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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.
