Do I care about what the market wants?

I've been reading quite a few tweets by agents recently about what's on their manuscript wish lists.  And I can't help feeling that sometimes the zeitgeist is wagging the agent.

In SF diversity is the hot topic.  Don't get me wrong, more diversity in the genre is definitely needed.   It's good that the publishing industry has acknowledged the need for the fiction it publishes to more accurately represent the complexity of human society.  But I sometimes get the feeling that there's an element of jumping on the bandwagon about some of these agents' requests.

This troubles me, because in the end it's the strength of the story that counts.  If I wanted to, I could sell Combined Cognition on its diversity.  My main character, Jian Kabana, is described as having 'dusky skin'.  That original manuscript in this series of novels is over twenty years old, and Jian and her dusky skin existed long before the current drive for diversity in the genre.

In today's vocabulary, Jian is a woman of colour.  But I don't feel comfortable labelling her that way.  That imposes the current moment's political and cultural understandings on her.  Jian has always been just Jian.  She's the best starship coder on Darius Orbital Shipyard, and her services are in demand by the biggest shipline in the system.  The story I'm telling is of a professional going about her daily business.

And this is why setting out a checklist of things an agent wants to see in a novel bothers me.  The  characters in a story need to be who they are, with their own motivations and dreams and drives.  And that must take priority over fitting the manuscript into today's shifting political landscape.

Yes, I do have a lesbian relationship in the book.  My engineer Mai is in love with Eris.  When I wrote Mai's chapters she took over my pen.  She showed me who she wanted to be.  I didn't write her that way because I wanted a lesbian relationship in the book, that was what the character revealed herself to me as.

Similarly, my shipyard general manager has a prosthetic lower leg.  But I don't focus on that.  It only features when she's tired and has been standing for a long time.  Then her leg hurts, and it's appropriate to mention it.  This to me is how diversity should appear in a story.  As facts woven through the narrative in the service of the story.  We shouldn't be warping stories to include it.