clavisa asked:

Have you read Zen Cho's Sorcerer to the Crown? Historical fantasy with many characters of colour and very well done. (I can't link here, obviously, but it's very googlable and I'd suggest the Big Idea post she did on Scalzi's website to start.)

What do I mean about the centrality of the colonial territories to Britain? When you read a Jane Austen novel (which you can’t really describe as a Regency romance, but is sort of a deity of the genre, influencing it but residing in a firmament above), or a true Regency romance like one of the classic Heyers, you enter what seems to be a hermetically sealed world.

[...]

It has influenced fantasy authors from Susanna Clarke to Kari Sperring, because, seen through modern eyes, it is as much a nice self-contained fantasy world as Middle-earth or Narnia.

But that self-contained quality is deceptive. The tea Pride and Prejudice’s Elizabeth Bennet drinks would have come from China via India. The sugar she puts in it would have been from plantations worked by enslaved Africans. Kashmiri shawls were a popular status item: Lizzy Bennet might not have been able to afford a dress made from them, which wealthier women wore, but she might have had a European-made replica.

I’ve obviously never been a slave or grown tea or woven a paisley shawl, but still, to someone from a former colony who grew up reading the books of authors like Austen and Heyer, these are interesting scraps of history to learn. I have always felt, with these books I love, like a ghost hanging around at the back of the room, peering interestedly at scenes, but conscious that I am out of place. To understand this history is to know that I always belonged in those books. I was a central part of the proceedings all along – whether that was a good thing or not.

Sorcerer to the Crown is about the sort of people whose labour and territory were exploited so that Lizzy Bennet could have her tea with sugar. Only it’s about those people benefiting from the resources of Empire – the wealth, the balls, the magic, the superiority complex, the self-serving imperial guilt. Protagonist Zacharias Wythe is Britain’s first black Sorcerer Royal and he is an emancipated slave. His counterpart, female magical prodigy Prunella Gentleman, is mixed race – one of her parents was Indian. They have their problems, but they both have OK lives, on the whole. It’s fantasy in more than one sense.