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badgerbagETA: maryread has great concise notes on this panel:
http://maryread.livejournal.com/258
...
(i came in in the middle)
Eleanor A. Arnason, Diana Sherman, Fred Shepartz, Chris Hill, Michael J. Lowrey.
Chris Hill: we imagine these futures with no workign class but the working class isn't going to disappear!
Michael L. Lowrey: so you have a sloosh pipe that takes away the garbage, so what, you are still going to need a person to build and maintain that sloosh pipe. (and where does the garbage go to?) and as i told my daughter from very early on in her life, there is no such place as "Away". what happens to the garbae when you throw it "away"? if you dont' think about the economic there is a oment where you freeze up
aud: spock is giving kirk a copy of tale of two cities for his birthday. a couple of guys vaccuuming in the background. and i wondered, why janitors, and no one else from teh working class int he whole universe?
chris hill: a lot of science fiction is written from the top down and not the bottom up. i'm being grossly unfair, but it starts off with a big idea and then works down to a level of detail they're comfortable with. how does this society actually function, and then the big ideas about the society?
Fred: who couldn't use the holodeck? a society where you don't have to answer certain questions
aud: service class. could you address the issues of the service industry and service class? cyberpunk. people go into diners. they go into shops where they buy cheap clothes and junk. where does it come from, who sells that stuff, we see them, but it's not thought through. is there a difference, working class, service class?
fred: people who honor the worknig class, they want to honor blue collar, they don't think of my mom the waitress, or the hotel working class.
Fred: they show bartender, a service worker, he has a nice scene but he's not a full character. guy in clone wars int he movie not the cartoon, obi wan goes looking for information, guy who runs the diner.
Andrea Hairston: it's so gendered because i would consider a waitress working class. they are all women's jobs they are all definitely working class! plumber, machine shop, they make way more money than a hotel service worker. this is a very gendered view you're describing
Fred: pink collar... seiu, renassance of organizgin, the exploitation is so high. woman in 2nd row you ahve the best tshirt, "my marxist feminst dialectic brings all the boys to the yard"
(note i have seen 2 other people at wiscon today, wearing that same tshirt! )
Eleanor: in the working class you tend not to do things on your own. heroes of unions. (Madewan, john sales) this defies the idea of the solitary hero, it is collective action we're looking at. if you're going to write that kind of story you may move away from the basic ways that science fiction has been written. if you're thinkng about the future, it might be a good idea to think about how the future is organized socially. in thinking about star wars, if robots are able to do the jobs that working class people do now, they can do all the jobs in the story so why have only human heroic protagonists? think about who else might be there.
Diana: get back to that plumber, what it's like, what is different in that world. changes, richness throughout every class, it will create a more foreign feeling place from the ground up as opposed to somewhere that just has something grafted on to feel freaky and different.
Eleanor: plumbing is all about gravity. you use gravity to get stufff up and down through the system. so every time you move into an evnivonment with diferent gravity or no gravity. i never thought about it, how do you move water and soil products in a space station ? spinning, different apparent g in different parts of the station
chris : you would probably have to have a phsyical pumping system, woudnt you.
Eleanor: onec you have a gazillion pumps you have the maintenance of a gazillion pumps
Fred: i liked in Enterprise that they showed them taking showers (audience laughter) I was like Oh! they have showers ! the gravity goes out, the water goes out.
kaya: kevin j. anderson 7th son, the working class, Roamers. clannish. they appointa a Speaker.
chris: "clannish" puts my teeth on edge. middle class writers tend to use that language to describe working class... othering, distancing there. an entire race that's working class. that seems ... odd. How did that get established? how would that happen?
katya: they're all sort of castoff. theyr'e from earth and they're all working class.
Fred; It's a caste.
Katya: yeah, kind of .
Fred: do they feel like real characters, 3 dimensional, positive?
Katya: Oh yeah. the rest of society looks down on them but they are very positively shown
Michael: use by tolkien , fantasy race as a short hand for cultural differences and essences. i was thinking of ()Dixon's future history with the exotic world and the militray world, that hhumanity woudl shift and separate itself into entire planets that are monolitithic, as if there are metaphysical reasons this woudl occur. The Dorsai...
what happens if you're on a military world but you have the soul of an accountant?
Aud: two separate things... (I missed them)
Fred: I'd see them as inter-related. It reflecting inability to see workign people.
Aud: different solutions for those problems? or would addressing one, you address both.
Michael: if you don't have the idea that you have a working class, you're not likely to have a character who is in it.
