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On Twitter, Kate Elliott said, "I grew up in farm country. 'Realism' in epic fantasy should have way more mentions of agriculture and food supply than rape."
I agree.
It started me thinking about agriculture-related jobs, too. When I was going off to college, I worked summers to earn money for tuition to the one school I could afford of the three that accepted me. For four summers, I worked twelve and a half hours a day, seven days a week, at the canning factory just outside the farm town of under two thousand people where I grew up. It was assembly line work, mostly. I wasn't in the front part of the factory where the beans were received and graded and sorted and cooked and put into cans. Nor was I out by the cookers, where despite the roofless middle section of the factory that enclosed them, it got so hot that a person could faint on a summer day. My jobs were in the warehouse, folding for the person running a boxer (machine that put 24 cans at a time into a cardboard box and glued it shut), picking shiners on the line (pulling cans out that hadn't gotten labelled, or had gotten mislabeled*, before they reached the boxer), or running a stacker. A stacker was a big steel plate in a sort of crow's nest way up high; boxes chugged up to it on lines, and you stood up there next to the plate, grabbed them off the line, and arranged them in the right pattern to be the next layer on the pallet just below the plate. Then you pulled the lever and the plate slid away from you, dropping the boxes the scant half-inch onto the layer beneath -- well, if you had done your job right and moved the pallet on the lift to exactly where it ought to be. Or I ran a Whallen hydraulic palletizer and did brightstacking.
Brightstacking is where there's too much production to label and ship it all at once, and you need to save some for winter because year-round employees have to work after we seasonals were gone. (Yes, the factory is where I learned what little Spanish I have. That's another story. Tip of the hat to Homero and Juan-the-dancer and the rest of the bunch.) So the hot cans came out of the cookers in crates, shining and beaded with boiling water, and most of the crates went over to the six or so labeling and boxing lines, but some went to the two lines serving the big Whallens. They looked like badly done mecha water-fishing birds, the way they hovered over the vibrating table which shook the cans marching onto it into a honeycomb pattern. When there were enough cans to fill up an entire layer on a pallet, the last can in the row hit a little switch and the feeder line stopped delivering cans and the shaker table stopped shaking, and the palletizer's big square electromagnet came down on top of the cans and pressed them into the table until the pressure told the machine "Yup, we got a load of cans!" Then it would click, and its big square head would rise up again with the load of cans hanging from it, arranged perfectly, and when it was at the top of its rise, it would pivot, and turn itself until it was positioned over the pallet. Then it would start lowering itself with the load of cans, stopping only when the cans were on the pallet and it had pushed hard enough that the pressure sensors assured it the move was complete. Then it clicked the magnet off, releasing the cans, and rise up and pivot back to wait for the next layer. If you were running the machine, it was your job to put a big square of heavy cardstock down on the layer, to get ready for the last one.
(Those heavy huge squares of cardstock made exceptional paper airplanes. The biggest downside to having a quarter-mile of uninterrupted corridor in a series of warehouses is that a paper airplane like that can fly a very long way, and it doesn't care that your boss just came around the corner and that its continuation of glorious flight is going to mean a bunch of trouble for you for goofing around. Ahem.)
I'll tell you where this all fits in with my highly negative reaction to the movie "The Phantom of the Paradise" sometime later, OK?
Anyhow, yeah, I worked four summers, seven days a week, twelve and a half hours a day, earning money for tuition. The handy thing about working that much, we used to joke, is that there wasn't really time to spend anything, and you were too tired to go out anyhow. On the other hand, if you're working night shift and there are no beans that night because it was raining in Illinois and they couldn't pick that day, you have a night off and no real need for sleep. But mostly I saved every bit, and went to the University of Minnesota, which in the seventies had tuition reciprocity with Wisconsin, and that made it the school I was going to go to, because I could afford (with a couple thousand dollars my grandmother left me for education, and some money from my parents, from Mom's job at the library and Dad's job at the plastics factory) to pay the $2600 tuition per semester (it went all the way up to $5000 my final year).
The other two schools weren't possible, though it would have been interesting. One was Michigan State, which had an excellent math program and really interested me, but it was so much more money. The third was Bryn Mawr, and there was just no way on God's green earth that was going to happen, financially. Though Sharyn November and I have joked that, had I gone, she and I would have been roommates, and we might have played goofy pranks on Ellen Kushner. Now there's an alternate universe for you!
Anyhow, yeah. Realism. Why doesn't it mean more people growing the food, processing and packing it, transporting it? You want drama? Talk to my co-workers about why they're missing some bits here and there. I only got caught in a machine once, and I got off lucky, but my thumb joint is still a little weird. (I was running the machine two years underage, so I had to falsify the accident report and say I had been picking shiners.) At least it wasn't my whole arm, like the guy on day shift. Pretty spectacular bruising there and a little laceration. Pressure-sensitive release on that big electromagnet, remember?
Anyhow, yeah. Realism. I do not think that word means the same thing to some writers that it does to me. I'm really glad Kate Elliott said what she did, and I have to think about this some more.
