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truepennyPANEL: All About the Benjamins
PARTICIPANTS: Kate Schaefer, Eleanor Arnason, Elizabeth Bear, Avedon Carol, Rebecca Maines
DESCRIPTION: Last year at a panel, Eleanor Arnason asserted quite eloquently that the great divide in our culture is economic—which led to a discussion about why there are so few regular working stiffs as heroes in our fiction. Let's discuss this in greater depth.
NOTES: Economics and class issues--so dovetailing interestingly with the panel about animals.
Avedon Carol recommends Thom Hartmann pretty much across the board.
Eleanor Arnason read from the Communist Manifesto about the role of the bourgeoisie as destroyers of feudalism:
Marx & Engels (and, yes, there's plenty to be said about their reification of history, but that would be a different panel) see society becoming divided into capitalists and the working class.
Which leads to the question: how does sf (which is all about the evolution of society) understand social class?
Often sf characters don't have jobs because they're too busy being protagonists. The counter-example cited was Maureen McHugh.
sf & f tends to elide out the lower-middle and functional working class (meaning the working class that is scraping by from paycheck to paycheck but is scraping by), only representing the professional class and then slaves and criminals: the underclass and the lumpenproletariat.
Eleanor gave a kind of schema of class in America
the rich
the middle-class
underclass
But what sf likes is the technological working class
Eleanor also described the three chronic problems with representations of class in American sf:
1. incredible unclearness of social class in the US
2. dominant politics of sf being right-wing libertarian
3. sf springs from pulp action stories--once the story starts, the job will necessarily disappear. [This is much like my complaint about quest narratives in fantasy: it's hard to find another model to engage with.]
Ken MacLeod was brought up; Eleanor opined as how his problem is that he thinks problems can be solved by shooting people, and there was some disagreement about whether that was true or not. But sf does often use violence to solve problems, more often in the work of male writers than of female. It is very invested in the romance of the frontier.
An audience member asked about sf in which the job is the solution to the problem. Alien, Air, The Unconquered Country, the oeuvres of Steven Brust and Eric Flint were cited. Also Nicola Griffith, Rebecca Ore's Slow Funeral, Sharyn McCrumb, Lyda Morehouse, Chris Moriarty's Spin State, and Peter Watts.
noir detective fiction was also cited as being about working class/underclass heroes in the person of the down-on-his-luck private eye. [I have some personal reservations about this assertion, but it is definitely a trope that sf has imported.]
sf, said an audience member, is inherently momentous in its plots. It maximizes risks. Whereas working/lower-middle-class life is all about minimizing risks.
In sf, even middle-class protagonists are risk-takers in a way that is rather unrealistic--but of course this is part of the escapism that genre fiction offers: a chance to read about people who AREN'T tied down by the kids and the mortgage and the need for health benefits.
Class in America is all about being able to pass.
It was announced that the Plunkett Award is in the process of creating itself; it will be to class as the Tiptree is to gender and the Carl Brandon is to race.
Pamela Sargent brought up the problem of class among sf & f writers, with full-time writers sometimes being perceived as higher status than part-time writers. Someone pointed out that Clarion is a luxury, and it definitely has cultural capital. And again with the escapism: sf writers aren't writing about their own lives.
PARTICIPANTS: Kate Schaefer, Eleanor Arnason, Elizabeth Bear, Avedon Carol, Rebecca Maines
DESCRIPTION: Last year at a panel, Eleanor Arnason asserted quite eloquently that the great divide in our culture is economic—which led to a discussion about why there are so few regular working stiffs as heroes in our fiction. Let's discuss this in greater depth.
NOTES: Economics and class issues--so dovetailing interestingly with the panel about animals.
Avedon Carol recommends Thom Hartmann pretty much across the board.
Eleanor Arnason read from the Communist Manifesto about the role of the bourgeoisie as destroyers of feudalism:
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors", and has left no other nexus between people than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment". It has drowned out the most heavenly ecstacies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom -- Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.
Marx & Engels (and, yes, there's plenty to be said about their reification of history, but that would be a different panel) see society becoming divided into capitalists and the working class.
