You’re Not Allowed to Write That!

There’s a conversation happening in speculative fiction that correctly identifies a real problem, then proposes exactly the wrong solution.

The problem: too much cross-cultural worldbuilding in SFF is downright lazy. Authors borrow surface elements from cultures they haven’t bothered to understand, strip them of context, and deploy them as exotic set dressing. This produces work ranging from the merely shallow to the actively harmful, and the people whose cultures got strip-mined are right to be angry about it.

The proposed solution: restrict who gets to write what. White authors shouldn’t write non-white cultures. Authors outside a tradition shouldn’t touch it. Check your identity at the door, and if you don’t have the right credentials, step aside.

The solution is wrong because it mistakes proximity for rigor. Proximity to a culture doesn’t guarantee you’ll render it well—plenty of people write their own backgrounds badly. And distance from a culture doesn’t prevent you from rendering it honestly, provided you’re willing to pay the research cost. The question that actually matters isn’t who you are. It’s whether you did the work. And “the work” is demonstrable, analyzable, and visible in the text.

Instead of asking who’s holding the pen, we need to look at what the pen put on the page.

So what is on the page in my own work?

Let’s start with a scene from my current WIP The Stygian Blades and a character it introduces. Read this surface-level checklist and tell me what you see.

A woman named Zahra. MENA-coded. Fire powers. Sinuous grace. Curved blades. An assassin, Jinn, trapped in the body of a beautiful foreign woman with eyes like liquid gold.

She purrs when she talks.

If you see an orientalist nightmare, you’d be completely justified. Every element on that list is a trope catalogued by Edward Said, deployed in a thousand bad novels as exotic decoration. If I handed you that character sheet without context, you’d be right to assume the worst.

And you’d be wrong.

Because, as with everything, context matters.

“Where are we going?” Kit asked for the third time, looking up at the dangerous woman, who’d said her name was Zahra. Her tall, soft leather boots padded silently while Kit’s bare feet slapped on the cobbles. Zahra moved with a sinuous grace, cat-like, while Kit, who’d shot up nearly a handspan since the last harvest, her legs longer but still coltish, felt like a puppet with half-cut strings in comparison.

“I like your hair,” Kit said, partly because it was true, and mostly because the woman’s silence was starting to make her stomach churn for fear of what exactly these people wanted with her. She kept talking to distract her from her unease. “You’re truly Sahrian? I’ve heard tales of the sun—blinds you if you stare, they say. Any truth to that? Have you met any sultans or evil viziers?”

One of her favorite roles was playing the Cunning Thief who steals a lamp. Uncle Thomas had rigged the prop to spew blue smoke and then Cousin Dickon would jump out of a trap door painted blue from head to toe as The Jinn while Cousins Alice, Joan, and Margery danced and writhed as The Harem. Joan couldn’t act to save her life, but she had paps like melons that jiggled like a tavern wench’s in a lusty galliard, so she didn’t need to. That act always got good coin. The thought made her raw guilt resurface for abandoning them with the mess she’d made, but she hadn’t had a choice.

“Can a jinn really grant wishes?” Kit wasn’t even sure jinn were real, but fae certainly were, so why not jinn? “Why do they live in lamps?”

Zahra rolled her eyes and looked down at Kit. “They don’t grant wishes and aren’t imprisoned in lamps.” Her voice was rich, with a rough, breathy quality that gave Kit goosebumps. “Those are Duskring fancies, not fact. I’ve never met a sultan myself, and evil viziers are beheaded rather swiftly, so most tend to behave themselves. The Sunward lands are vast, and they aren’t all silks and sorcery.”

Dodging a pile of manure, Kit frowned. The glowfeathers were closing, their light dimming as the frond-like petals closed, and the gloam was closing in. A tattered broadsheet fluttered in the muck, its woodcut of a gutted doxy half-torn. Kit shivered, recalling Nubs’s shouted headline. She looked back up at Zahra. “If jinn don’t grant wishes or live in lamps what do they do?”

