and utterly disagree.  Maybe this is true occasionally, but it hardly the norm.This is a weird, narrow, and overly political way to approach sci-fi and fantasy literature.   The 'buggers' in Orson Scott Card's 'Ender's Game' aren't meant as stand in for any human ethnic group, much less a specific ethnic group.   Racism, even particular cases of racism, is not the highest level we can discuss the problem of The Other, hatred, war, and violence at.  It's an important part of the conversation, but it isn't the whole of the conversation.   The Ruhml in Dickerson's 'The Alien Way' aren't a stand in for any real human racial group.  Neither are the Cobbies in 'A Deepness in the Sky' intended as caricatures of any real ethnic group. The Wookies in Star Wars would be trivialized to make them stand ins for any real human rational group and are not best understood in this light.   Likewise, Elves aren't meant to stand in for any human racial group.   Dwarves aren't meant to stand in for any human racial group.  Elves and Dwarves and the like are pretty pervasive to human myth the world over.   The best explanations I've seen are that ties them to anything real is that they are inspired by contact with people with genetic abnormalities - real little people - and attempts to explain or rationalize this uncanny experience in the absence of any real scientific understanding.  But even that is I think too shallow to example the power the archetypes have over our thought, nor do I think it particularly insightful to treat the presence of dwarves, fairies, and elves as a proxy for prejudices against real dwarves and midgets.I think it's a very bad policy to assume that the only thing that a writer has to say is some sort of xenophobia/xenophilia prejudice.  You've basically just condemned the whole of science fiction and fantasy fandom as vicarious racists.I agree it is a deep-seated problem, but consider prejudice to be just one symptom of a deeper and more pervasive problem.</blockquote>

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