Fred: more and better portrayals fo women and people of color?
eleanor: if you're a writer, more consciously thinking about bilding a world fromt he bottom up. howdoes your world actually work? for fans, i think cons can be very usefl. once you start to process talkng about thse issues, maybe people will start thinking about them more and it will affect what people write? and wheer people back authors into corners and say why do you only have a prince and no one else? It's important that authors think that, well, i'm rubbing my hands nervously because i haven't done a good job of it, is the world a stage set? or is something going on behind it? if you've ever been back stage in a theater there's an incredible amount going on out of sight. you have far richer story, as diana pointed out, if you make that back stage visible.
chris: If you are going to have working class characters, get it right! don't give peopel free passes! serious problems with Gregory Benford's Timescape. Oh, it's the best picture of how scientists realy work, but i will tel you one thing, ther are a number of english working class characters in that book and every single one of them is either stupid, or crooked. i almost threw the book across the room. but he gets a free pass on it!
Micheale: if you write fantasy, standard opening scene, Gorgax walks into a tavern and orders a big tangkard of ale from the serviing wench. i challenge you to follow her behind the bar and write the story about that serving wench.
Diana: and how many of those stories woudl be comedic?
*brief silence from everyone*
Aud: romance , personal life, then like, giant mutant moths and stuff. i kept thinking, couldn't they just go back to having dinner?
Chris hill: i have been frowned on by pointing out that most of the second half of perdido street station is (missed it..... but everyone cracked up)
Aud:what about this, robot maintenance worker and what he does. the cmopany has bought out the robot maintenance contract fo the station and the robots and the workers don't know what wil happen do them.
diana: you can have a story that is about an entire empire, and you can have a story about one space station, but you have to keep the stakes high so that everything matters, it's a different scale.
Eleanor: kornbluth story about a puerto rican kid who washes dishes and then walkes into a university and writes all these equations on the board. written in the 50s. and everyone judges him... 50s, cold war, military... super bomb... or something. And the guy is made a prisoner, and he gets unhappy, and has accident
aud: he forgets everything
Evelyn: He gets a girlfriend, and forgets everything
aud: AARRRRRGH!!!!
Evelyn: that's what ahppens!
Eleanor: and really, he would just rather be a dishwasher and not a prisoner. Knight, Kornbluth, willian tenor, where you get ordinary people, something extraordinary happens. somewhere along the way we lost that particular kind of story and we lost the people in that story.
Chris: when something does focus on workign class characters, a tendency to tell not their story but to use them to reflect on someone els'es story, babylon 5, harlan ellison who should know better, from point of view of two maintenance workers on the space ship, use them to tell the audience how wonderful the main characters are. they are purely there to reflect on the main characters, they have no life of their own
aud: i think that was jms not ellison
aud: using working class chars to tell stories that are not their own. Bradbury short story, mexico, farmer seeing all these cars full of tourists fleeing, end of world, atomic bomb, to him the world ending doens't make sense, their world is ending but not his. what do you mean "the world". was that a workign class view of "the world" and wwIII
chris: predicates the idea that workgin clas people are a bit dumb
Fred: moving on. why important that working class people be portrayed in sf?
eleanor: same as women and people of color being represented, partly, because they're there. F&SF should be true to some kinds of reality. Creating a fictio where the reader cannot ultimately see thesmelves in the characters is a disservice.generatsion of womena nd people of color grew up with out those role modes, what do you do if yo're not the genius scientist in the story, not the superhero.. Spiderman, part of the message is that you're not going to be able to solve problems if you haven't been bit by a radioactive spider, better to give the message that everyone can have an effect on the world.
Chris; i'm sure i'm not the only person in the room who has been incensed by how someone you know treats a waiter or cleaning staff and if you dn't see people treated as human in books, you're not going to treat them as human in real life. humanizing for other people, not just aspirational or models for working class.
Mike: thinking out the role for working class makes it a more rational and sociologicially sensible world. the distribution of people, better SF, if you've thought out the economics of a planet.
Mike: the greying of fandom, the working class used to read more, stories in Saturday Evening Post, now they watch tv instead
(I wonder if this is actually true, and i also don't believe at all in 'the greying of fandom'...)
Fred: YA fic is really hot... all the little girls hovering around the vampire shelves.
Andrea: There's a great video "Class Dismissed", about TV portrayals of working class people as buffoons, tragic, quaint, invisible or you wish they were.
Mike: Unions. On tv they are either corrupt or buffoons.
Chris: East Enders. A long running soap opera set in London's East End, last 25 years. It is a miserable piece of TV. (They get and do everything wrong)
Fred: Writers who do it well? Good ones, or bad ones?
