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owlectomyWe Do The Work
with Fred Schepartz, Eleanor A. Arnason, Chris Hill, Michael J. Lowrey
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?
FS: This panel is not a general discussion about class. It's a reaction to panels about class that have gone off the rails in the past. Sometimes those panels are too general and get too focused on definitions, so we're going to take a very tightly focused look at the topic: the portrayal of working-class characters in science fiction, or rather, the lack thereof, and the notion that there should be more, and there's no good excuse for why there's so few.
FS: Briefly, I want everyone to define, what is working-class?
EA: People who do not own the means of production. People who can get fired by a boss.
DS: I would agree with that. People whose personal schedules are defined by their jobs.
CH: I've never really thought about it in those terms. That would make a lot of people I consider to be middle-class, working-class. I tend to think of it in terms of opportunities, their background means that their opportunities are limited by the available physical and intellectual resources.
ML: Their economic well-being is at the mercy of somebody else. The quality of what you do is often irrelevant, you are vulnerable to powers from above. Beyond that, it gets to tricky cultural issues, self-perception and so forth. Class as self-defined as opposed to defined by economics. But whether you can feed your kid, whether you can stay in school, is at someone else's control.
CH: What is the status quo and why does it exist, in terms of how WC characters are portrayed in SF?
EA: There are large areas where they tend not to be represented. Blue-collar working class. No plumbers in the future, apparently. Depending on the definition... SF stories tend to have pilots, military, criminals, scientists. Lumpenproletariat in cyberpunk. But there are large chunks of society that aren't represented, and we don't know why not.
CH: Why?
EA: I asked Patrick. He said: blue-collar work is repetitious, uncreative (construction, etc.) You don't want creative problem-solving in construction because things need to be how you expect. Work is not inherently exciting. SF came out of the pulps, ripping tales for manly youth. Bias towards action, particularly individual action.
DS: Very focused on the individual adventure, yes. You can have a WC character who's secretly a prince of some sort (Harry Potter, etc.) Or he can start off as an apprentice in some field, but does all of these heroic things by the end. There's a resonance with the concept of being hidden in an everyday WC situation, but then leaving it. In ALL literature, you'll see being WC as a "trap." Death of a Salesman. He's very trapped within his life. From the beginning, a lot of authors look at it as something to be escaped from. Most examples are either very sad or completely comedic. There's no alternative to that.
CH: We're talking about this in an SF context, but it's a generic truth about literature. WC class characters are perceived as not generators of story unless they're escaping their situations. So it's either about their escape, or else their failure to escape. But also the comedic thing as well -- Dickens's great portrayal of the working classes? He only gets that cookie because he was writing about the working class, and nobody else was, but they're all either tragic or comical.
ML: One of the very few working class professions that shows up in SF is soldier. Mostly it is dull, boring, repetitive. Occasionally a grunt can break out and change the world. The roots of SF are not just in pulps, but specifically American pulps. American bias against any kind of collective action, collective plotline. You can have someone who is a leader. It tends to be about the leader and not the movement. Partial exception, Harry Turtledove, his Timeline where the confederacy managed to win. Follows characters of all social classes. Eric Flint, 1632 series. Hero is the ordinary American in that little town of WV. Even in that, he does find himself looking at the big colorful figures. Flint started out as a union organizer -- keeps coming back to the potential of the ordinary Joe. Just because someone's daily work is repetitive and determined by someone else doesn't mean that there's not a "mute inglorious Milton" with the potential for greatness. So if you're an SF writer -- you have to unleash that greatness.
FS: Writing about labor struggles gets into uncomfortable discussions of class. Class is taboo in the US -- Barack Obama is a socialist? In England you actually have political discourse outside the realms of the very narrow acceptable discourse in America. There's the issue of escapism -- you have writers who want escapism, feel like the audience wants escapism. In terms of portraying a labor struggle, that requires the writer to use an ensemble cast. It's much easier to focus on the one great heroic character, as opposed to the group which requires shifting points of view, etc. But if you're a good writer you can do that. Something Eleanor brought up -- will there be a working class in the future?
ML: Who built the death star?
Audience: Robots.
Who built the robots?
Aud: Robots.
EA: But then you would have the robots doing the fighting, and a robot Luke Skywalker, but you don't... despite Mark Hamill's acting. There's a Charles Stross book where the humans die off and the robots are left to carry on human civilization. I have my doubts about robots -- humans are versatile and cheap.