Which leads to the question: how does sf (which is all about the evolution of society) understand social class?
Often sf characters don't have jobs because they're too busy being protagonists. The counter-example cited was Maureen McHugh.
sf & f tends to elide out the lower-middle and functional working class (meaning the working class that is scraping by from paycheck to paycheck but is scraping by), only representing the professional class and then slaves and criminals: the underclass and the lumpenproletariat.
Eleanor gave a kind of schema of class in America
the rich
the middle-class
small business people
professional and managerial class
comfortable working class
underclass
low level shitty jobs
petty criminals
(in America, the underclass tends to be racially marked)
But what sf likes is the technological working class
- Susan Palwick, The Necessary Beggar
- Melissa Scott
- Minister Faust
- John Varley, "Lollypop and the Tar Baby"
- C. J. Cherryh
- William Gibson, Virtual Light
- Bruce Sterling, Zeitgeist
- Theodore Sturgeon
- Philip K. Dick
Eleanor also described the three chronic problems with representations of class in American sf:
1. incredible unclearness of social class in the US
2. dominant politics of sf being right-wing libertarian
3. sf springs from pulp action stories--once the story starts, the job will necessarily disappear. [This is much like my complaint about quest narratives in fantasy: it's hard to find another model to engage with.]
Ken MacLeod was brought up; Eleanor opined as how his problem is that he thinks problems can be solved by shooting people, and there was some disagreement about whether that was true or not. But sf does often use violence to solve problems, more often in the work of male writers than of female. It is very invested in the romance of the frontier.
An audience member asked about sf in which the job is the solution to the problem. Alien, Air, The Unconquered Country, the oeuvres of Steven Brust and Eric Flint were cited. Also Nicola Griffith, Rebecca Ore's Slow Funeral, Sharyn McCrumb, Lyda Morehouse, Chris Moriarty's Spin State, and Peter Watts.
noir detective fiction was also cited as being about working class/underclass heroes in the person of the down-on-his-luck private eye. [I have some personal reservations about this assertion, but it is definitely a trope that sf has imported.]
sf, said an audience member, is inherently momentous in its plots. It maximizes risks. Whereas working/lower-middle-class life is all about minimizing risks.
In sf, even middle-class protagonists are risk-takers in a way that is rather unrealistic--but of course this is part of the escapism that genre fiction offers: a chance to read about people who AREN'T tied down by the kids and the mortgage and the need for health benefits.
Class in America is all about being able to pass.
It was announced that the Plunkett Award is in the process of creating itself; it will be to class as the Tiptree is to gender and the Carl Brandon is to race.
Pamela Sargent brought up the problem of class among sf & f writers, with full-time writers sometimes being perceived as higher status than part-time writers. Someone pointed out that Clarion is a luxury, and it definitely has cultural capital. And again with the escapism: sf writers aren't writing about their own lives.
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no subject
Date: 2006-05-30 12:14 am (UTC)'Cuz we were. I think Pullman tossed off the "servants have dog daemons" bit in a moment of temporary British insanity, and spent much of the other two books regretting it. It doesn't hold together at all; no other social hierarchy has an implied genus of daemon (the Church, for instance, doesn't), nor does Pullman manage to create the impression that this is an oppressive social construct.
Just imagine if he had, though. Some Mrs. Coulter socialite has a kid whose daemon settles as a sheepdog—imagine the uproar!
no subject
Date: 2006-05-30 03:58 am (UTC)(Yeah, that drove me nuts through the whole series.)
no subject
Date: 2006-05-30 05:51 am (UTC)Did you spot the one about the strange servant who had a daemon of his own sex, and people avoided him?
Yuck.
Determinism in a cute furry coat.
no subject
Date: 2006-05-30 12:31 am (UTC)Which is not to say that sf and fantasy which deals with these questions is not interesting reading, but by and large, you know, if you get up in the morning at six, struggle to be at the office or factory by 8, have a half-hour to an hour for a meal, get out at five and have to go home and feed your kids, you maybe have time for an hour or two of television or writing or internet, you're not going to go off and save the world without serious consequences to that lifestyle, particularly if like many people in this position you're in debt, have little savings and are a paycheck or two from serious financial trouble.
