Wiscon panel notes: We Do the Work

[firecat]

SF writers are supposed to be good at building compelling and believable worlds. So why is it so hard to build a world featuring working class characters in working class settings, especially given that a lot of SF writers come from that kind of background? What has worked, for you? What hasn't? Who clearly hasn't tried? Who has tried, but failed spectacularly? SF fans have done a good job of demanding better–written women and minorities in SF; what about their working class counterparts?

Panelists: Eleanor A. Arnason, Chris Hill, Michael J. Lowrey, Diana Sherman
Moderator: Fred Schepartz

badgerbag has detailed notes on most of this panel here. I'm including my notes from the beginning of the panel. My notes aren't verbatim so don't blame the panelists for any words I am putting in their mouths.


Panelists introduce themselves:
Eleanor: Writes science fiction and fantasy
Diana: Writes for a video game company
Fred: Novelist, cab driver, union organizer, shows communist party card
Chris: British working class origins
Michael: Union organizer, NWU


Fred: We aren't going to have a debate on class because that panel has been done before and it hasn't worked well. But let's define "working class"

Eleanor: Can get fired by boss, doesn't own means of production
Diana: Personal schedule is defined by job, can be fired
Chris: Opportunities are limited by upbringing and attitudes
Michael: Economic well-being is at the mercy of someone else


Fred: What's the status quo with regard to working class characters in SF?

Eleanor: Blue collar workers are not represented -- there are no plumbers in the future, e.g. Shadow economy is represented. Blue collar work is repetitious and doesn't include creative problem solving (e.g. in construction -- because you don't want creative problem solving in construction work). So it's not inherently exciting. SF came out of pulps, and has a bias toward stories of individual action.

Diana: Working class people exist in SF&F but are usually a secret prince or an apprentice who saves the planet. They are "hidden" and then they "leave." Working class job is seen as a trap. SF is escapist adventure.

Chris: It's a generic truth about literature that working class people don't generate story unless they are escaping. Dickens gets a cooking for writing about the working class, but actually all his working class characters were either tragic or comic.

Michael: Soldiers are working class people who show up in SF. Roots of SF are in American pulp literature, which has a bias against collectivism. Leader stories are about leaders, not the movement. Exception: Some Harry Turtledove, and Eric Flint's 1832 series. (Eric Flint was a union organizer.) There is potential for greatness in working class people, so unleash it in your writing.

Fred: Labor struggle is difficult to talk about in America because it's difficult for us to talk about class. Some writers are working class but write escapist SF because they want it or think audience wants it. Also to portray a labor struggle requires an ensemble cast which is harder to write (more characters).


Fred: Will there be a working class in the future?

Michael: Who built the Death Star?

Audience: Robots!

Eleanor: If robots built the Death Star they would also do the fighting. In Charlie Stross book Saturn's Children, only robots are left. People are versatile/cheap. (So there will continue to be a working class.

Diana: Humans are more flexible than robots.

Chris Hill: People are cheap. In utopias, who is doing the work? These societies are often untenable because the author is not interested or isn't thinking about those issues.

Michael: Writers of magic utopias should be required to work at jobs where they have to maintain something. "There's no such thing as 'away.'"

(badgerbag's blogging begins here)

During this section of the panel I was thinking about Jeanne Duprau's book City of Ember (which is also a movie), because it's all about work. Humans are living in an underground city that was set up for them to survive a nuclear? disaster, and they don't remember ever living on the Earth's surface. The elders who put them down there left instructions for how to get out, once it was safe to go topside again, but the instructions got lost. So now the city is decaying and the supplies are running out. A number of jobs are described including courier, maintainer of electrical systems, maintainer of water pipes.

In a later section of the panel, one of the panelists was describing a story by Kornbluth about a Puerto Rican dishwasher who is a math genius. The panelists were lamenting that this kind of story is no longer being written. But it reminded me of a story in Walter Mosley's Futureland in which a technical genius is born into a poor family. So maybe some of them are being written again.

Comments

[sqbr]

Oooooh. *reads and ponders* A really interesting piece of working class ssff to me since it's genre-busting in other ways too is the anime "Planetes", about garbage collectors in space.