FS: In the Clone Wars, the humans had some advantages over battle droids, mainly flexibility.
DS: There's going to be a working class in the future. Why would it ever go away?
CH: People are cheap. There's always more of them around the corner. I'm going to butcher the name of the book -- Infoquake? It's a semi-utopia where everyone is forming collectives to do particular class, and I'm wondering, who's maintaining it? Nothing indicates that it's a technological solution. So much SF shows this utopia with nobody actually doing any work. Maybe the author isn't interested, just hasn't thought about it that carefully. With some of these futures, if the writers think too hard, their future becomes untenable. The bubble bursts, the future disappears.
ML: I would love to see the people who write mechanized utopias work in any mechanical job. Who maintains the slush conveyor pipes? Who maintains the garbage processing machine? Who gets rid of the resultant product? The only SF I can remember about a garbageman is by Asimov, a satellite colony, it takes only one person to maintain that machine, but that person is considered untouchable, it's taboo. The underlying economics, if you don't understand it, after a while you freeze up from implausibility.
Aud: There's an odd moment in Star Trek 2, Spock gives Kirk A Tale Of Two Cities, and you see people vacuuming in the background. Why janitors, and nothing else? The author doesn't think about it.
CH; A lot of SF is written from the top down. It starts off with the big idea and then works down to a comfortable level of detail. It's not bottom-up from, how does this society actually function?
FS: Star Trek is interesting. It's neat to have a replicator. But it's a way of copping out. It's a way of creating a society where you don't have to answer certain questions.
Aud: Is the service industry working class?
Yes
Aud: Can you address the service industry? How does that figure in? It appears more because more people see it.
ML: Traditionally... people who honor the working class want to honor blue-collar. They don't think of the waitress, the hotel laundry worker.
FS: There's the bartender in Neuromancer. They're portrayed, but they're not necessarily treated as interesting characters in their own right. The guy who runs the diner in Clone Wars.
Aud: It's gendered. If you're a nurse's aide, a waitress, that's absolutely working class, not above working class. Plumbers make more money than hotel service workers.
FS: SEIU is doing organizing of hotel workers. A lot are undocumented. Renaissance of organizing because exploitation is so high. (At this point he calls me out on my T-shirt, which says, "My Marxist Feminist Dialectic brings all the boys to the yard.")
Is it fair to say that a writer is copping out if they don't write about working-class characters because they don't know anything about them?
CH: Yes, next?
FS: OK, we can talk about Star Trek.
EA: To write about working people... there is a proletarian literature which existed in the 30s. Something esoteric, the novel "Independent People" which is about farmers in iceland. There is a literature about working people, which is politically charged. If you're going to write about working people, you may need to write about politics, about union organizing, collective struggles. May need to restructure the kind of story you tell. In WC, you tend not to do things on your own. There's hardly anything more heroic than the union movement. It does involve some individual heroes -- the movie Madeline, John Sayles. He's a solitary hero. But when he dies, we're looking at collective action. But writing that story, you move away from the basic ways science fiction has been done. Might be a good idea to think about how the future's actually organized socially. In point of fact, if robots can do the jobs working-class people do now, then they can do all the jobs in the novel. There's no need for a heroic protagonist.
DS: It's going to be a much richer world if you want to do a good job worldbuilding. If you figure out what's different in that world, that has ramifications for every class. It's a place that feels foreign from the ground up, not something grafted on to be freaky and different.
EA: We were talking about earlier, Pat was trained as a plumber. It's all about gravity. You use it to get stuff up and down through the system. So it changes if you move to an environment in different gravity, no gravity. How do you move water in a space station? If it's spinning, and you've got different apparent G, how are you going to run your pipes?
CH: It has to be a physical pumping system.
EA: And once you've got a gazillion pumps, you've got the maintenance.
FS: They didn't go into the details on Enterprise, but they showed them taking showers. Oh! They're taking showers! There's a scene where Archer's in the shower and the gravity goes out and it's a real mess. Nuts and bolts things that we usually don't get to see.
Aud: Kevin J. Anderson's saga Seven Suns -- there's a race of people who are WC, the Roamers. Very clannish, run mines, shipyards. Juxtaposed with the other different people and environments.
