The power of the older character

I'm starting to think about my panel at Loncon 3.  I'm talking about Exuberance and Experience, stereotypes and expectations of older and younger characters.

It's got me thinking about how many older characters I have in my books, and how I portray them.  The first thing I have to decide is what I mean by 'older'.   To someone in their teens it probably means some ancient person of fifty.  To me of rather more mature years, I think of older as seventy plus.  So it's a fluid definition that I can interpret in my individual way.

Taking a good, hard look at my books, I realise I have lots of "older" characters if you define older as forties and fifties, but very few if you define it as sixty plus.  One of the reasons for this is that most of my books have elements of adventure to them, and often my characters have to run about somewhere or avoid being shot.  There are limits to the degree of physical fitness of very old characters that tends to rule them out of many of the roles my characters play.

Having said that, in Snowbird and Darius I do have a very powerful older character.  Hyam D Scwanberger is the owner of the biggest shipline on Darius Orbital Station, and he has his fingers in dozens of pies.  I see him as a spider in the centre of his lair, pulling in data from everywhere.  In Jade my main characters are in their thirties and forties, but Kaath my main character does have an older aunt Bara.  She's a key source of support for Kaath when she discovers the truth about her origins.

Looking back at my books I see I don't have that many older characters in them.  Was that because I was in my twenties and thirties when I wrote them?  Possibly.  But I'm not anymore, I'm now of an age to know how powerful an older person can be, a person who knows their own mind and can spot falsehood, flattery, and bribery from a hundred paces away.

There's no reason why powerful older characters can't have a place in books.  Elizabeth Moon has several fabulous examples in hers.  I must try harder in future.

The wisdom of years

I have a suspicion that editors are sometimes influenced by our cultural emphasis on young celebrity when looking at the characters in the books submitted to them.  Having become a woman of a certain age, I notice the absence of older women in the books I read, or read about.

It's okay for male characters to be old.  They can manage to hold onto their power too.  How much more powerful can you get than Gandalf from The Lord of the Rings?  But if we translated this character into a older woman she wouldn't be called a wizard.  She'd be called a witch, with all the negative associations that our culture puts on that word.  Or she'd be labelled as an old crone. Instead of admiring her flowing white locks we'd describe her thinning grey hair.

Some writers have managed to slip older characters into their stories.  CJ Cherryh's Pyanfar Chanur is a wily starship captain that has been travelling the space ways for a long time. A shrewd political and  interstellar political operator, it is her age and wisdom, her ability to read the big picture of her actions that keeps her alive in her dealings with the dangerous Kif. She is a powerful woman, and one of my favourite role models.

Elizabeth Moon features an older, not well-educated woman, in Remnant Population.  Her pragmatic, practical way of seeing life allows her to get in with the aliens just fine when she is left behind when the colony leaves the planet.  She has a quite, sly way of getting what she wants that is both gentle and strong, and takes no notice of the silly edicts of the men in charge.

These writers' choices of older characrers challenge our youth obsession.  They've seen it all before, the rise of a dictator or pirates, the greedy war of acquisition.  Older characters keep the history, balance the hot-headed actions of impulsive younger people.  They are the memory-keepers of our civilization, the essential link between the lessons of the past and the present,

Age in SF stories

I recently challenged a comment on Twitter where the writer was focused on getting young people into an SF convention.  My response was "why is everything focused towards the young?"  Being a woman of a certain age, I often find this focus insulting.

It's got me thinking about age in SF stories.  One of my favourite characters, Pyanfar Chanur, is a wily starship trading captain.  She's not young, and her age gives her the wisdom and the nerve to steer a very tricky course through the interstellar politics and warmongering of several species.  She wouldn't have survived five minutes against the mercenary Kif if she wasn't older and wiser.

Elizabeth Moon's Remnant Population features an older woman as the heroine of the story.  She's not well educated, and she gets left behind when the colony is lifted off the planet.  She uses her age and her wisdom to make contact with and get along with the indigenous aliens.

Androids can often live fantastically long lives in SF stories, so can AIs. Philip Reeve's Stalkers from his Mortal Engines series of books are ancient tech, and even more terrifying for it.  Anne McCaffrey's Aivas from the Pern books is at least 2500 years old, and still functioning perfectly.

These stories provide a counterpoint and a challenge to our culture's present obsession with everything youth.  Older characters have seen this war before, they know how this menace was successfully tackled twenty years ago on some obscure frontier world.

Age gives us the chance to take the long view, to spot disturbing trends that might be emerging that somebody needs to do something about.  Is there a resurgence of piracy in one sector of space? Who remembers the old pirate Turek? Is this a new incarnation of an old conflict?  Older characters are memory-keepers, and memory and history are important for civilized societies.