Man, way to make me wish I was there EVEN MORE.

[firecat]

Thanks for the recommendation! (Hope you can come next year...)

[sqbr]

I hope to make it to Wiscon one year but it's unlikely to be soon. America is a long way away!

Best I can do is the Aussie Worldcon.

[trixtah]

Interesting discussion topic, although those "definitions" of working class are kind of limited.

Funny, isn't it? I think the SF writers of working class origins who write - and I'd like to see a roll-call as well, because I don't think there are that many - might drive the genres which assume there is no working class because it's all robots (and while someone logically pointed out if robots can build, they can fight, I don't think that stops SF writers from being inconsistent at times), or else dystopias were everyone is a slave, except for the aristocracy at the top.

But I think the observation that it's mainly soldiers and the US prejudice against anything smacking of socialism or collectivism during the pulp years is bang-on. Not that I think socialism is "owned" by the working classes - shock, horror - partly because I think the working classes are steadily eroding in Western societies. What appears to be increasing is the aristocracy of the rich, the middle classes, and the non- or marginally-working underclass. Of course, it might be my prejudice - is a call-centre drone working class or lower-middle class?

A great story to tell might be if the "sweatshop countries" have a revolution against the prosperous West. Anyway, the eroding working class and the polarisation of extreme rich and extreme poor, with skilled labour being greatly reduced, might explain the dearth of literature from that perspective in more recent times.

[firecat]

What appears to be increasing is the aristocracy of the rich, the middle classes, and the non- or marginally-working underclass. Of course, it might be my prejudice - is a call-centre drone working class or lower-middle class?

By the formal definitions of the panel, a call-centre drone and a computer programmer making US$100K a year are both working class. But when they were talking about working class people in SF they seemed to be talking about service industry and construction/physical plant, not all people who receive salary/wage from someone else. I guess a call centre drone counts as service industry.

[kitrona]

It's interesting that this was pointed out, as I just recently created a character to play with who is a plumber... in space!! No, really, she's part of Starfleet but someone has to make sure the water goes where it's supposed to go and not where it's not, and that it gets purified correctly and whatnot, especially since water is a finite resource on a starship.

Not that I'm a paid writer or anything; I'm just doing it for fun. :)

[firecat]

Awesome! (Wiscon is very fanfic friendly.)

[elainegrey]

I think there must be something about the educational level expected because working on a scout ship for a larger company could be working class by many of the definitions given. The "Opportunities are limited by upbringing and attitudes" definition seems to begin to point to *class*. It's the lack of privilege to choose.

It seems to me the ownership of "means of production" is not necessarily a good signifier. Mechanics, carpenters may own their own tools, truck divers their own rigs, exotic dancer their own costumes. Are we to say a truck driver who owns her own rig, messenger who owns his own bike, pizza delivery dude with his own car are not working class?

Reading the early life of Oil Wildcatter Glenn McCarthy at Wikipedia[1] makes me think all the asteroid miner stories might ought to be considered as echoes of the oil and mineral prospectors of the American west: maybe an interesting question is how frontier work is different from working class (an escape from working class).


[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_McCarthy

[firecat]

The "Opportunities are limited by upbringing and attitudes" definition seems to begin to point to *class*. It's the lack of privilege to choose.

Yes, and the panel sort of deliberately veered away from that kind of discussion of class, because there was another panel about that, and such discussions have frequently gone wonky at Wiscon.

It seems to me the ownership of "means of production" is not necessarily a good signifier.

I agree; it doesn't seem to work as well as it might once have.

maybe an interesting question is how frontier work is different from working class

Yep, excellent question.

[nancylebov]

I know I've read sf about construction workers in space-- here's one: "Crucifixus Etiam" by Walter Miller.

Damn, there's a more recent novel (90s?), and I've lost track of both author and title. It's about a man and a furry/modified woman. They are stuck working in bad conditions (contract slavery or nearly) for most of the book. Their lives get a lot better when the laws change in their favor.

If contract slavery is within the topic (I can see arguments both ways), Heinlein's "Logic of Empire" would count.

[firecat]

Thanks!