By Neil Hogan
Research Background
The precursor 2 artefact dataset is significant to the lab’s overall theme of creative employment in that it shows a list of 85 creative writers that worked while writing space fiction. (I define space fiction as a science fiction story in space, journeying between at least two planets, with some hard science.) This relates to my Honours thesis question which is “What has caused there to be a predominance of galactic empires in the space fiction books genre of the twentieth century?” This precursor assignment enables me to take a closer look how creative workers, otherwise known as ‘no collar workers’, survived as space fiction writers in the twentieth century.
Writers are part of the creative community that inevitably suffers from a lack of government support and availability of jobs just like other creative workers. All 85 of the authors listed in the artefact had to get a job in another field while they were writing. Heazlewood (2014), in Funemployed, touched on the issue of finding that ‘middle ground’ where a writer can work and also write, and that working on writing full time isn’t usually possible. This is born out in the dataset. The dataset also proves Mengar’s (2003) point about self-employment, unemployment and intermittent work in that almost every writer has had more than one job in their lives. Essentially, this artefact proves that the idea of writing for a living is a myth for most writers.
From military to journalist, farmhand to bioengineer, these authors have worked in many fields. It’s interesting that, while they all had written about stories set in space, usually in a vehicle that travels between planets, their backgrounds were quite different. Even separating their jobs into blue collar and white collar didn’t show much difference between them. (38 did mostly blue-collar work and 47 did mostly white-collar work). However there doesn’t seem to be positions listed for many of them above entry level, apart from the occasional professor. Career wise, climbing the ladder within a company or military organisation didn’t happen for the majority of these writers. This reflects what Mirvis and Hall (1996) said about protean workers being uninterested in following a career path, preferring their personal successes through their own agency.
A creative career is “Difficult to sustain over an entire life” (Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2011) who go on to show how fragile creative careers are and that there is a need to have an unrelated stable job to finance it. Even so, it might be difficult to pull space fiction writers away from their passion to enable them to get a better paying job. As Chiapello (2004) said “The signature characteristic of genius is the single-mindedness with which certain artists engage in their activity.” This suggests that the space fiction writers I looked at may have restricted the kinds of jobs that they were able to do so that they could focus more on their space fiction writing. As they were more likely to be protean workers, it stands to reason they focused on their writing as their ‘career’ and remained in lower paid jobs with less responsibility.
So, my precursor 2 artefact is significant in pointing out that, just looking at a selection of 85 authors from the twentieth century, needing an unrelated job to be able to write is not only endemic in the creative writing industry, it has always been this way.
Fields
My field is in Humanities, in author studies, looking at how a particular idea in space fiction novels has become popular—galactic empires—and associating it with various reasons for its existence. I also want to know what the appeal of galactic empires is to readers as knowing what triggers readers to want to read about them might help newer writers tap into that market, if that market is still there.
Context
My research engages with the field in that galactic empires are a big part of space fiction. A number of researchers have qualitatively analysed space fiction works, reviewing the fiction stories in some detail. I’m building on that community’s research and also adding to it with quantitative research analysing the rise and fall of the use of galactic empires in space fiction across the twentieth century, and relating that to local historical events of the time to see if there is a correlation or pattern between writers’ works and the world around them. This would be useful to others who are doing qualitative research on this subject but wish to cite particular quantitative patterns in writing across a century.
The precursor artefact is practical in that it helps to answer one question which was whether writing about galactic empires in space fiction had the effect of helping writers to quit their day jobs and write full time. The evidence overwhelmingly says that this was not the case, thereby quickly closing this line of research.
I have learnt that, when corresponding the artefact with historical events, that World War II had a negligible impact on the themes in the novels. Writers continued to write what they wanted to write and, after revisiting some of these fiction titles within the context of their timelines of historical writing period and publishing period, I can see that they were written in a way that allowed both the writer and the reader to escape from the idea of war on Earth. This essentially means that space fiction was not written as an allegory for the present or a way of holding up a mirror to our past. Instead, it was a rejection of it, replacing it with an idealised utopian future with hope. (Many of the galactic empire structures were positive.) This has enabled me to redirect my thesis research to focus more on utopia and utopian ideals, leading me to begin research on Morian and Marxian references that may be better at explaining the existence of galactic empires in space fiction novels.
References
Chiapello, E. (2004). Evolution and co‐optation. Third Text, 18(6), pp.585–594.
Heazlewood, J. (2014). Funemployed: life as an artist in Australia. South Melbourne, Vic: Affirm Press
Hesmondhalgh, D. and Baker, S. (2011). Creative Labour: media work in three cultural industries. London; New York, N.Y.: Routledge.
Mirvis, P.H. and Hall, D.T. (1994). Psychological success and the boundaryless career. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 15(4), pp.365–380.