“Strangle ugly, freckled girls who ask far too many stupid questions and pretend to be boys.” Zahra’s eyes flashed and Kit swore her irises changed from amber to molten gold for a moment. But she also caught a fleeting smirk on the woman’s lips, not cruel, more like a sister sparing a jest.

All the same, Kit glued her gob shut and walked beside Zahra in silence, nervous of the gathering shadows. The woman’s barb stung, but Kit had learned to let comments like that go a long time ago. She knew she was ugly and spotted, a carrot-haired runt all knees and elbows. That was her father’s legacy, a man she’d never known who didn’t even give her a name. Some gentleman in some town who swived her mother. The Tarltons were all comely and dark-haired with big blue eyes; Kit was none of those things. She hadn’t known her mother either—she’d died of the fever when Kit was a babe, but Meg said she was a sharp-tongued raven-haired beauty who could dance like a succubus.

Even though Zahra unnerved Kit, she was glad for the other woman’s company. Alone in this city, she’d likely end up ravished in a gutter by some poxy cur’s cankered yard or with a bodkin in her kidney. Likely both, she wagered. And if there truly was a fiend stalking young women…

Pulling the folded broadsheet out of her shirt, she busied herself with trying to make out the words, but soon gave up. Aunt Meg knew her letters, and had tried to teach Kit, but the words constantly shifted and rearranged on the paper like she were viewing them through a kaleidoscope.

Zahra snatched the broadsheet from Kit and laughed. “Better not let Jasmine see this.” She tore it up and tossed the scraps in the gutter.

“Hoy!” Kit protested. “That cost me a farthing.”

“I wouldn’t wipe my arse with that ignorant, hyperbolical rot,” Zahra said. “And that’s not what an elephant looks like anyway.”

“You’ve seen one?”

“Aye, magnificent animals. Noble.”

So what’s actually happening here?

Kit is a teenage traveling player from a Tudor-analog culture—Karnland in the Duskring, this world’s England—and every orientalist cliché she rattles off comes from a theatre troupe’s act. Cousin Dickon painted blue as The Jinn. Cousins writhing as The Harem. The Cunning Thief and the magic lamp. Kit is performing her culture’s ignorance, and the text lets you see it as ignorance because Zahra is standing right there dismantling it. Jinn don’t grant wishes. They aren’t imprisoned in lamps. Evil viziers get beheaded rather quickly. The Sunward lands aren’t all silks and sorcery.

Each orientalist expectation the reader brings gets surfaced, attributed to the ignorant character, and corrected by the character who actually knows, in her voice, not narrative editorialization. The scene isn’t deploying orientalist tropes. It’s dramatizing how they form and what they look like from the receiving end.

And Zahra herself? She isn’t a generic jinn. She’s a si’lāt—a specific class within jinn taxonomy, the shapeshifters, traditionally the most beautiful and dangerous. The seductress tradition associated with si’lāt is part of her toolkit; she performs it when it serves her purposes. But the character underneath the performance has her own specificity, her own cosmology, her own sexuality, her own language built from the ground up, even if little of it is visible in this scene, because the scene doesn’t need neon signs. It’s there in the architecture.

The question of whether I should be allowed to write a character like Zahra is the wrong question. The question is whether the text earns it.

I’m doing my best to ensure it does.

Which raises the obvious follow-up: if this is what earning it looks like, what has the genre been rewarding instead?

Perhaps the genre’s most celebrated example of a white author engaging with another culture is Frank Herbert’s Dune. It’s been the reference point for sixty years.

And, frankly, it doesn’t survive scrutiny.

Herbert’s Arabic vocabulary arrives in his far-future setting functionally untransformed. Jihad, Mahdi, Shari-a, Hajj—recognizable, unaltered, deployed as flavor. The Fremen’s social structures are sourced from T.E. Lawrence’s accounts of Bedouin culture, transplanted without internal justification for why a people ten thousand years removed from Earth would organize themselves along the same lines.