Eleanor: Ignoring the bad.
Good:
* Ann Harris
* Melissa Scott - Dreaming Metal and the other one. Characters in high tech world, spaceship operators. Get into the underground city on a world. The relatives are all in the Union. They go through the maintenance tunnels.
* Rebecca Ore. Slow Funeral. Becoming Alien. Gaia's Toys.
* Maureen McHugh.
* Fred's vampire cabbie books
* Some CJ Cherryh.
* (another author) blue collar Ohio
* Wall-E
Diana: Nina Kiriki HOffman, sometimes. not princes or epic types. The Incredibles.
(I disagree about the Incredibles, I thought they were extremely middle class, am I wrong?)
Fred: William Gibson's Virtual Light. doing the research into bike couriers in San Francisco. How hard is that... go meet people and talk with them about their lives... It's called doing the research.
BSG. the labor conflict. Problems of one great leader, but still they showed the grunts and the tension between mechanics vs. pilots.
Chris: Half Day's Night. Necropolis. Some CJ Cherryh. Ian McDonald, River of Gods, Brazil, Hearts Hands Voices. Working class characters from non-western backgrounds; why are they so often non western, what's going on there? India, Brazil, North Africa. Fantastic books, though.
Eric (something) 1632 Ring of Fire series. Written collectively. When stories are approved they become canon. There was one barmaid in oxford story.
Alan Steel, space roustabouts.
SUMMARY by each panelist
Eleanor: This panel worked. Every other panel about class I've been on went down like the Titanic. This one worked and I didn't have to apologize for having been on it.
Fred: Last year you busted me for looking at the schedule to see what else was happening.
Diana: This panel has made me think about writing and literature in a different way. And about applying this to video games.
Eleanor: What is the working class video game?
Chris: Interesting recs. I'd like to read something by Melissa Scott.
Zine - Entry Level. lots on class!
Mike - quote about no power under the sun... the union makes us strong.
Fred: Writers! Write about working people! Let's all support publishing houses who publish that work! If you have a blog, write about it!
http://maryread.livejournal.com/258
...
(i came in in the middle)
Eleanor A. Arnason, Diana Sherman, Fred Shepartz, Chris Hill, Michael J. Lowrey.
Chris Hill: we imagine these futures with no workign class but the working class isn't going to disappear!
Michael L. Lowrey: so you have a sloosh pipe that takes away the garbage, so what, you are still going to need a person to build and maintain that sloosh pipe. (and where does the garbage go to?) and as i told my daughter from very early on in her life, there is no such place as "Away". what happens to the garbae when you throw it "away"? if you dont' think about the economic there is a oment where you freeze up
aud: spock is giving kirk a copy of tale of two cities for his birthday. a couple of guys vaccuuming in the background. and i wondered, why janitors, and no one else from teh working class int he whole universe?
chris hill: a lot of science fiction is written from the top down and not the bottom up. i'm being grossly unfair, but it starts off with a big idea and then works down to a level of detail they're comfortable with. how does this society actually function, and then the big ideas about the society?
Fred: who couldn't use the holodeck? a society where you don't have to answer certain questions
aud: service class. could you address the issues of the service industry and service class? cyberpunk. people go into diners. they go into shops where they buy cheap clothes and junk. where does it come from, who sells that stuff, we see them, but it's not thought through. is there a difference, working class, service class?
fred: people who honor the worknig class, they want to honor blue collar, they don't think of my mom the waitress, or the hotel working class.
Fred: they show bartender, a service worker, he has a nice scene but he's not a full character. guy in clone wars int he movie not the cartoon, obi wan goes looking for information, guy who runs the diner.
Andrea Hairston: it's so gendered because i would consider a waitress working class. they are all women's jobs they are all definitely working class! plumber, machine shop, they make way more money than a hotel service worker. this is a very gendered view you're describing
Fred: pink collar... seiu, renassance of organizgin, the exploitation is so high. woman in 2nd row you ahve the best tshirt, "my marxist feminst dialectic brings all the boys to the yard"
(note i have seen 2 other people at wiscon today, wearing that same tshirt! )
Eleanor: in the working class you tend not to do things on your own. heroes of unions. (Madewan, john sales) this defies the idea of the solitary hero, it is collective action we're looking at. if you're going to write that kind of story you may move away from the basic ways that science fiction has been written. if you're thinkng about the future, it might be a good idea to think about how the future is organized socially. in thinking about star wars, if robots are able to do the jobs that working class people do now, they can do all the jobs in the story so why have only human heroic protagonists? think about who else might be there.
