Morgan pointed out that aging is a process. If you don't acknowledge the process, you don't get a sense of someone's life arc. There may be many different kinds of changes involved in this process: doing more as well as doing less. A person can have increasing levels of skill at some activities even as they are not able to participate in others.
We should think about the full range of changes that can happen with aging. Coming of age is a very common story topic, but we don't tend to look at protagonists in other parts of their aging process. There are some people who perceive genre fiction readers as young, and this may affect the kind of storytelling that is happening.
One good example of an aging character is Masterharper Robinton from the Pern books of Anne McCaffrey. He had a very interesting and complex story. Quite often, we can find that older people in stories are being seen through the eyes of younger people. Lois McMaster Bujold also has great portrayals of older characters. We often talk about how speculative fiction affects childhood or adolescence, but it's far less common to show the point of view of older poeple.
What are the things that make you realize you are aging? Is it gray hair, physical creakiness or pain, shortness of breath? If you are working with aliens, what other things might it be? When we are in the process of aging, we don't always step back to consider our current age.
Kat suggested we consider some of the things that people say when they are older, including, "You'll be more certain of yourself when you're older." Older people may comment on changes in technology, like, "Everyone thinks the Mach 4 blaster is so cool now..." Older people have observed changes in fashion and technology. They have also observed changes in language usage.
Common tropes of aging include the magical old person, and the aging mad scientist striving for immortality.
Older people may try to put off life-changing things - like, say, hip replacement surgery - and then later decide it would have been best to have them done earlier.
Damon Knight wrote a short story called The Dying Man about a man in a society of immortals who begins to age.
I really loved the character of Moana's grandmother.
Older people may appear in stories for children because children are accustomed to seeing their grandparents. They are certainly present in literary tales and in fairy tales.
We could explore aging and regret, but we don't necessarily need deathbed confession tales. We could explore aging with and without grace. We could consider the stories of patriarchs, matriarchs, or gender-nonbinary-archs!
Morgan said she's tired of seeing older people representing stodginess, prejudice, and bigotry. It's dismissive of people who did not have those qualities in age, or who were simply ahead of their time.
Kat made the observation that we assume a kind of generational character, and that it may be connected to the fact that we educate in cohorts.
There is diversity among older people.
The physical appearance of age differs widely on the basis of health, wealth, ethnicity, and other factors.
What do older people understand or remember that younger people don't? What are the buggy-whips and walkmans of your world? What do older people learn that we don't necessarily expect them to learn about new technology? What are the things that older people may not have heard of that they might have to catch up on?
Where do we get the idea that older people can't learn new things? Does it take more learning cycles as you get older to learn new things? Do you necessarily care about whether you learn a thing, and does that affect whether you learn it? (I think the latter happens at all ages)
There are such things as "health windows," or age ranges when particular diseases are most likely to make themselves known. This may contribute to certain people vanishing from public sight within a particular age range as they are not as likely to be healthy and out and about. It can contribute to stereotyping.
Kat remarked that the effects of aging on you socially depend a lot on your society. Are you to be discarded? Or are you to be venerated?
Morgan mentioned differences in infrastructure that might affect the lives of older people. If it's more difficult for an older person to drive at night, does that mean they can't go places at that time? Are there any alternatives to cars? How might other accommodations for disabilities etc. affect the movement of people (both disabled people of all ages, and older people)?
What are older people asked to give up? Che mentioned driver's licenses. Giving such things up can be very difficult because they mean giving up a level of independence.
Kat returned to the question of access with questions that are useful for more groups than just aging populations: In the world we've built, who has access? Who doesn't? Why?
If a society is mostly based on nuclear families, we may not encounter many older people. If we don't encounter older people, we may marvel at them or fail to understand them.
How does a person's age affect the way you describe them?
What do you do if you have no Earthly time measurements?
Do aliens perceive generations the way we do? What does it mean for aliens to age? What characteristics do people elect as salient to indicate age? Wrinkles, gray hair, long teeth? Other things?
Kat said she'd like to see someone take on a story involving people who age artificially to fit in with an age-centered culture.
Morgan mentioned that in younger people, aging is aspirational. However, in our society, once you hit 29, it becomes undesirable, leading to people pretending for years that they are 29. People do many things to try to stay in the culturally identified ideal age window.
When we talk about characters' actions in a story, we generally expect those characters to "get things done." If a character is 20-something, how can they know enough to get those things done? What is the age of maturity in your society and why?
Look at aging across different cultural groups in your society. How does it differ between the poor and the rich? Who gets to be old because of access to health care etc? Who has the food and comfort necessary to have a long life?
In my Varin world, the nobles might be expected to live longer because of their increased access to food, comfort, money, and health care, but their inbreeding means that they don't have as many older people as you might expect.
What kind of views do people have about sun exposure? Stress?
How do grooming and fashion expectations change as you get older? What are the grooming and fashion codes to indicate a particular age?
We thought of Howl's Moving Castle, a story which treats aging in a very interesting way.
Kat said she wants to see a world where one's mobility increases as one gets older instead of decreasing. Aging could work really differently among aliens.
We talked about the concept of "elders." It's a term I've generally seen associated with indigenous groups, but we want to make sure that we don't exoticize our concept, since it does exist across multiple cultural groups.
Who are the productive members of society? What does "productivity" mean?
Do we respect or disrespect accrued knowledge?
Thank you to everyone who attended this discussion. Next week, Dive into Worldbuilding will meet on Tuesday, July 31 at 4pm Pacific and we will discuss Culture, and how it changes and reinforces itself. I hope you can join us!
#SFWApro
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