English didn’t exist a thousand years ago in any form a modern speaker would recognize. Try reading Beowulf. Herbert’s Fremen speak functionally unchanged Arabic after ten times that span, plus interstellar diaspora, plus the catastrophic social upheavals his own worldbuilding describes. There’s no in-universe mechanism for this preservation. It’s just there because Herbert slapped some Arabic flavor on the page.

This isn’t a new observation. MENA scholars and critics have been pointing it out with increasing specificity since the Villeneuve films brought Dune back into the cultural conversation. Haris Durrani’s work on the orientalist dynamics, Algerian critics noting that the Fremen battle cry “Ya Hya Chouhada” was lifted directly from the Algerian War of Independence, Islamic studies scholars identifying Herbert’s “Auliya“—a term for the people most beloved to God, roughly equivalent to saints—mistranslated as “a handmaiden of God,” revealing surface-level borrowing from a tradition he hadn’t internalized. The criticism exists, it has specificity, and it has merit.

But nearly all of it lands on the representation axis. Whose faces are on screen. Who got cast. Whether Arab actors should play Fremen. The craft axis—did Herbert respectfully build or steal? did the cultural construction earn its place?—has been raised, but by critics whose work circulated outside the genre’s prestige conversation. The genre’s critical apparatus wasn’t structured to treat those observations as craft critiques. It processed them as identity-politics complaints, which is a different and arguably worse problem than simple oversight.

The strongest defense of Herbert is that the Fremen culture was never meant to be realistic—it was meant to be legible. Recognizable terminology so readers would map the Fremen onto real-world colonial dynamics. I personally think that’s a weak artistic choice. But if you accept it, you have to acknowledge it means the world-building is doing something different than what the genre credits it for. You can’t simultaneously claim Dune as the gold standard for immersive cultural worldbuilding and also claim the cultural elements are deliberately non-immersive for thematic purposes. Pick one.

The downstream effect is where the damage calcified. When the genre’s single most celebrated worldbuilding achievement treats cultural-linguistic persistence as set dressing, it normalizes that approach. You get generations of writers who build rigorous magic systems, intricate economic structures, and meticulous ecological models—and then treat language and culture as flavor text. Borrowed phonemes from real-world cultures, sprinkled without transformation logic, accepted without scrutiny. The bar wasn’t actively defended. It just calcified through imitation, and nobody raised it because the people who tried were dismissed as having a political objection rather than a craft one.

At the other end of the spectrum is something considerably worse than laziness.

A bestselling military SF series—millions of copies sold, Dragon Award winner, #1 across multiple Amazon categories, 44,000+ Goodreads ratings across an 18-book main series plus spinoffs—features an alien species with the following characteristics: donkey-like features, a religious leader called the Grand Pasha, weapons described as curved like crescent moons, a ritual torture practice called “Paradise of a Thousand Cuts,” harems of captive females, their own females referred to as “mares” and described in garments resembling burkas, and battlecruisers named Brass Djinn and Divine Zephyr. The official series blurb describes them as “bloodthirsty extremists.” The series lore includes their “forced migration” as a historical event.

There is no satirical frame. No complexity. No individual member of this species with interiority, agency, or moral reasoning. They exist as an enemy to be exterminated, and readers describe them accordingly: “go full Roman on the psychotic Zhee.” The coding is so thorough that it can’t be coincidental, and so normalized that it’s invisible.

I found exactly one reader, across thousands of reviews, who noticed. A single Goodreads review of one book in the series observed “the not even thinly veiled racial stereotypes converted into species.” One person. Everyone else consumed it as genre furniture.

This isn’t lazy borrowing. It’s cultural weaponization—Middle Eastern and Islamic signifiers deliberately deployed to code an alien species as subhuman vermin. Post-9/11 Islamophobia given a science fiction costume and sold to millions of readers who absorbed the message without consciously registering it as a message at all.

