What’s My Line?
Professions in Science fiction & fantasy. Essay. 900 words, 5-minute read.
What’s My Line?
By Ray Tabler
Everybody’s got to do something to put food on the table. Fictional characters are no exception. What those jobs are sometimes tells us something about the character. Or maybe it tells us something about us.
In Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Richard Dreyfus is an electrical utility lineman, who is chasing down power outages across rural Indiana. That places him in the right place at the right time to have a close encounter with some UFOs. Which marks him for more interaction with the aliens later on in the movie.
Oil rig workers are the main characters in both Armageddon, and The Abyss. A giant comet is on a collision course with Earth in Armageddon, and NASA recruits the best crew of roustabouts to plant a nuke deep enough inside the icy heart of the comet to blast it to pieces. In the Abyss, oil well drillers are interrupted while searching for a gusher on the ocean floor, because a submarine has sunk nearby. They encounter aliens as well.
In these stories, ordinary people interact with extraordinary circumstances. Not only do their commonplace lives provide a stark contrast to alien personalities and happenings, but we sympathize with them more easily. We can place ourselves within the story.
Post-apocalyptic tales delight in slamming ordinary people into desperate situations. Alas Babylon follows a small-town attorney as he leads his neighbors through the aftermath of a nuclear war. In The Stand, a factory worker, a country music singer, and a drifter navigate the end times. Before the zombie outbreak, the characters in The Walking Dead were police officers, a teacher, a mechanic, a pizza delivery driver, and an unemployed drifter.
Of course, ordinary characters will only take drama so far. Dangerous or violent jobs often are employed to access create interesting situations. Cops and robbers appear regularly in speculative fiction. Conan, Bilbo Baggins, and Fafrd and the Gray Mouser all took things that didn’t technically belong to them. Inception and The Fifth Element are essentially heist movies. Blade Runner, and Minority Report are detective stories, at heart. Then there are space pirates, which probably deserve a separate essay.
The military employs a significant portion of the characters in science fiction stories. That makes sense. War is dramatic, and drama is required for exciting tales. Spacers, mech warriors, scouts, space marines, fighter pilots, and the like can lead thrilling lives. But, there’s room for humor as well. Harry Harrison’s Bill The Galactic Hero is in the space navy. Specifically, he’s a fuseman. Deep in the bowels of an interstellar battleship, Bill’s job is to replace man-sized electrical fuses when they blow during the heat of battle. A vital function.
Characters in fantasy stories often don’t have specific professions. Probably because many fantasies take place in a medieval setting, where almost everyone is simply scratching out a living from the land as a farmer. Often, farmer youths answer the call to adventure, sometimes walking directly away from the plow. If they’re lucky. Having your village attacked and burned to the ground is a common inciting incident in such tales.
The only person in Lord of the Rings who has an actual job is Samwise Gamgee, gardener. The hobbit he gardens for, Frodo, is some sort of country squire, independently wealthy and specializing in long walks and second breakfast. Nice work, if you can get it. Merry and Pippen spend their time hanging around the pub and stealing vegetables. Aragorn is basically a dangerous hobo. Gandalf’s business card might read wizard, but he appears to be more of a roving busybody.
Reporters offer storytellers the excuse to have characters poke their noses into dangerous matters. Superman, as mild-mannered Clark Kent, has already excuse to be on hand for all manner of strange goings-on. Then Superman pops out of the phone booth to save the day. Similarly, peter Parker is a newspaper photographer, allowing him to snap pics of Spiderman swinging in to wrap up the bad guys. Convenient.
Sometimes, a character’s profession is a ready source of irony. Dr. Strange was a brilliant surgeon, until an accident ruined his hands and started him down the road to becoming the Sorcerer Supreme. David Banner was a scientist, studying the effects of gamma rays. An overdose transformed him into the Incredible Hulk. Now, his supremely analytical side constantly battles the raging beast within.
Scholars and scientists, mad and otherwise, figure prominently in sci fi tales. The fine line between genius and insanity is an old saw. The basis for the trope is the single-minded focus often required for scientific breakthroughs. It’s easy to lose touch with the consequences of the discovery. Dr. Frankenstein, Dr, Jekyll, and Dr. Strangelove all fell into that trap. Henry (Indiana) Jones Jr., Dr. Emmet Brown, and Hans Zarkov handled things better, in comparison.
In the Star Wars universe, Luke Skywalker was a water farmer. His long-lost twin sister, Leia, was a politician. As was their mother, Padme. Their father, Anakin, started off as a fixit slave, got a better position as a Jedi, then hired on with the Sith when he didn’t get the promotion he wanted. Looked at that way, the Star Wars prequel trilogy is really just an HR dispute gone horribly wrong. And Obiwan Kenobi was a grumpy, old retired guy, yelling at the sand people to get off his desert! Each must leave their old life, and jobs as the story unfolds.
There are several reasons to equip a character with a certain profession. Dramatic jobs (military, law enforcement, criminal, mad scientist, etc...) provide ready access to dramatic situations. Ordinary characters thrust into extraordinary events drag the reader/viewer along as they imagine themselves in the same boat. Or, the cozy, familiar life of acts as a springboard to launch the character into adventure.
END.
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"And Obiwan Kenobi was a grumpy, old retired guy, yelling at the sand people to get off his desert!"
Not at the narrative start of the story, but I got that impression the way Alec Guinness played him in the first movie.
One of my early writing books was about how to find jobs for your characters. My books always have military protagonists and lots of other military members. One is also always a pilot. I need someone to fly jet fighters and blow stuff up. Why settle for a hand grenade when 30 mm wing cannons and mini-guns firing thousands of rounds per minute are available!