A few years back, a friend and I wrote an article about how unions were represented in contemporary sci-fi. It was an interesting experience in multi-disciplinary research and, for me, a pleasant diversion from the gloomier topic of workplace injury. Over the intervening time, another friend (Olav Rokne) has extended this analysis. He ran an interesting panel with some of the authors whose stories we included in our study.
Last month, Rokne published a fascinating blog post about how sci-fi turned away from early concerns about working conditions and the plight of workers and, since the 1940s, come to accept “broadly accept hegemonic ideas that centre the aims of capital and capitalism. The depiction of workers was replaced with stories that centred industrialists, non-working-class inventors, and the military.”
Rokne then examines some of the historical mechanics by which this change came about, including editorial preferences and the emergence of agency-less robots as a metaphor for the working class. Robot/workers as mindless slaves complements the tendency of sci-fi writers to frame collectives (as a proxy for unions) as monstrous antagonists (e.g., Frankenstein, Cylons, Borg).
-- Bob Barnetson, Worker 889398
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