Doris Lessing?

Winifred Holtby?

Charlize Theron?

Jesus H Christ.

Thank you, Hec, for getting the right name from my vague and incorrect memory. It was her Shikasta series that my mother tried to wean me off sci fi with. My mother? Not always the most sensible woman.

Until now, though, I hadn't realised she wasn't born in Africa. She was born in Iran.

And thanks, the rest of you, for playing along with my senior moment.

eta: except P-C. No thanks for you!

Lessing would have been my next guess.

For some reason, my mother really wanted me to stop reading sci fi and fantasy books, and wanted me to read socially conscious books. So she introduced me to Doris Lessing (and we see how well that took) and Octavia Butler's Kindred.

She so crazy.

Of course, I'm insanely grateful to her for the Octavia Butler thing, because she's one of my favourite authors ever, but how was Kindred supposed to make me stop reading sci fi?

Also, for a woman with a chronic spy thriller habit, she really has no room to need to wean anyone off any genre. There's no more crap in my backyard than there is in hers.

One of my favorite writers is Ursula Leguin, and I am not a sci-fi reader per se.

If only I had noticed the skin colour in Earthsea, I could have waved it in her face. Because, for sure, there was very little happening in my books with minorities. And when there was, I didn't pay much attention.

I'm not sure how I visualised Ged...he sort of didn't have a look, until I saw it explicitly called out. Somehow I skimmed over that particular description.

Sometimes I catch it, sometimes I don't.

For the record, I also never noticed that the Anansi Boys protagonists weren't white...not for sure. I figured they were West Indian, and I did wonder, but I didn't notice that Gaiman was only describing white characters by their race, because that's not something I associate with black people.

Especially not Jamaican ones. We will usually tell you the precise shade of skin of the person we're talking about.

Didn't whats her name write a really cool poem about how to describe different shades? My own senior moment. Really famous African-American poet. Still living. Like one first two or three women one thinks of when talking African-American poets.

Maya Angelou?