Writing Fails: The Locked Tomb and Diversity
or How Not To Add Diversity To Your Epic Fantasy Series
Spoiler's Ahead
This article will contain spoilers for The Locked Tomb Series by Tamsyn Muir; that is Gideon the Ninth, Harrow the Ninth, and Nona the Ninth.
With social media, it is very easy for authors to add to the canon of their work outside of it. And for the diehard fans, these titbit acts as a neat little easter egg for those in the know. But what happens when authors add details to the canon that should have been in a book, and are they ultimately doing a disservice to their fans?
Recently I learnt that two of my favourite characters of 2021, Gideon and Harrow from The Locked Tomb / Gideon the Ninth, are supposed to be mixed Māori, declared so in a Tumblr Ask by the author herself1. And instead of finding this a cool easter egg and being giddy at the Indigenous representation, I was scratching my head thinking, "where is that in the text." Because while Tamsyn Muir hasn't been the only author to engage in this sort of social media retconning and adding to the lore, it is nonetheless disappointing. And for me, declaring ethnicity outside of the text without consideration of what a mixed Maori heritage would mean in a post-earth imperialist society is an erasure of the Indigenous experience under imperialism rather than inclusive.
There is nothing - that I can find - beyond a few and far-between mentions of skin colour in the text that suggest that these characters come from a different ethnicity - ethnicity is cultural heritage, race is skin colour (this is extremely simplified) - than that of the Nine Houses. And the Nine Houses themself are very culturally homogenous. Everything from the names, clothes, locations, etc tells us that this setting is very much inspired by European cultures and Western Christianity.
And even if we look at it from an assimilation angle, empires have never really been able to 100% stamp out the culture of the people they subjugate. And sometimes, those cultural practices must stay hidden and dormant amongst its people to survive. But that’s the point they still exist. They are still practised and passed down. There are also those from the subjugated group who align themselves with the imperial forces to keep power. In turn, one of the effects of this alignment with the dominant force is they are the ones that get to decide which culture is “acceptable” and “unacceptable” under either a paradigm of empire and subject.
The point is that there are many ways to explore an empire’s relationship with its subjects, especially if those subjects did not originate from the dominant class. Exploring that relationship while keeping the culture of the minority present in the text. But, The Locked Tomb ignores all of this complexity in favour of a pretty homogenous culture amongst the Nine Houses.
The names for pretty much all the cast come from Latin or Greek. The only explicitly Māori reference I can remember in all of the books I have read - All of Gideon and part of Harrow - is Awake Remembrance of These Valiant Dead / Kia Hua Ko Te Pai / Snap Back To Reality (Awake). A reference as clumsy as her name.
The glossary of Harrow the Ninth does explain that this three-part name is meant to reference "extinct cultural references" and carry them on for future generations. However, that aspect is not discussed in the text. Nor can I find any mention of Awake by her full name or partially in Nona the Ninth. I can also only find one reference where Māori is explicitly said in the text in reference to John looking like a “Māori TV Pink Panther”, in John 15:23 of Nona the Ninth2.
At surface value, as I have yet to read Nona, Nona the Ninth, a book that is meant to show us the wider universe of The Locked Tomb, seems to have nothing to say about the fact that both its main characters and apparently its main antagonist are of Māori heritage. And Muir’s reasoning as to why she choose these heritages, “I am a Kiwi: I write Kiwis In Space as a Default” is as shallow as the thought she has given to conceptualising her characters as Māori.
Muir is Kiwi I am not denying that, but she is a white Kiwi her experiences of living in Aotearoa are not going to be the same as that of a Māori person. And like many other white writers, she writes her POC characters with little thought to how POC navigate the world in a “colour-blind” way. And because of this “colour-blind” approach to making her characters, Muir has no explicit references to the fact they are Māori till book 3 in the series.
But, The Locked Tomb isn't set on Earth. It's thousands of years into the future in a galaxy far far away. Why would the racial and ethnic structures of today exist in the same paradigm in the series as in the real world? They wouldn't, but it doesn't mean they would feasibly disappear altogether. That oral or written tradition and culture wouldn't be passed down through the generations. And that they wouldn’t be practised alongside the dominant culture.
And I’ve already discussed above ways that could happen under an empire, ways that we have seen in the real world Culture survive oppression. The Locked Tomb also touches upon this idea that contemporary culture will survive post-earth within Awake's glossary entry, but we never see this in the text and when we do it is a fleeting reference. And this is what gets me so riled because at a point Muir did think about some of those things, but she chose not to include them.
This argument also tends to erase the fact that we see culture passed down in these post-earth SFF stories by white writers - white European culture. But, white writers like Muir fail to conceptualise the existence of POC and POC Culture in their writing by writing homogenous worlds. However, most importantly, the idea that our cultures will survive in some form after us, changed by humanity’s existence post-earth is not new to SFF fiction.