CH: That puts my teeth on edge -- "clannish." It's a popular way that middle-class writers write WC characters. There's a tendency to make them look Other. There's a distancing. The idea of an entire race that's WC doesn't work for me. How does that system get established?
Aud: They're cast-offs from earth, but all affiliated with one another.
ML: It's a caste.
FS: Are they portrayed in a positive way, do they feel like real characters? 3-dimensional?
Aud: Yes.
ML: There's another panel about "race" as a shorthand for cultural type, or different essences -- the dwarves are like THIS. Gordie Dickson's future history, where humanity's going to shift and separate itself into culturally monolithic planets -- the Childe cycle. That strikes me as false to the history of immigration and colonization. What if you have the inner soul of an accountant?
Aud: So, we don't see working class people in the background, and we also don't see them as characters in their own right. Are those intertwined?
Panel: Yes.
ML: If you don't notice the WC, you're not going to make them your heroes.
FS: Call to arms: How do we as writers/fans advocate for more/better portrayals of WC? How do we find common cause with people advocating for more/better portrayals of women and PoC?
EA: Thinking about your world from the bottom up: how does it actually work? As far as fans go, I think cons can be very useful. Once you start the process of talking about these issues, maybe people will think about them more, and that will affect what people write. People will ask, why do you only have a prince? It's important that authors think about -- I don't think I've done a good job of this -- who they're representing, how they're doing it. Is the world a stage set? There's an incredible amount going on out of sight. It's a far richer setting if you make the backstage stuff visible.
CH: I'd argue that... it's not necessary to make your WC characters the lead, but if you're doing so, get it right. Don't give people free passes when they get it wrong. I have serious problems with Benford's Timescape. People say it's the best SF talking about how scientists really work, but there are WC characters in that book, and every one is stupid or crooked. I couldn't get beyond that, but he's been given a free pass.
Aud: All the women are that way too.
ML: If any of you write fantasy, contemplate this: Guy with mighty sword walks into a tavern, quaffs a big mug from a serving wench... write the rest of your story about the serving wench.
DS: But how many of those stories are going to be comedic?
Aud: It's a question of what makes a good conflict. In Perdido Street Station, people are dealing with the university funding, they go to dinner, worry about their personal lives, then giant mutant moths attack. Couldn't they just go back to having dinner?
CH: I've been frowned on by my friends for pointing out that the second half of PSS is an overgrown episode of Doctor Who.
Aud: If you could write about a robot maintenance worker, and what he does, and the conflict between workers and management... they don't have to blow up planets and rescue princesses.
DS: You can have the story that's about an entire empire, or one space station, but you have to keep the focus there so it matters to everybody involved. It's doable. It's just a different scale.
FS: Storytelling is storytelling is storytelling.
EA: Seems to me that 50s SF, a lot of the short stories were our world, and then something strange happens, and the people in our world weren't necessarily glamorous. Kornbluth story about a puerto rican kid who washes dishes and is an incredible math genius, walks into Columbia and writes these equations on a blackboard. Everyone thinks he's a nut.
CH: That's Goodwill Hunting!
EA: When they figure out what he's doing, the military moves in on him. It's the 50s, cold war. He'll make a super duper bomb or something. The guy is made a prisoner, he's getting more and more unhappy -- then he suddenly forgets everything.
Aud: He gets a girlfriend and the math is gone.
EA: And then the military lets go of him and he goes back to being a dishwasher. At the end of the story, the narrator/reporter has an interaction with him, and the math is still there -- it's just that it wasn't worth it to him. There were a lot of stories where you've got ordinary people and then something extraordinary happens. We lost that particular kind of story, and we lost those people.
CH: is there a tendency to use WC characters to reflect on somebody else's story? Episode of Babylon V, A View From the Gallery. Harlan Ellison should know better. Cute ways for maintenance workers to interact with the main characters and tell you how wonderful the MCs are. The WC characters have no story of their own.
Aud: Bradbury short story in Mexico. This farmer sees all these carts filled with tourists fleeing. It's the end of the world. The notion of the world ending doesn't make sense to him -- the world that's ending is not HIS world.
ML: He was trying to establish a sense of perspective.
CH: That's predicated on the idea that WC people are a bit dumb and don't know much about the world.
FS: An obvious question, why is it important that WC characters be portrayed?
