When I was in Madison (Wisconsin) during Memorial Day weekend for WisCon (a long-running feminist science fiction and fantasy conference), I was approached after a panel by a man – Mark Soderstrom – who wanted to talk to me about labor in SFF. Specifically, he wanted to mention a short story of mine that I was talking about on the panel that used the Lattimer Massacre as a backdrop, and to note that while SFF seems perfectly content to deal with robots and elves, it has a history of shying away from any sort of rich or meaningful examination of what literatures of the fantastic can teach us about labor, capital, and social change.

He passed along a copy of the paper he was presenting, which I really enjoyed (I actually need to email him and say so, damn – if he sees this before I get to that: hi, Mark!). I’m not as well-versed in the canon as he is, but while he singled out a number of works of fiction that do deal with labor in some direct manner, he also points out that an additional number of them – at least the more “Golden Age”-type ones, contemporary with the Cold War – adopt a somewhat disparaging  approach (Heinlein, to name one, naturally gets seriously libertarian about it and does not think much of those dirty socialists). Even when labor is dealt with differently, there still isn’t often a whole lot of depth. Older science fiction is full of miners on asteroids and on the moon, but there’s no real depiction of abusive working conditions, or exploitation on the level of which we see in the historical and contemporary extraction of resources here on Earth.

SFF has a poor history in general when it comes to telling the stories of marginalized people, though more recently there have been attempts to remedy this. So it stands to reason that the people who tend to make labor their business – at least from the bottom up – are excluded and erased. Obviously it would be great to see more of those stories being told, and I think it’s awesome that that’s starting to happen.

But it’s not just about neglecting stories that cry out to be told, at least not for me. It’s also that it represents a huge missed opportunity to do some theorizing in fiction, and in ways that go beyond “labor” as it’s generally imagined.

Anyone who knows anything at all about historical processes of social change is going to recognize the significance of labor – of its definition, of the meanings constructed around it, of how and where it’s done and who’s doing it, of the exchanges and productions of social power that take place through and because of it. You can’t understand society without understanding labor. Science fiction and fantasy – really, especially science fiction – fancies itself an explicitly sociological genre. It’s a place where you can perform wildly speculative thought experiments, tweak some settings and try to imagine what the results might be. But – in not insignificant part because of who’s been allowed to be the most prominent writers for a long time – it’s a genre with some major gaps in what it covers. There are holes in its imagination.

Back during the Cold War – and after – there’s a deficit in terms of explorations of the meaning of labor. Now, as what we understand by labor is undergoing some serious shifts, it would be great if we didn’t experience a deficit again.

We need speculative literature that deals with menial labor, skilled labor, workers of all kinds, the people who actually make the marvelous objects that fill fantastical worlds (in Star Trek, does anyone on Earth who doesn’t run an eatery or work for Starfleet actually have a job at all?). But we’re now seeing forms of labor that are embedded into our daily navigation of social media, where, just as an example – as Whitney Erin Boesel has pointed out – our use of emoticons on Facebook now functions as free labor in the sense of data production:

This [emoticon] status update feature isn’t really about being more visually expressive and, while determined users can still use the feature creatively, it doesn’t afford much opportunity for creative self-expression. Instead, Facebook emoticon status updates are about incentivizing you to provide more information and to provoke more interaction. They’re about sanitizing and domesticating your bad mood, your inescapable ennui, and your existential depression into something that can be yoked to the gears of a new Social advertising machine.

This would have been science fiction three decades ago. Like most stuff we have now.

And it’s not just about class, because it’s never just about class. Mainstream (white straight cisdudely) SFF has historically also been pretty bad at dealing with race and gender, but labor and the workings of human capital have always been profoundly racialized and gendered. The role technology is playing in the development of these processes has been talked about pretty continuously on this blog, just yesterday by Robin James. It’s not that no one is aware of this, and it’s not that no one understands it. But the genre in which I write, it seems to me that it’s still pretty radically underexamined.

I know there are places in SFF where this stuff is being talked about, and I think my generation of neopros is doing a lot to change the landscape, but I would love to see more. We have this idea that the tiny, mundane details of someone’s life aren’t worth writing about, but it’s the changes in the tiny, mundane details that often carry the most long-term weight. Any genre that wants to lay claim to being sociological at all is going to need to address work and what work means. The fact that we now have the concept of “data serfs” matters in a literary sense. If the value we’re producing is the ease in which we can be advertised to – among other things – I want to see speculating about it that goes beyond essays and papers. I want to see stories.

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