Diana: get back to that plumber, what it's like, what is different in that world. changes, richness throughout every class, it will create a more foreign feeling place from the ground up as opposed to somewhere that just has something grafted on to feel freaky and different.
Eleanor: plumbing is all about gravity. you use gravity to get stufff up and down through the system. so every time you move into an evnivonment with diferent gravity or no gravity. i never thought about it, how do you move water and soil products in a space station ? spinning, different apparent g in different parts of the station
chris : you would probably have to have a phsyical pumping system, woudnt you.
Eleanor: onec you have a gazillion pumps you have the maintenance of a gazillion pumps
Fred: i liked in Enterprise that they showed them taking showers (audience laughter) I was like Oh! they have showers ! the gravity goes out, the water goes out.
kaya: kevin j. anderson 7th son, the working class, Roamers. clannish. they appointa a Speaker.
chris: "clannish" puts my teeth on edge. middle class writers tend to use that language to describe working class... othering, distancing there. an entire race that's working class. that seems ... odd. How did that get established? how would that happen?
katya: they're all sort of castoff. theyr'e from earth and they're all working class.
Fred; It's a caste.
Katya: yeah, kind of .
Fred: do they feel like real characters, 3 dimensional, positive?
Katya: Oh yeah. the rest of society looks down on them but they are very positively shown
Michael: use by tolkien , fantasy race as a short hand for cultural differences and essences. i was thinking of ()Dixon's future history with the exotic world and the militray world, that hhumanity woudl shift and separate itself into entire planets that are monolitithic, as if there are metaphysical reasons this woudl occur. The Dorsai...
what happens if you're on a military world but you have the soul of an accountant?
Aud: two separate things... (I missed them)
Fred: I'd see them as inter-related. It reflecting inability to see workign people.
Aud: different solutions for those problems? or would addressing one, you address both.
Michael: if you don't have the idea that you have a working class, you're not likely to have a character who is in it.
Fred: more and better portrayals fo women and people of color?
eleanor: if you're a writer, more consciously thinking about bilding a world fromt he bottom up. howdoes your world actually work? for fans, i think cons can be very usefl. once you start to process talkng about thse issues, maybe people will start thinking about them more and it will affect what people write? and wheer people back authors into corners and say why do you only have a prince and no one else? It's important that authors think that, well, i'm rubbing my hands nervously because i haven't done a good job of it, is the world a stage set? or is something going on behind it? if you've ever been back stage in a theater there's an incredible amount going on out of sight. you have far richer story, as diana pointed out, if you make that back stage visible.
chris: If you are going to have working class characters, get it right! don't give peopel free passes! serious problems with Gregory Benford's Timescape. Oh, it's the best picture of how scientists realy work, but i will tel you one thing, ther are a number of english working class characters in that book and every single one of them is either stupid, or crooked. i almost threw the book across the room. but he gets a free pass on it!
Micheale: if you write fantasy, standard opening scene, Gorgax walks into a tavern and orders a big tangkard of ale from the serviing wench. i challenge you to follow her behind the bar and write the story about that serving wench.
Diana: and how many of those stories woudl be comedic?
*brief silence from everyone*
Aud: romance , personal life, then like, giant mutant moths and stuff. i kept thinking, couldn't they just go back to having dinner?
Chris hill: i have been frowned on by pointing out that most of the second half of perdido street station is (missed it..... but everyone cracked up)
Aud:what about this, robot maintenance worker and what he does. the cmopany has bought out the robot maintenance contract fo the station and the robots and the workers don't know what wil happen do them.
diana: you can have a story that is about an entire empire, and you can have a story about one space station, but you have to keep the stakes high so that everything matters, it's a different scale.
Eleanor: kornbluth story about a puerto rican kid who washes dishes and then walkes into a university and writes all these equations on the board. written in the 50s. and everyone judges him... 50s, cold war, military... super bomb... or something. And the guy is made a prisoner, and he gets unhappy, and has accident
aud: he forgets everything
Evelyn: He gets a girlfriend, and forgets everything
aud: AARRRRRGH!!!!
Evelyn: that's what ahppens!
Eleanor: and really, he would just rather be a dishwasher and not a prisoner. Knight, Kornbluth, willian tenor, where you get ordinary people, something extraordinary happens. somewhere along the way we lost that particular kind of story and we lost the people in that story.