EA: For the same reason that women and PoCs be represented. Because they're there, and SF should be true to some kinds of reality. Because creating a fiction where the reader can't see themselves, that's a disservice. Women SF fans grew up with no role models, same thing for people of color. Who do you identify with in a story? The message of stories where you have a superhero is, you're not going to be able to solve major problems unless you're bit by a radioactive spider. People need the message that everyone can have an effect on the world.
Aud: Can that explain the loss of young people from SF fandom over the last whatever? They can't see themselves in that?
EA: I don't have an answer to that.
FS: It's a crucial point. The points I wanted to make are, as EA said, if such characters are portrayed -- you're a subject, not an object. And the question of role models. I'm a believer in, there's no reason why working people can't produce art. They can do fiction, poetry, be an artist, musician. When you portray WC people, it helps readers feel like they can do that too. I can write about what I know. It serves as an example and inspiration.
CH: In the other direction, there's something about empathy. if people who aren't WC come across good well-written people not like themselves, they might start to treat them as human beings. The way people treat waiting staff or hotel cleaners -- you don't see people who are different from you as being human. If you're not seeing them in books and film and TV, you're not going to see them as people. It's aspirational for WC readers, but also humanizing for others.
ML: One argument for writing about WC -- it makes it a more rational, economically, sociologically feasible world, one that makes sense. It's going to be better SF if you think out the economics, whether your char. is a merchant or whatever. As far as WC characters not doing anything heroic, I'm reading a bio of a silversmith called Paul Revere. Sequoyah was a silversmith by profession. You don't have to be an elected leader or a king to shape your culture. There was at one time a working-class reading population, reading Saturday Evening Post, publications that don't exist or don't bother now. That population is now watching television. That's a whole separate issue. We're at a con heavy on people who still read, so the audience is graying.
FS: But YA fiction, and YA SF, is hot. A month ago I was doing a reading at Borders, and there are these little girls hovering around the vampire section. It's a start.
Aud: There's a video about the portrayal of the WC on television... it's yucky. It's invisible, or tragic, or buffoons and ignoramuses.
ML: When you see unions on television, they're corrupt, or...
CH: Do US channels show East-Enders? It's a soap opera set in the east end of London... it's the most miserable piece of television.
FS: There's going to be yelling and screaming about this... what writers do this well? What writers disappoint?
EA: I'm not going to deal with disappointing ones. Lovely job: Ann Harris, who's here at the convention. Melissa Scott, wonderful. One story, the characters who are very high-tech spaceship operators have to get into the underground city and one of them, all of his relatives are in the union. These guys are snuck into this underground city through the maintenance tunnels. They get in because the one character can say to the union workers, my buddies are OK, you can trust them. Melissa Scott writes stories about computer people, techie people, working class or shadow economy. Rebecca Orr is fabulous. Slow Funeral, about witchcraft. She has a series of books starting with Becoming Alien. Dirt poor, hill family, abducted by aliens. Incredible.
Aud: Gaia's Toys.
EA: She's a fabulous writer. Not a lot of people are talking about dirt-poor southern whites. Maureen McHugh. Fred here with Vampire Cabbie. Once in a while C.J. Cherryh. Chris Barzak, a YA set in blue-color Ohio. And Wall-E.
DS: Nina Kiriki Hoffman touches on that a bit. Characters who are not hidden princes or epic types. Don't have much money, but very real, sincere, interesting lives. The Incredibles gets close to what I'd like to see, they're living a very suburban life.
FS: William Gibson -- in Virtual Light, he made the conscious decision to write about bicycle couriers in San Francisco, and he went and spent time with them. Anybody can do that. It's called research, God! I loved in Battlestar Galactica. The one labor conflict episode, Dirty Hands. The one issue I had is, it got into the Great Person thing, but they did a good job of portraying the grunts and the class division between mechanics and pilots.
CH: Maureen McHugh. Nekropolis, which is a tragedy, which is a cliche. Ian MacDonald, particularly River of Gods. Brasyl. Writers seem to be more comfortable talking about WC chars from a non-Western background -- is that a topic of its own? In India, or Brazil... topic for another time. Great novels.
ML: Eric Flint, 1632, is a bizarre example. It's being written collectively -- shared universe. Another example, though it's flawed, Alan Steele has written about space roustabouts, warehouse workers, blue-collar male jobs. I have a personal grievance with him because I was the dungeon master when he was this high school kid and now he's won two Hugos. He does talk about good ole boys in space without it being a mockery.
with Fred Schepartz, Eleanor A. Arnason, Chris Hill, Michael J. Lowrey
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?
