It's the Economy, Stupid

Some of the more interesting conversations I end up having occur during our hellaciously long commute across the entire city of Cleveland in the evenings. I've usually been writing all day, and thus I, the fantasist, and my partner, the die-hard SF fan, get to squabbling about genre things fairly frequently. Thus was the case a few days ago, with "metal," and with what Fantasy Is All About.All this sort of feeds into the things I've been talking about over the last few days, as writing for someone else's blog means never having to say "I'll get around to posting about that eventually."The issue is class. Is fantasy a classist genre by definition? It concerns, more often than not, kings and princesses and the accouterments of wealth--rings and jewels and swords and what not. While dark fantasy and urban fantasy and a few other subgenres sometimes delve into the realities of the lower and middle classes, the core of the genre, the big, epic bestsellers, still revolve around kingmaking and the concerns of those wielding power or seeking it.The issue is gaze. When I was talking about steampunk, I mentioned that the TOTAL AWESOMENESSOMG of the Victorian era depends on whether you owned the factory or worked in it. But there are precious few novels that feature a POV character who lives as most people did during the 19th century and through most of human history--in desperately poor circumstances, where power didn't matter so much as eating. The gaze, if it falls on the underclasses at all, is so often, so painfully upper class and white, in Victoriana and the medieval milieux--despite the rich stories to be mined from the experiences of people who do not wear silk.Old news, right? I mean, fantasy is like that, everyone knows that. (I'd argue that SF is equally obsessed with technocracy, but that's beside the point.) Your occasional de Lint doesn't change high fantasy--and why should it? As a genre it started with Tolkien and Lord Dunsany, white guys with plenty of pudding in their pantry, those are our roots.Except this: I am not a lady. I will never have particular power over anything. My stomach still turns at the sight of powdered milk in the store because there was a time when I was a kid that that was all we could afford. I've slept in the cold because I had nowhere else to go. So why should I expend my writing and my passion to communicate the experience of the upper classes?Why should you?Now, I don't want, in any of these posts, to seem as though I'm laying down any kind of rules for content. I just like to think about my assumptions. When writing The Orphan's Tales I often tried to write fairy tales--typically concerned with royalty--from the perspective of those outside the apparatus of power. I'm not sure I did enough, but when I think about fantasy as a genre, with my die-hard SF darling at my side, I wonder what it is that makes it contemptible in the eyes of realists and often science fiction writers as well.And the class issue makes me think it is partly because realists cannot see us as honest. (SF authors cannot see us as useful, concerned as they are with the Future of Man.) High fantasy, and like it or not those of us who do not write it still must deal with it as the great behemoth of our genre, does not appear from the outside to have anything to do with the author's personal experience. It has everything to do with the personal experience of men like Dunsany and Tolkien, who wrote books that paralled their own lives, metamorphosed them into myth. And it looks, from an outsider's perspective, as though we have become anemic and ashamed of our actual lives in deference to theirs.There is a peculiar alchemy that forces personal experience through the lens of fantasy and changes it into a book. I confess I put a great deal of value on personal experience, a holdover from my days as a realist, and though obviously we ought to be making up fabulous stories of impossible things, the emotional root comes from our selves and our lives. The gaze should be our own, not the ghost-gaze of British men long gone and past concern.Office workers need fairy tales, too. And teenage runaways, and factory workers, and bloggers, and authors. Everyone needs fairy tales, to be told their lives and experiences Matter in that mythic, universal way. Not just boys who will grow up to be kings.