Chris: when something does focus on workign class characters, a tendency to tell not their story but to use them to reflect on someone els'es story, babylon 5, harlan ellison who should know better, from point of view of two maintenance workers on the space ship, use them to tell the audience how wonderful the main characters are. they are purely there to reflect on the main characters, they have no life of their own
aud: i think that was jms not ellison
aud: using working class chars to tell stories that are not their own. Bradbury short story, mexico, farmer seeing all these cars full of tourists fleeing, end of world, atomic bomb, to him the world ending doens't make sense, their world is ending but not his. what do you mean "the world". was that a workign class view of "the world" and wwIII
chris: predicates the idea that workgin clas people are a bit dumb
Fred: moving on. why important that working class people be portrayed in sf?
eleanor: same as women and people of color being represented, partly, because they're there. F&SF should be true to some kinds of reality. Creating a fictio where the reader cannot ultimately see thesmelves in the characters is a disservice.generatsion of womena nd people of color grew up with out those role modes, what do you do if yo're not the genius scientist in the story, not the superhero.. Spiderman, part of the message is that you're not going to be able to solve problems if you haven't been bit by a radioactive spider, better to give the message that everyone can have an effect on the world.
Chris; i'm sure i'm not the only person in the room who has been incensed by how someone you know treats a waiter or cleaning staff and if you dn't see people treated as human in books, you're not going to treat them as human in real life. humanizing for other people, not just aspirational or models for working class.
Mike: thinking out the role for working class makes it a more rational and sociologicially sensible world. the distribution of people, better SF, if you've thought out the economics of a planet.
Mike: the greying of fandom, the working class used to read more, stories in Saturday Evening Post, now they watch tv instead
(I wonder if this is actually true, and i also don't believe at all in 'the greying of fandom'...)
Fred: YA fic is really hot... all the little girls hovering around the vampire shelves.
Andrea: There's a great video "Class Dismissed", about TV portrayals of working class people as buffoons, tragic, quaint, invisible or you wish they were.
Mike: Unions. On tv they are either corrupt or buffoons.
Chris: East Enders. A long running soap opera set in London's East End, last 25 years. It is a miserable piece of TV. (They get and do everything wrong)
Fred: Writers who do it well? Good ones, or bad ones?
Eleanor: Ignoring the bad.
Good:
* Ann Harris
* Melissa Scott - Dreaming Metal and the other one. Characters in high tech world, spaceship operators. Get into the underground city on a world. The relatives are all in the Union. They go through the maintenance tunnels.
* Rebecca Ore. Slow Funeral. Becoming Alien. Gaia's Toys.
* Maureen McHugh.
* Fred's vampire cabbie books
* Some CJ Cherryh.
* (another author) blue collar Ohio
* Wall-E
Diana: Nina Kiriki HOffman, sometimes. not princes or epic types. The Incredibles.
(I disagree about the Incredibles, I thought they were extremely middle class, am I wrong?)
Fred: William Gibson's Virtual Light. doing the research into bike couriers in San Francisco. How hard is that... go meet people and talk with them about their lives... It's called doing the research.
BSG. the labor conflict. Problems of one great leader, but still they showed the grunts and the tension between mechanics vs. pilots.
Chris: Half Day's Night. Necropolis. Some CJ Cherryh. Ian McDonald, River of Gods, Brazil, Hearts Hands Voices. Working class characters from non-western backgrounds; why are they so often non western, what's going on there? India, Brazil, North Africa. Fantastic books, though.
Eric (something) 1632 Ring of Fire series. Written collectively. When stories are approved they become canon. There was one barmaid in oxford story.
Alan Steel, space roustabouts.
SUMMARY by each panelist
Eleanor: This panel worked. Every other panel about class I've been on went down like the Titanic. This one worked and I didn't have to apologize for having been on it.
Fred: Last year you busted me for looking at the schedule to see what else was happening.
Diana: This panel has made me think about writing and literature in a different way. And about applying this to video games.
Eleanor: What is the working class video game?
Chris: Interesting recs. I'd like to read something by Melissa Scott.
Zine - Entry Level. lots on class!
Mike - quote about no power under the sun... the union makes us strong.
Fred: Writers! Write about working people! Let's all support publishing houses who publish that work! If you have a blog, write about it!
![[identity profile]](http://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Also, I think it's John Sayles' Matewan [checks IMdB], yep, 1984. Currently OOP on DVD, it seems, so available only used.
()Dixon
Gordon Dickson?
most of the second half of perdido street station is
...a Doctor Who episode
Eric (something) 1632 Ring of Fire series. Written collectively. When stories are approved they become canon. There was one barmaid in oxford story.
Eric Flint. Most of the people from the future are working-class union folk from West Virginia, and a lot of the cast, especially in the short stories are either working class from 1990, or working class from 1630. (No, I don't love SFF that talks about the people at the bottom...)
"a big over-grand Dr. Who episode."