“Community! Jesus, you guys are kind to yourselves. Community.”
This was one of my favorite moments in Three Days of the Condor. It’s a moment where Joe Turner (Robert Redford, in one of his best performances), a lowly CIA researcher, finally gets to ask station chief Higgins (Cliff Robertson) who could hire the man that eliminated his section, and has been hunting him ever since.
Higgins explains it has to be someone in ‘the community.’ “The intelligence community.”
Once you’ve seen Three Days of the Condor, go watch or read The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, you can and tell me how much of a “community” you see there. I’m reminded of those films when I hear about fandoms and communities these days. I’m also reminded of Nick Mamatas’ quote from a few weeks back: “Remember that a community is a machine for excluding people from itself.”
The idea of community – a place where folks with like-minded interests and aspirations can find comradery, company, and even friendship or love – is an interesting one when dealing with science fiction and fantasy (or the fannish community).
We think of communities much like we think of small-town America: Places where folks can live and grow. Places that warm the heart, and help create Hallmark Channel films. They aren’t supposed to be insular or intolerant or oligarchical but instead represent our ideal selves. They are supposed to be the Norman Rockwell vision of who we are as a people, species, and country.
But just as one person’s Golden Age is another person’s nightmare years, a warm community for some can be as insular as the Skull & Bones for others. Especially if the community really doesn’t want to deal with those young folks with their fancy ideas about everything. Humans are political animals. We are, as Octavia Butler put it, hierarchical and herd based, which can lead to self-destructive and counter-intuitive behavior.
It can also lead to interesting views of what a community should be like, what a community actually is, and the narratives we hold for those communities. Go through your memory and think about how most communities are portrayed in SF or Fantasy novels. Think about what it takes to join the community, or guild, or seitch, or order. Usually it’s trials and suspicion and ritual. You have to prove yourself worthy of joining this community – because the community is usually equated with an elite group. It’s a reflection of how the SFF ‘community’ thinks of itself – and also what it feels is necessary to create conflict and tension in a story. “I mean, where’s the tension if someone’s just welcomed and given a tour?”
The other community narrative is the “Elders versus youth” or “Change versus status quo” story. It’s another simple narrative, with SFF often casting its lot in with the daring young man (usually a man) looking to overthrow the system. But it often leaves out what happens after the overthrow, when the young man becomes the system itself – a generation later, they’re the ones telling some new kid off. It reminds me of a study I heard on a podcast where they tracked the behaviors of folks who became wealthy by climbing the ladder.
Once they have success, what do they do? Mentor others and show them how to reach the same heights? No. They break the rungs of the ladder behind them. They start displaying, and supporting, the worst kind of behaviors from the community. Quoth Edison Carter/Max Headroom “Converts are the worst kind of bigots.”
Is there any other kind of narrative? Can we change community so the idea of actually welcoming folks, and making it easier for them to join, instead of viewing them with suspicion? Or are we trapped, forever stuck in this pattern because it’s easier – and frankly more popular with those in charge – to keep the community ‘tight knit’ and unwelcoming to others?
Well, there is. If anyone is leading the charge these days, it’s Becky Chambers. Her most recent book, Record of a Spaceborn Few, deals with questions about community most directly, but all her other books talk about it in one way or another. And they tell a specific truth:
It takes effort to make a community welcoming to folks outside the community. To turn the machine around, you need to actually get into the works and change the gears. You need to get dirty. You need to challenge your assumptions. And you need to make a genuine effort to welcome others, keep at it, and check your blind spots.
Is it worth the effort? Damn right. I attended a famous ‘old codger’ con in my neighborhood. They invited a very diverse group to speak at the panels to talk about everything from Afrofuturism to myths about ‘winning your one true love.’ And every one of those panels featuring new folks sparked and shined. There was life and excitement and interest and people discovering exactly how much they had in common.
Sounds like a community to me…
Biomechanoid Blues 