I find the silence around this shocking frankly. Not one think piece. Not a single panel. Not even a Reddit thread. One Goodreads review. Why?

My guess is it’s because the coding is laundered through a fictional species. “Alien enemy” is genre furniture—nobody processes it as cultural content. The identity-credential discourse asks “is this white author writing a MENA character?” and space donkeys don’t trigger that question. They’re not characters from a culture, they’re enemies coded with a culture, and the discourse seems to lack a framework for that distinction. Apparently it can police borrowing but it can’t see weaponization.

Or maybe it’s because this particular series serves a niche conservative audience and is completely off the radar of the people who’d see it for what it is and say something.

And perhaps it’s because the progressive discourse is spending all its energy arguing about whether a white author is permitted to write a character from another culture in the first place—as if the problem is identity rather than what’s actually being done with the text. The spectrum runs from weaponization to laziness to diligence, and the question the discourse should be asking is where a given work falls on that spectrum. Not who wrote it. Not what the author’s background is. Definitely not their DNA. But whether the work itself demonstrates harm, indifference, or rigor.

What does rigor look like in practice? I’d argue it depends on what the project demands.

My current WIP, The Stygian Blades, is set in a Tudor-analog secondary world, so the cultural borrowing is deliberate—the novel is in conversation with colonial history, and the Duskring’s relationship to its Sunward neighbors is part of the point. But borrowed cultures aren’t props. Lady Sahanko, the Xipangese ambassador, serves her own nation’s strategic interests. Zahra corrects orientalist nonsense about cultures that aren’t even hers. Kit’s theatrical jinn-and-harem act exists in the same novel as an actual jinn whose specificity exposes the act as the ignorant pantomime it is. The text’s architecture characterizes Karnish ignorance as ignorance.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Dark Dominion is set in the far future, and far-future settings demand building from scratch. The Mešvi—a matriarchal, prophetic, goddess-worshipping nomadic culture—needed a language that encoded those structures in its grammar. And my draft version of the language didn’t. It was Persian with drift, and a patriarchal language cosmetically altered to serve a matriarchal culture doesn’t encode the culture—it decorates it. So I rebuilt from scratch. The Mešvi language now has evidential suffixes that make epistemological claims mandatory in every verb—because a culture built on prophecy would grammatically distinguish between what you witnessed, what you were told, and what you believe. It has noun classes mapped to cultural domains: Masculine, Virgin, Mother, Crone. Women’s names change at each life stage. There are no pronouns, because the culture’s relational architecture doesn’t permit the abstraction.

Doomsday Recon, on the other hand, is set in a literal Mesoamerican alternate reality, with direct cultural depictions, not analogs. And so I ensured Nahuatl functions as a living system in the text, not flavor vocabulary.

Teōicpauhqui—”one who makes with threads of god”—isn’t just a cool title I coined. The concept is coherent in Nahuatl, but breaks in English, which splits “god” (a being) from “energy” (a force)—and teōtl doesn’t make that distinction. It’s simultaneously divine and impersonal, volitional and ambient. Nephi can’t think about god-weaving in English without distorting it. He keeps reaching for approximations—”vaguely akin to Qi or Mana”—and each one fails differently. The theological discomfort he feels isn’t about magic being weird. It’s that Nahuatl’s conceptual framework for the divine doesn’t map onto his Mormon theology, and he has to hold both frameworks simultaneously without resolving them.

The language gap is the character conflict.

When Epasotl tries to explain that Ōmeteōtl might be symbolic rather than literal, she reaches for machiotlatolli and then can’t translate it. Nephi offers a cascade—”a story, a metaphor. A symbol or representation. A prefigurement”—and she just says “Is same.” But it’s not the same. None of those English words individually capture what she means, and the fact that she needs one Nahuatl word where Nephi needs five English approximations tells the reader something about how her culture’s relationship to myth works. Stories aren’t decorative or merely illustrative in her framework. They’re structurally predictive. “Prefigurement” is probably closest, but Nephi buries it at the end of his list like it’s just another synonym rather than the key.

