Patrick shows us just how inclusive he is that an old Zimbabwean woman occupies the role of Captain on the Ark, which brings me to making a very tired but nevertheless important point: he's as much a true believer in Left-wing propaganda as Cenk Uygur is, and he can't help but champion this diversity crap everywhere he goes. I'm hazy on when "diversity", or the obnoxious installation and fronting of minority ethnicities in all kinds of media really took off, but this book was published in 2015, meaning writing could have been underway as early as 2014.
There is not a single white male in this story who occupies any meaningful position aside from Bryan Benson, whom is obviously Patrick's self-insert so of course he can't be low on the food chain. The only other white male character is Constable Korolev, a Russian bit character in Chapter 2 who may or may not appear again, and Laraby is dead so who the fuck cares - actually, if Laraby is technically white (his name makes it possible) then a white man died first among a richly diverse cast, which I'm sure Patrick must have thought was a great twist or subversion. And no, I'm not counting the old fart Salvador Kite, whose name (and nickname Sal) strongly implies Italian or Sicilian descent to me. And even if he is white, he's portrayed as a criminal who miserably laments about how his lineage will die out and he'll shovel shit and probably die when a tree falls on him on Tau Ceti G - I'm not being facetious.
Everyone with real authority, power and influence is either female, a minority, or both. True, it was obvious immediately from Chapter 1, with the ridiculous focus on *Zero Finals* and a Mexican and Chinese team being front and center, but there's a certain kind of hubris in Mahama tracing her roots back to Zimbabwe, a historically poverty-ridden shithole among shitholes. The hyper-specificity of this is very telling about Patrick himself. My guess is if this were a TV show (or worse, a video game), Mahama would be played by Debra Wilson, twisting the knife that much deeper between our collective ribs.