Using the Programme Guide of the World
Science Fiction Convention in Helsinki Finland in August 2017 (to which I will
be unable to go (until I retire from education)), I will jump off, jump on,
rail against, and shamelessly agree with the BRIEF DESCRIPTION given in the pdf
copy of the Programme Guide. I wrote this some time ago (August 2017), yet it
seems even more relevant today. I also added a few new thoughts at the end.
Fantasies of Free
Movement: A number of recent works have explicitly linked the trope of
transportation in SF to issues of migration and home, ranging from the strange
topologies of Dave Hutchinson's "Fractured Europe" series, to the
"death of the majority" in Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota, or the more
contemporary parable about seeking refuge found in Mohsin Hamid's Exit West.
What do such works do to help us explore the opportunities and challenges of a
free-movement world? In a time of (seemingly) closing borders, where in
fantastika can we find grounds for hope? And what questions remain
under-explored?
Niall Harrison –
moderator and member of the WorldCon 2o17 team
Nicholas Whyte –
science fiction fan
Rosanne Rabinowitz
– contributed to anthologies: Jews vs
Aliens, Horror Uncut: Tales of Social Insecurity and Economic Unease, Something
Remains and Murder Ballads. Her
novella “Helen's Story” was shortlisted for the 2013 Shirley Jackson Award.
Teresa Romero – no
information on her and she only participates in this event
John-Henri
Holmberg – Swedish author, critic, publisher and translator, and a well-known
science fiction fan
This is truly a
fantasy that only the wealthy might even be able to imagine…
I can’t respond to
Dave Hutchinson’s series, but having read Ada Palmer’s first book, I am of the
belief that the kind of movement she postulates will ONLY be possible for the
mega-wealthy.
In fact, it may be
embarrassing how little of the world’s population even have an INKLING of what
such a world would look like. According to the two articles below, one seventh
of the world’s population has to walk some six kilometers to get drinkable
water. Hilary Clinton made it a cause de
célébrité. Based on a wild guess, Christine Negroni of AIR&SPACE
magazine says that perhaps six percent of the world’s population has flown at
all…
That means that
94% of the Earth’s population would have little to no idea what such a concept as
“freedom of movement” is (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_movement)
as a purely physical concept.
Politically out of
the 197 regimes on this planet, one in four are considered “not free”. Of the
other three fourths; one third are only partly free. In 2016, the “free world”
was made up of less than half the countries on Earth…
While science
fiction writers have for decades attempted to both entertain and cast a light
into the future and explored possible futures, I am increasingly bothered that
those futures seem to be more for the wealthy and less for the poor. For some
reason “the poor” seem to have vanished miraculously – from Gene Roddenberry’s
wildly optimistic United Federation of Planets of which Deanna Troi says, “…Poverty
was eliminated on Earth, a long time ago. And a lot of other things disappeared
with it - hopelessness, despair, cruelty...
And to which
Samuel Clemens replies, “Young lady, I come from a time when men achieve power
and wealth by standing on the backs of the poor, where prejudice and
intolerance are commonplace and power is an end unto itself. And you're telling
me that isn't how it is anymore?”
To virtually every
other story I’ve read recently, though Kameron Hurley created a new definition
of “poverty” in her THE STARS ARE LEGION the author doesn’t talk about poverty,
nor do they deal with the powerless. In 2013, Charlie Jane Anders sparked a
discussion about how science fiction writers deal with poverty (read the
original article and the comments here: http://io9.gizmodo.com/where-is-the-science-fiction-about-ending-poverty-472693273)
I’ve got a few books to check out because of the Anders article, but I can just
note that her debut novel isn’t about poverty but about teen love, magic, and
technology. Nothing wrong with that, but I simply note that here for effect.
So…my rant is
over. The reason I feel strongly about this is that “some” people in the
comment section of Anders’ article claimed that there is no poverty anymore and
that it’s just a matter of distribution. I would direct them to the nearest
Calcutta slum; or possibly the Chicago projects; or even Mary’s Place in
downtown Minneapolis to have a little chit chat with someone who lives on the
streets. I know students who live in a family car. I personally know two boys
who were born in the back of a van in which the family lived because there was
no way for them to afford the trip to the hospital or to live anywhere else (may
I also point out that they were born 21 years ago in 1997 during the reign of
the Democratic Party…which prides itself on taking care of the poor…which, in
this case, it didn’t.). When attempting to interview for a job (I might point
out that this incident occurred in the Golden Age of Barack Obama), they were
told “No.”
The reason given
was that they were “urban hillbillies”…
Another problem is
that if you present your main character as one who has no power; who is
disenfranchised; who is marginalized…then the story can’t go anywhere because
without power – or even a tool with which to leverage power – nothing will
happen in a story. Even when a novel begins with a slave or the poor, it
usually turns out that they were some sort of royalty and actually DO have
power (Twain’s “The Prince and the Pauper”; Heinlein’s CITIZEN OF THE GALAXY;
even Ada Palmer’s TOO LIKE THE LIGHTNING and Gordon R. Dickson’s WAY OF THE
PILGRIM gives a slave a fulcrum with which to change his world.) [I find it ironic that someone living in poverty would have been unable to add anything to the conversation on poverty...as they would not have been able to attend WorldCon...]
So, how DO we
empower the impoverished?
Resources: http://www.cnn.com/2011/HEALTH/04/29/drinking.water/index.html,
http://www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/how-much-worlds-population-has-flown-airplane-180957719/,
http://www.unhcr.org/en-us/figures-at-a-glance.html,
https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/freedom-world-2017
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