FS: This panel is not a general discussion about class. It's a reaction to panels about class that have gone off the rails in the past. Sometimes those panels are too general and get too focused on definitions, so we're going to take a very tightly focused look at the topic: the portrayal of working-class characters in science fiction, or rather, the lack thereof, and the notion that there should be more, and there's no good excuse for why there's so few.
FS: Briefly, I want everyone to define, what is working-class?
EA: People who do not own the means of production. People who can get fired by a boss.
DS: I would agree with that. People whose personal schedules are defined by their jobs.
CH: I've never really thought about it in those terms. That would make a lot of people I consider to be middle-class, working-class. I tend to think of it in terms of opportunities, their background means that their opportunities are limited by the available physical and intellectual resources.
ML: Their economic well-being is at the mercy of somebody else. The quality of what you do is often irrelevant, you are vulnerable to powers from above. Beyond that, it gets to tricky cultural issues, self-perception and so forth. Class as self-defined as opposed to defined by economics. But whether you can feed your kid, whether you can stay in school, is at someone else's control.
CH: What is the status quo and why does it exist, in terms of how WC characters are portrayed in SF?
EA: There are large areas where they tend not to be represented. Blue-collar working class. No plumbers in the future, apparently. Depending on the definition... SF stories tend to have pilots, military, criminals, scientists. Lumpenproletariat in cyberpunk. But there are large chunks of society that aren't represented, and we don't know why not.
CH: Why?
EA: I asked Patrick. He said: blue-collar work is repetitious, uncreative (construction, etc.) You don't want creative problem-solving in construction because things need to be how you expect. Work is not inherently exciting. SF came out of the pulps, ripping tales for manly youth. Bias towards action, particularly individual action.
DS: Very focused on the individual adventure, yes. You can have a WC character who's secretly a prince of some sort (Harry Potter, etc.) Or he can start off as an apprentice in some field, but does all of these heroic things by the end. There's a resonance with the concept of being hidden in an everyday WC situation, but then leaving it. In ALL literature, you'll see being WC as a "trap." Death of a Salesman. He's very trapped within his life. From the beginning, a lot of authors look at it as something to be escaped from. Most examples are either very sad or completely comedic. There's no alternative to that.
CH: We're talking about this in an SF context, but it's a generic truth about literature. WC class characters are perceived as not generators of story unless they're escaping their situations. So it's either about their escape, or else their failure to escape. But also the comedic thing as well -- Dickens's great portrayal of the working classes? He only gets that cookie because he was writing about the working class, and nobody else was, but they're all either tragic or comical.
ML: One of the very few working class professions that shows up in SF is soldier. Mostly it is dull, boring, repetitive. Occasionally a grunt can break out and change the world. The roots of SF are not just in pulps, but specifically American pulps. American bias against any kind of collective action, collective plotline. You can have someone who is a leader. It tends to be about the leader and not the movement. Partial exception, Harry Turtledove, his Timeline where the confederacy managed to win. Follows characters of all social classes. Eric Flint, 1632 series. Hero is the ordinary American in that little town of WV. Even in that, he does find himself looking at the big colorful figures. Flint started out as a union organizer -- keeps coming back to the potential of the ordinary Joe. Just because someone's daily work is repetitive and determined by someone else doesn't mean that there's not a "mute inglorious Milton" with the potential for greatness. So if you're an SF writer -- you have to unleash that greatness.
FS: Writing about labor struggles gets into uncomfortable discussions of class. Class is taboo in the US -- Barack Obama is a socialist? In England you actually have political discourse outside the realms of the very narrow acceptable discourse in America. There's the issue of escapism -- you have writers who want escapism, feel like the audience wants escapism. In terms of portraying a labor struggle, that requires the writer to use an ensemble cast. It's much easier to focus on the one great heroic character, as opposed to the group which requires shifting points of view, etc. But if you're a good writer you can do that. Something Eleanor brought up -- will there be a working class in the future?
ML: Who built the death star?
Audience: Robots.
Who built the robots?
Aud: Robots.
EA: But then you would have the robots doing the fighting, and a robot Luke Skywalker, but you don't... despite Mark Hamill's acting. There's a Charles Stross book where the humans die off and the robots are left to carry on human civilization. I have my doubts about robots -- humans are versatile and cheap.