A working class or even a lower end professional job places incredible demands upon a worker's time, and more so in societies where there are fewer labour laws and workers must put in more hours under less safe conditions. If you can't work the job into the plot, then you're left with a character who doesn't have the time or the energy to do anything.
no subject
Date: 2006-05-30 02:27 am (UTC)Does it fit in anywhere her to observe that "middle class" is a huge, ill-defined social artifact in itself? Everyone I know thinks of themselves as middle class; I don't think I have ever heard anyone define themselves as either rich or lowerclass/underclass.
The professionals I know who make several hundred thousand still don't think of themselves as "the rich". The people I know scraping by at one or more dead-end jobs and struggling to keep a place to live (or couch-surfing) would be extremely offended at being called "working class", and I don't tend to think of them that way - they're lower middle class down on their luck and trying to climb back up.
no subject
Date: 2006-05-30 03:10 pm (UTC)This point was made again and again at every WisCon panel which touched on class. (And there were several; more than usual, even for a WisCon!) It's pretty much a central issue any time you're talking about Americans and class.
no subject
Date: 2006-05-30 03:22 pm (UTC)The estate tax never applied to anyone with an estate of less than a million dollars, and yet somehow the pols managed to spin it as a tax on those who really, really need the inheritance with no strings attached.
Sigh.
no subject
Date: 2006-05-30 05:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-30 01:30 pm (UTC)Class is more about what your parents taught you than anything else. We take our cues about what's possible in life and what's allowed in life from them.
no subject
Date: 2006-05-30 02:58 pm (UTC)*nodnodnod*
But what sf likes is the technological working class
[examples]
To bring a movie into this writing discussion, there's The Matrix: Neo escapes his cubicle prison, and enters a materially poorer but more authentic, important, and exciting world. I wonder if the people rescued from the Matrix ever had conflicts over who they'd been in their former lives.
2. dominant politics of sf being right-wing libertarian
A. MEN. *sigh*
Now I'll have to read Nancy Kress's Beggars in Spain again soon, because I just realised that I haven't reread it since before I'd ever encountered the real-life equivalents of the political movements she was describing.
Steven Brust
Who would be more thoughtful about issues of class than the average person, because of his upbringing.
In sf, even middle-class protagonists are risk-takers in a way that is rather unrealistic--but of course this is part of the escapism that genre fiction offers: a chance to read about people who AREN'T tied down by the kids and the mortgage and the need for health benefits.
This parallels the way protagonists in romance fiction (including slash and het fanfic) often take emotional risks that a real person probably wouldn't take, because the real person doesn't have the surety of being rewarded by the narrative. Drives me crazy sometimes. Every now and then I'll find a story in which the main two characters never speak up, and thus never get together, and I'll dance around with glee and relief.
no subject
Date: 2006-05-30 03:11 pm (UTC)There is also LeGuin's "Changing Planes," which has some pretty trenchant observations on class here and there. (The Christmas Island story is a little too blatant for my tastes -- though certainly not over-the-top when one considers Swift -- but Ai Li A Le is a heartbreaker, and "The Flyers of Gy" plays in, too, in sort of a lefthanded way.)
Asimov, the early Elijah Baley books, Caves of Steel in particular. Heinlein, "The Roads Must Roll" (though Heinlein fits all too well into the right-wing-lib box).
That sf/f writers do not typically focus on class doesn't mean sf/f critics can't root out class issues in sf/f. Which is, of course, what the panel was about.
no subject
Date: 2006-05-30 03:13 pm (UTC)I think it was me that brought this up. I agree, the class aspect of this can easily be ignored/subverted; but the radical affiliations of the founders of the genre like Hammett are quite clear; and Glen Cook's Garrett series, for example, has some interesting things to say about class issues (for a fantasy series).
no subject
Date: 2006-05-30 05:25 pm (UTC)I don't think Ken MacLeod thinks shooting things fixes all problems--he writes about people who try to fix their problems by shooting at things, which is not the same thing.