Nahuatl doesn’t function as set dressing. It functions as a cognitive boundary. Characters who operate across both languages are always navigating a gap where meaning lives in the space between systems, and that gap does real work: it generates theological conflict, romantic subtext, comedic misunderstanding, and philosophical insight depending on who’s standing on which side of it.

Research for the trilogy required conversations with native speakers and extensive deep-dives into maddeningly contradictory mythological sources, competing lexicographies, and anthropological texts biased by the non-native authors—and then a commitment to depict ugliness alongside beauty—because a culture rendered honestly isn’t a culture sanitized for progressive consumption. The Kuauchanejkej’s matriarchal warrior culture has real costs, genuine homophobia, and religious syncretism the narrative doesn’t resolve.

My standard across all of my projects is the same: match the approach to the project’s demands, then execute with diligence and respect. It’s not a high bar, yet here we are. And it’s precisely the bar the identity-credential model fails to raise, and its most visible failures are worse than the problem it claims to solve.

The first is cultural sterility. If the only culture you’re allowed to render with depth is your own, then every other culture in your fiction becomes furniture—or disappears entirely. A white American author writing a galactic civilization populated exclusively by cultures that map to white American experience isn’t avoiding appropriation; they’re building a universe that’s a mirror instead of a window, and the absence is no functionally different than erasure.

The second pushes in the opposite direction but lands in the same place. Characters performing twenty-first-century progressive values in historical or far-future settings. Cultures flattened into vehicles for modern pieties. The anachronistic moralizing that produces warriors who would never use a slur, enslaved peoples who process their oppression through therapy-speak, and alien civilizations whose gender politics conveniently align with a Brooklyn graduate student’s Twitter feed.

I maintain the fix for both failures is the same fix for lazy borrowing and cultural weaponization: craft. Did you build the culture with internal logic? Do the characters enforce their own taxonomies? Does the ugliness come from characters who would produce it, contested by characters with the lived experience to push back? Does the text trust the reader to process moral complexity without authorial hand-holding?

In my work, Musashiro says “savages”—and the word characterizes him, not the Tlalxoc culture he’s describing. Vincent takes credit for Grace’s intellectual work, and the text never flags it as a Gender Problem; it just shows it happening and trusts the reader to see it. The Mešvi practice infanticide of albino children and Lenaja says she doesn’t like it, but it’s the law. In the same series, the Dominion practices eugenic abortion of “defective” slaves and serfs. Two cultures, two eugenic practices, neither endorsed nor excused via anachronistic 21st century moralizing. The parallel lands without the text pointing at it, because pointing at it would be the author doing the reader’s work, and I refuse to hand-hold.

Like I said, none of this is extraordinary, which is my point. The standard I’m describing is simply professional diligence: research your source material, consult people who know what you don’t, build or borrow per project demands, give cultures interiority and agency, let characters enforce their own taxonomies, and catch yourself being lazy and fix it.

The discourse has spent years arguing about who’s allowed to write what while leaving the craft question unexamined—and the genre’s ethics apparatus, the panels, the sensitivity readers, the identity-credential gatekeeping, somehow missed a bestselling series selling millions of copies with textbook Islamophobic coding so normalized that only one reader among thousands noticed.

I believe the beauty of speculative fiction is its potential to render the interior of cultures that aren’t your own with enough rigor that the reader comes out understanding something they couldn’t have accessed any other way—and the ability to deliver on that promise has absolutely nothing to do with your biography or genetics.

The criticism that white authors do cross-cultural worldbuilding badly is a misdiagnosis. Bad authors do cross-cultural world-building badly, because doing it well is hard and doing it lazily is easy.

That’s not a whiteness problem; it’s a craft problem, and the solution isn’t cultural gatekeeping—it’s simply putting in the effort to do the work.

Which is, you know, sort of our job.