FS: In the Clone Wars, the humans had some advantages over battle droids, mainly flexibility.
DS: There's going to be a working class in the future. Why would it ever go away?
CH: People are cheap. There's always more of them around the corner. I'm going to butcher the name of the book -- Infoquake? It's a semi-utopia where everyone is forming collectives to do particular class, and I'm wondering, who's maintaining it? Nothing indicates that it's a technological solution. So much SF shows this utopia with nobody actually doing any work. Maybe the author isn't interested, just hasn't thought about it that carefully. With some of these futures, if the writers think too hard, their future becomes untenable. The bubble bursts, the future disappears.
ML: I would love to see the people who write mechanized utopias work in any mechanical job. Who maintains the slush conveyor pipes? Who maintains the garbage processing machine? Who gets rid of the resultant product? The only SF I can remember about a garbageman is by Asimov, a satellite colony, it takes only one person to maintain that machine, but that person is considered untouchable, it's taboo. The underlying economics, if you don't understand it, after a while you freeze up from implausibility.
Aud: There's an odd moment in Star Trek 2, Spock gives Kirk A Tale Of Two Cities, and you see people vacuuming in the background. Why janitors, and nothing else? The author doesn't think about it.
CH; A lot of SF is written from the top down. It starts off with the big idea and then works down to a comfortable level of detail. It's not bottom-up from, how does this society actually function?
FS: Star Trek is interesting. It's neat to have a replicator. But it's a way of copping out. It's a way of creating a society where you don't have to answer certain questions.
Aud: Is the service industry working class?
Yes
Aud: Can you address the service industry? How does that figure in? It appears more because more people see it.
ML: Traditionally... people who honor the working class want to honor blue-collar. They don't think of the waitress, the hotel laundry worker.
FS: There's the bartender in Neuromancer. They're portrayed, but they're not necessarily treated as interesting characters in their own right. The guy who runs the diner in Clone Wars.
Aud: It's gendered. If you're a nurse's aide, a waitress, that's absolutely working class, not above working class. Plumbers make more money than hotel service workers.
FS: SEIU is doing organizing of hotel workers. A lot are undocumented. Renaissance of organizing because exploitation is so high. (At this point he calls me out on my T-shirt, which says, "My Marxist Feminist Dialectic brings all the boys to the yard.")
Is it fair to say that a writer is copping out if they don't write about working-class characters because they don't know anything about them?
CH: Yes, next?
FS: OK, we can talk about Star Trek.
EA: To write about working people... there is a proletarian literature which existed in the 30s. Something esoteric, the novel "Independent People" which is about farmers in iceland. There is a literature about working people, which is politically charged. If you're going to write about working people, you may need to write about politics, about union organizing, collective struggles. May need to restructure the kind of story you tell. In WC, you tend not to do things on your own. There's hardly anything more heroic than the union movement. It does involve some individual heroes -- the movie Madeline, John Sayles. He's a solitary hero. But when he dies, we're looking at collective action. But writing that story, you move away from the basic ways science fiction has been done. Might be a good idea to think about how the future's actually organized socially. In point of fact, if robots can do the jobs working-class people do now, then they can do all the jobs in the novel. There's no need for a heroic protagonist.
DS: It's going to be a much richer world if you want to do a good job worldbuilding. If you figure out what's different in that world, that has ramifications for every class. It's a place that feels foreign from the ground up, not something grafted on to be freaky and different.
EA: We were talking about earlier, Pat was trained as a plumber. It's all about gravity. You use it to get stuff up and down through the system. So it changes if you move to an environment in different gravity, no gravity. How do you move water in a space station? If it's spinning, and you've got different apparent G, how are you going to run your pipes?
CH: It has to be a physical pumping system.
EA: And once you've got a gazillion pumps, you've got the maintenance.
FS: They didn't go into the details on Enterprise, but they showed them taking showers. Oh! They're taking showers! There's a scene where Archer's in the shower and the gravity goes out and it's a real mess. Nuts and bolts things that we usually don't get to see.
Aud: Kevin J. Anderson's saga Seven Suns -- there's a race of people who are WC, the Roamers. Very clannish, run mines, shipyards. Juxtaposed with the other different people and environments.
