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say the television, but she replied, “No, that thing destroyed my social life.”
    She told him that in fact it was the refrigerator that had changed her life. She said it freed up hours of her days, creating leisure time that allowed her to go and see a movie occasionally, and to hang out with friends.
    My roomie’s story left me thinking about just how labour-intensive it is to maintain a single human life, never mind a family of humans. We are a lot of work; really, to have any quality of life, we are more work than we can manage by ourselves.
    Time was, if you were rich, you had servants to do a lot of the drudge and administrative work for you. Hang on; that one hasn’t changed.
    If you weren’t rich, you got together in communities and shared what labour you could, and you had children to help with the rest. And that one hasn’t changed much, either.
    And if you weren’t the breeding kind, you found other ways to make yourself invaluable to the people in charge. I don’t suppose I’m saying anything about this that is news to this crowd, so please bear with me while I build my argument.
    So that’s a really glossed-over version of how the balance of labour and power has traditionally tended to play out. But as disempowered groups in society become more empowered, they begin to be able to make more choices about where they are going to place their labour efforts.
    We’ve made magic; we’ve created this near-intangible substance called “money” (it’s almost more an idea than a substance, really) which you can use—if you have enough of it—to compel or persuade others to do some of your work for you.
    In many countries of the world, women and men can now choose to have fewer children.
    Sometimes, people are able to choose to do blue-collar work over relatively unskilled labour; can get the education that allows them to do white-collar work, or even end up in the highly skilled labour pool, the one in which you find doctors and lawyers. If you manage to boost yourself there, you can afford to hire people to do a lot of your drudge work for you.
    But the necessity for somebody to do the hard labour to sustain human lives and communities hasn’t gone away. One way we make sure that there are always people to do that work is by deliberately keeping portions of our populations disenfranchised so that they have little choice but drudge work.
    We also create “labour-saving” devices. But as anyone who’s ever used a computer knows, in many ways, those just create new forms of work.
    We’re always imagining new ways around the dilemma. So it seems to me that one of the things that fantasy and science fiction do is to imaginatively address the core problem of who does the work.
    Science fiction looks at technological approaches to the problem, and at all the problems the solutions create. (You know, the discovery that a computer isn’t exactly a labour-saving device. Or the question of what happens when our machines become so complex that they are in effect sentient beings able to demand rights.)
    Fantasy looks at the idea of work. Instead of using technology, it uses magic. But both are labour-saving devices.
    And both fantasy and science fiction wrestle with the current and historical class inequities we maintain in order to have people to do the work.
    Especially in North America, class differences have historically become so entrenched that they are characterised as or conflated with cultural or racial differences.
    And as someone brilliant has said, “Race doesn’t exist, but it’ll kill ya.”
    So one might say that, at a very deep level, one of the things that fantasy and science fiction do is to use myth-making to examine and explore socioeconomically configured ethnoracial power imbalances.
    That’s why those of us who live in racialised bodies, and who love and read fantasy and science fiction because we relate so strongly to it, can get so bloody irritated at the level of sheer, wilful