Dune is an example of this because despite being set 10,000s of years in a post-earth future, we can still make direct or indirect inferences about which cultures and ethnicities the majority of the cast are descended from on Earth based on things like their names and their cultural practices3, as well as discussion both in and out of text about the history of Dune’s peoples. Does it do it well? No, and Dune is often rightly criticised for its cultural appropriation. However, unlike The Locked Tomb, it does the bare minimum of showing that the universe is ethnically diverse. And as post-earth fiction, it draws a direct line to the ethnicities and cultures it takes inspiration from and then extrapolates from that to Dune’s present. Intrinsically there is an understanding between the reader and the fictional world to conceptualise certain people as being from or similar to ethnicities and cultures in the real world.
Now, not all authors need to go into this type of depth with their world-building. Kimberly Lemming’s Mead Mishaps, Tavia Lark’s Radiance series’ or Legends and Latte’s by Travis Baldaree are the polar opposite of works like Dune and The Locked Tomb. The reader's requirements to understand these worlds' political landscapes are shallow because that is not the main focus. For the first two, the main focus is romance as they are fantasy-romance. The third is a cozy fantasy and the focus is on creating that “cozy” atmosphere. Political structures exist as a backdrop and not the main plot.
However, both Dune and The Locked Tomb, are Epic Science Fiction and Fantasy. The world's political structure is important and not only informs us how characters move throughout the world both these stories are centred on how political structures, particularly empires, shape their universes. And to not recognise that within imperial structures there are ethnic and racial hierarchies and that POC will fundamentally have a different experience in that structure than white characters in favour of a “colour-blind” approach is a misstep on Muir’s part.
"But what about mixed people who didn't grow up within culture?" And if this is your response, I ask you this question, as a white woman do you think Tamsyn Muir could accurately portray the nuances of that experience? And the answer given within The Locked Tomb, for me - a light skin Indigenous Australian is no. Muir's writing suffers from the same problem many white writers have when portraying mixed characters. Often it is just that the character is described as mixed without consideration of their heritage. It is the aesthetics of skin colour as representation rather than meaningfully examining what it means in your world to exist as a POC.
Mixed and light-skinned POC experience racism - both racial discrimination and systematic racism. My experiences with racism have mostly aligned with other Indigenous people in Australia country, even though I get far, far, less of it. And as someone who is racially ambiguous and who has family members who fully pass as white. I can tell you not only have I been treated differently from them in many situations, but I will also never be “acceptable” enough for white society no matter how light my skin is because I still look racially other.
There is also a fact that disconnection from Culture is almost always the result of trauma. Whether that be trans-racial adoption, parents not passing on culture due to trauma, the primary parent not being a part of that culture and being disconnected from the other parent, genocide, etc. And, in both Australia and New Zealand there was and is still this day the state-enforced removal of Indigenous children as a method of cultural genocide. Disconnection from culture happens for a reason, not just because a mixed person happens to be born in a white-dominant society.
And had Muir conceptualised her characters as POC, she could have explored these topics in The Locked Tomb - and she had a character she could have done this with, Gideon. And while we get some examination of how Gideon is treated as an outsider within the Ninth House, we don’t get the depth of that experience as would from a writer who actually has had that experience - of not only being adopted and looking different from your peers but being placed on the outside and being at a disadvantage in society from the start because of it. And Gideon is disadvantaged at the Ninth House, but it is not because of her race - her parentage doesn’t even become a factor until the very end of Harrow the Ninth and even then her parents’ race is not a conflict in the story - or confirmed to much later. She is treated as an outsider because she the metaphorical representation of guilt to Priamhark and Pellemeana over the genocidal act they used to bring their daughter Harrow into the world. And you could metaphorically tie this into Māori history and a mixed Māori character is the perfect way to do this. But Muir never does this and that plotline reads more like the scapegoat child in an emotionally abusive dynamic than having intricate racial discriminatory undertones to it.
When conceptualising your characters as POC from the start beyond the aesthetics of skin tone these are all the questions you tend to ask yourself about their role in your world and how they relate to the structures of power within it. But Muir doesn’t ask these questions instead creating a culturally homogenous world. And because of this, The Locked Tomb lacks the nuance and diversity of experience. This information about the heritage of her characters should have been included from the start and not relegated to a blog post that the majority of your readers won’t read and retroactively added to the text.
I have not read Nona yet - though I have been spoiled on some of the plot details and did do a cursory search for this article. However, in my opinion, book 3 in an original 3-book series, now 4, is often too late to retroactively be adding representation to your work. Especially when that work has already discussed the larger universe and its people in its second book - though biasedly.
The more obvious example is the Freman, whose culture is partly based on Sunni Muslims and Zen Buddhists - previous to their arrival on Arrakis the Freman were Zensunni Wanders, in this naming structure Herbert is trying to directly link contemporary Sunni and Zen Buddhist culture to his Freman. But there are things like the Atreides claiming descendants from the greeks and their name coming from Atreus, the father of Agamemnon. We also see the influence of Spanish culture, particularly bullfighting. As the reader, we are meant to draw the conclusion from these cultural clues that House Atreides are descendants of Spanish and Greeks who left earth.
This sort of foundational connection between the Nine Houses and contemporary Earth ethnicities doesn’t exist in The Locked Tomb because it very much defaults to white European Culture in its world-building.