CH: That puts my teeth on edge -- "clannish." It's a popular way that middle-class writers write WC characters. There's a tendency to make them look Other. There's a distancing. The idea of an entire race that's WC doesn't work for me. How does that system get established?
Aud: They're cast-offs from earth, but all affiliated with one another.
ML: It's a caste.
FS: Are they portrayed in a positive way, do they feel like real characters? 3-dimensional?
Aud: Yes.
ML: There's another panel about "race" as a shorthand for cultural type, or different essences -- the dwarves are like THIS. Gordie Dickson's future history, where humanity's going to shift and separate itself into culturally monolithic planets -- the Childe cycle. That strikes me as false to the history of immigration and colonization. What if you have the inner soul of an accountant?
Aud: So, we don't see working class people in the background, and we also don't see them as characters in their own right. Are those intertwined?
Panel: Yes.
ML: If you don't notice the WC, you're not going to make them your heroes.
FS: Call to arms: How do we as writers/fans advocate for more/better portrayals of WC? How do we find common cause with people advocating for more/better portrayals of women and PoC?
EA: Thinking about your world from the bottom up: how does it actually work? As far as fans go, I think cons can be very useful. Once you start the process of talking about these issues, maybe people will think about them more, and that will affect what people write. People will ask, why do you only have a prince? It's important that authors think about -- I don't think I've done a good job of this -- who they're representing, how they're doing it. Is the world a stage set? There's an incredible amount going on out of sight. It's a far richer setting if you make the backstage stuff visible.
CH: I'd argue that... it's not necessary to make your WC characters the lead, but if you're doing so, get it right. Don't give people free passes when they get it wrong. I have serious problems with Benford's Timescape. People say it's the best SF talking about how scientists really work, but there are WC characters in that book, and every one is stupid or crooked. I couldn't get beyond that, but he's been given a free pass.
Aud: All the women are that way too.
ML: If any of you write fantasy, contemplate this: Guy with mighty sword walks into a tavern, quaffs a big mug from a serving wench... write the rest of your story about the serving wench.
DS: But how many of those stories are going to be comedic?
Aud: It's a question of what makes a good conflict. In Perdido Street Station, people are dealing with the university funding, they go to dinner, worry about their personal lives, then giant mutant moths attack. Couldn't they just go back to having dinner?
CH: I've been frowned on by my friends for pointing out that the second half of PSS is an overgrown episode of Doctor Who.
Aud: If you could write about a robot maintenance worker, and what he does, and the conflict between workers and management... they don't have to blow up planets and rescue princesses.
DS: You can have the story that's about an entire empire, or one space station, but you have to keep the focus there so it matters to everybody involved. It's doable. It's just a different scale.
FS: Storytelling is storytelling is storytelling.
EA: Seems to me that 50s SF, a lot of the short stories were our world, and then something strange happens, and the people in our world weren't necessarily glamorous. Kornbluth story about a puerto rican kid who washes dishes and is an incredible math genius, walks into Columbia and writes these equations on a blackboard. Everyone thinks he's a nut.
CH: That's Goodwill Hunting!
EA: When they figure out what he's doing, the military moves in on him. It's the 50s, cold war. He'll make a super duper bomb or something. The guy is made a prisoner, he's getting more and more unhappy -- then he suddenly forgets everything.
Aud: He gets a girlfriend and the math is gone.
EA: And then the military lets go of him and he goes back to being a dishwasher. At the end of the story, the narrator/reporter has an interaction with him, and the math is still there -- it's just that it wasn't worth it to him. There were a lot of stories where you've got ordinary people and then something extraordinary happens. We lost that particular kind of story, and we lost those people.
CH: is there a tendency to use WC characters to reflect on somebody else's story? Episode of Babylon V, A View From the Gallery. Harlan Ellison should know better. Cute ways for maintenance workers to interact with the main characters and tell you how wonderful the MCs are. The WC characters have no story of their own.
Aud: Bradbury short story in Mexico. This farmer sees all these carts filled with tourists fleeing. It's the end of the world. The notion of the world ending doesn't make sense to him -- the world that's ending is not HIS world.
ML: He was trying to establish a sense of perspective.
CH: That's predicated on the idea that WC people are a bit dumb and don't know much about the world.
FS: An obvious question, why is it important that WC characters be portrayed?