I agree.
It started me thinking about agriculture-related jobs, too. When I was going off to college, I worked summers to earn money for tuition to the one school I could afford of the three that accepted me. For four summers, I worked twelve and a half hours a day, seven days a week, at the canning factory just outside the farm town of under two thousand people where I grew up. It was assembly line work, mostly. I wasn't in the front part of the factory where the beans were received and graded and sorted and cooked and put into cans. Nor was I out by the cookers, where despite the roofless middle section of the factory that enclosed them, it got so hot that a person could faint on a summer day. My jobs were in the warehouse, folding for the person running a boxer (machine that put 24 cans at a time into a cardboard box and glued it shut), picking shiners on the line (pulling cans out that hadn't gotten labelled, or had gotten mislabeled*, before they reached the boxer), or running a stacker. A stacker was a big steel plate in a sort of crow's nest way up high; boxes chugged up to it on lines, and you stood up there next to the plate, grabbed them off the line, and arranged them in the right pattern to be the next layer on the pallet just below the plate. Then you pulled the lever and the plate slid away from you, dropping the boxes the scant half-inch onto the layer beneath -- well, if you had done your job right and moved the pallet on the lift to exactly where it ought to be. Or I ran a Whallen hydraulic palletizer and did brightstacking.
Brightstacking is where there's too much production to label and ship it all at once, and you need to save some for winter because year-round employees have to work after we seasonals were gone. (Yes, the factory is where I learned what little Spanish I have. That's another story. Tip of the hat to Homero and Juan-the-dancer and the rest of the bunch.) So the hot cans came out of the cookers in crates, shining and beaded with boiling water, and most of the crates went over to the six or so labeling and boxing lines, but some went to the two lines serving the big Whallens. They looked like badly done mecha water-fishing birds, the way they hovered over the vibrating table which shook the cans marching onto it into a honeycomb pattern. When there were enough cans to fill up an entire layer on a pallet, the last can in the row hit a little switch and the feeder line stopped delivering cans and the shaker table stopped shaking, and the palletizer's big square electromagnet came down on top of the cans and pressed them into the table until the pressure told the machine "Yup, we got a load of cans!" Then it would click, and its big square head would rise up again with the load of cans hanging from it, arranged perfectly, and when it was at the top of its rise, it would pivot, and turn itself until it was positioned over the pallet. Then it would start lowering itself with the load of cans, stopping only when the cans were on the pallet and it had pushed hard enough that the pressure sensors assured it the move was complete. Then it clicked the magnet off, releasing the cans, and rise up and pivot back to wait for the next layer. If you were running the machine, it was your job to put a big square of heavy cardstock down on the layer, to get ready for the last one.
(Those heavy huge squares of cardstock made exceptional paper airplanes. The biggest downside to having a quarter-mile of uninterrupted corridor in a series of warehouses is that a paper airplane like that can fly a very long way, and it doesn't care that your boss just came around the corner and that its continuation of glorious flight is going to mean a bunch of trouble for you for goofing around. Ahem.)
I'll tell you where this all fits in with my highly negative reaction to the movie "The Phantom of the Paradise" sometime later, OK?
Anyhow, yeah, I worked four summers, seven days a week, twelve and a half hours a day, earning money for tuition. The handy thing about working that much, we used to joke, is that there wasn't really time to spend anything, and you were too tired to go out anyhow. On the other hand, if you're working night shift and there are no beans that night because it was raining in Illinois and they couldn't pick that day, you have a night off and no real need for sleep. But mostly I saved every bit, and went to the University of Minnesota, which in the seventies had tuition reciprocity with Wisconsin, and that made it the school I was going to go to, because I could afford (with a couple thousand dollars my grandmother left me for education, and some money from my parents, from Mom's job at the library and Dad's job at the plastics factory) to pay the $2600 tuition per semester (it went all the way up to $5000 my final year).
The other two schools weren't possible, though it would have been interesting. One was Michigan State, which had an excellent math program and really interested me, but it was so much more money. The third was Bryn Mawr, and there was just no way on God's green earth that was going to happen, financially. Though Sharyn November and I have joked that, had I gone, she and I would have been roommates, and we might have played goofy pranks on Ellen Kushner. Now there's an alternate universe for you!
Anyhow, yeah. Realism. Why doesn't it mean more people growing the food, processing and packing it, transporting it? You want drama? Talk to my co-workers about why they're missing some bits here and there. I only got caught in a machine once, and I got off lucky, but my thumb joint is still a little weird. (I was running the machine two years underage, so I had to falsify the accident report and say I had been picking shiners.) At least it wasn't my whole arm, like the guy on day shift. Pretty spectacular bruising there and a little laceration. Pressure-sensitive release on that big electromagnet, remember?
Anyhow, yeah. Realism. I do not think that word means the same thing to some writers that it does to me. I'm really glad Kate Elliott said what she did, and I have to think about this some more.