EA: For the same reason that women and PoCs be represented. Because they're there, and SF should be true to some kinds of reality. Because creating a fiction where the reader can't see themselves, that's a disservice. Women SF fans grew up with no role models, same thing for people of color. Who do you identify with in a story? The message of stories where you have a superhero is, you're not going to be able to solve major problems unless you're bit by a radioactive spider. People need the message that everyone can have an effect on the world.
Aud: Can that explain the loss of young people from SF fandom over the last whatever? They can't see themselves in that?
EA: I don't have an answer to that.
FS: It's a crucial point. The points I wanted to make are, as EA said, if such characters are portrayed -- you're a subject, not an object. And the question of role models. I'm a believer in, there's no reason why working people can't produce art. They can do fiction, poetry, be an artist, musician. When you portray WC people, it helps readers feel like they can do that too. I can write about what I know. It serves as an example and inspiration.
CH: In the other direction, there's something about empathy. if people who aren't WC come across good well-written people not like themselves, they might start to treat them as human beings. The way people treat waiting staff or hotel cleaners -- you don't see people who are different from you as being human. If you're not seeing them in books and film and TV, you're not going to see them as people. It's aspirational for WC readers, but also humanizing for others.
ML: One argument for writing about WC -- it makes it a more rational, economically, sociologically feasible world, one that makes sense. It's going to be better SF if you think out the economics, whether your char. is a merchant or whatever. As far as WC characters not doing anything heroic, I'm reading a bio of a silversmith called Paul Revere. Sequoyah was a silversmith by profession. You don't have to be an elected leader or a king to shape your culture. There was at one time a working-class reading population, reading Saturday Evening Post, publications that don't exist or don't bother now. That population is now watching television. That's a whole separate issue. We're at a con heavy on people who still read, so the audience is graying.
FS: But YA fiction, and YA SF, is hot. A month ago I was doing a reading at Borders, and there are these little girls hovering around the vampire section. It's a start.
Aud: There's a video about the portrayal of the WC on television... it's yucky. It's invisible, or tragic, or buffoons and ignoramuses.
ML: When you see unions on television, they're corrupt, or...
CH: Do US channels show East-Enders? It's a soap opera set in the east end of London... it's the most miserable piece of television.
FS: There's going to be yelling and screaming about this... what writers do this well? What writers disappoint?
EA: I'm not going to deal with disappointing ones. Lovely job: Ann Harris, who's here at the convention. Melissa Scott, wonderful. One story, the characters who are very high-tech spaceship operators have to get into the underground city and one of them, all of his relatives are in the union. These guys are snuck into this underground city through the maintenance tunnels. They get in because the one character can say to the union workers, my buddies are OK, you can trust them. Melissa Scott writes stories about computer people, techie people, working class or shadow economy. Rebecca Orr is fabulous. Slow Funeral, about witchcraft. She has a series of books starting with Becoming Alien. Dirt poor, hill family, abducted by aliens. Incredible.
Aud: Gaia's Toys.
EA: She's a fabulous writer. Not a lot of people are talking about dirt-poor southern whites. Maureen McHugh. Fred here with Vampire Cabbie. Once in a while C.J. Cherryh. Chris Barzak, a YA set in blue-color Ohio. And Wall-E.
DS: Nina Kiriki Hoffman touches on that a bit. Characters who are not hidden princes or epic types. Don't have much money, but very real, sincere, interesting lives. The Incredibles gets close to what I'd like to see, they're living a very suburban life.
FS: William Gibson -- in Virtual Light, he made the conscious decision to write about bicycle couriers in San Francisco, and he went and spent time with them. Anybody can do that. It's called research, God! I loved in Battlestar Galactica. The one labor conflict episode, Dirty Hands. The one issue I had is, it got into the Great Person thing, but they did a good job of portraying the grunts and the class division between mechanics and pilots.
CH: Maureen McHugh. Nekropolis, which is a tragedy, which is a cliche. Ian MacDonald, particularly River of Gods. Brasyl. Writers seem to be more comfortable talking about WC chars from a non-Western background -- is that a topic of its own? In India, or Brazil... topic for another time. Great novels.
ML: Eric Flint, 1632, is a bizarre example. It's being written collectively -- shared universe. Another example, though it's flawed, Alan Steele has written about space roustabouts, warehouse workers, blue-collar male jobs. I have a personal grievance with him because I was the dungeon master when he was this high school kid and now he's won two Hugos. He does talk about good ole boys in space without it being a mockery.
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