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Here's a post listing speculative novels that address disability

Over on [community profile] access_fandom there's howling that The Ship Who Sang  is a bad example, not a good one.  Here's a poem and a post.

Now, I'll admit that it isn't as good as some things we have now, like the Vorkosigan saga.  But it came out when nobody else was writing anything about heroic characters with disabilities, and the rare examples of disability were stock characters like Igor.  0_o  And then came Helva, and after her came other shellpeople who were ships and cities and all sorts of things.  To me, a shellperson's ship was basically adaptive equipment, like a wheelchair.  That could fly between stars.  I think that's awesome.  Hell, I'd consider that a trade up from the body I have, which is mobile but not what I'd call reliable.  The part of that image that spoke to me was about not being limited by the meat you're born with.  You could imagine something bigger and better.  You didn't have to be physically perfect to be an astronaut.  You could have a wreck of a body, and be the ship,  and go have adventures anyway.  So the society was kind of a mess in places, well, that's humanity for you.  You don't have to be perfect to have a future either.

And that wasn't the only time Anne McCaffrey wrote about a protagonist with physical or mental challenges.  She did that a lot.  Sometimes better, sometimes worse, but I count her as an icebreaker for a lot of what came after.  The Ship Who Sang  wasn't one of my favorites.  But if not for that, we wouldn't have The Ship Who Searched  and The City Who Fought,  and probably a lot of others tangentially inspired, that I have greatly enjoyed.

If you don't like what's being written, do something else.  You don't have to get it perfect the first time.  Try again, fail again, fail better.  Do something new.  

Still looking

Date: 2014-09-12 02:52 am (UTC)
dialecticdreamer: My work (Default)
From: [personal profile] dialecticdreamer
I didn't much care for "Ship" mostly because of the romantic subplot that just made me go, "WHYYYY???"

But someone had to do /something/ first. It is worth looking at from that perspective, just like reading different translations of "The Odyssey" is useful when looking at whether a newer edition would be useful or interesting.


I'm just not hunting out "books with disabled protagonists" so i don't even know what's out there right now. Why? Because for so long there /was/ just the 'magical cure' or 'hard work will bring X up to passing for normal' as tropes, and they are HIGHLY aggravating when one is NOT going to do that. Rather like trying to write novels where all cisgender humans have to be certified as cisgender by a panel of NON-cisgender "experts".... the results aren't going to make ANYBODY happy!

Re: Still looking

Date: 2014-09-12 03:14 am (UTC)
dialecticdreamer: My work (Default)
From: [personal profile] dialecticdreamer
It's one of the things that started to bug me when /every stinking year/ some teacher would "assign" me to read "Deannie" by Judy Blume because the main character had to wear a back brace. Every year, for five years running. And each one acting like they were doing me a FAVOR by "including" someone with a disability as a main character in the reading list.

But they put Deannie IN by taking something else OUT... and I couldn't opt out of THAT book in favor of the other one. NONE of the teachers after the first one believed that I had /read the stupid book already/.

Fourth grade. "Deannie". Fifth grade. Everyone else is given "The Time Machine," and I got "Deannie". Fine. I'd read BOTH of them though, and the teacher wouldn't budge. Sixth grade was worse-- that was the year I spent all my free time reading a poetry translation of the "Iliad" written for the local college. Because, of course, I was honest enough to MAKE myself reread blinkin' DEANNIE AGAIN and write the paper, but I /ran/ back to the Greeks and the Trojans for months. Seventh grade. Deannie, right in September, off the bat... and then we MOVED across country.

Apparently, I have a "different interpretation" of great literature. Smack in the middle of reading "Cyrano De Bergerac"the instructor asked me why I didn't seem 'enthused,' I actually told him the truth. "Cyrano wasn't the problem, it was everybody else who had a problem with Cyrano's appearance that wrecked his life. By the time the story started, he was totally messed up in the head, and that means any 'happy ending' was an illusion."

(no subject)

Date: 2014-09-12 03:13 am (UTC)
krait: a sea snake (krait) swimming (Default)
From: [personal profile] krait
Aaaahhhh, I love The Ship Who Searched so much!

I recently (ish; it was maybe 3 months ago?) reread both Sang and Searched, and enjoyed them both; it was interesting especially from a - as you point out - timeline perspective, because they were written a decade or so apart (I think) AND I had read them more than a decade ago, so I had an entirely different perspective when rereading! They do show their age a little, especially Sang (current tech has come so far already that Dr. Kenny's robo-legs seem imminently feasible rather than fantastical)... and being a grownup this time round left me seeing more of the problematic aspects to them, too.

The Ship Who Searched, along with The City Who Fought, are still my favourites out of the whole series. Great finds for kid!me who was just starting out in sci-fi; the idea that science wasn't just fun, it could let anybody become a hero who had awesome adventures, hopefully influenced both my further tastes in reading and the way I look at the absence of differently abled characters in mainstream SF.

Re: Yes...

Date: 2014-09-13 12:53 am (UTC)
krait: a sea snake (krait) swimming (Default)
From: [personal profile] krait
Oooooh, yeah - Sharing Knife is awesome!

(no subject)

Date: 2014-09-12 01:50 pm (UTC)
sashajwolf: drawing of fat woman looking in the mirror, her reflection smiling at her and waving a white flag (truce)
From: [personal profile] sashajwolf
I loved The Ship Who Sang growing up. I wasn't disabled then, but I had an eating disorder, and that book told me that you could deviate from the societal beauty ideal and still have something to be proud of.

(no subject)

Date: 2014-09-13 02:03 am (UTC)
From: [personal profile] chanter1944
As someone with a disability, I tend to avoid literature with disabled main characters for the simple reason that whatever their disability is invariably ends up a focus in some way. Maybe it's not a plot turner or other device, but it's *obvious* and referenced, and I've basically hit the 'For heaven's sake, can't we just be people who happen to XYZ?' stage of thinking.

Re: Okay...

Date: 2014-09-27 03:10 am (UTC)
From: [personal profile] chanter1944
Whoooo-eeeee am I ever late in responding to this!

As you describe it, background parity doesn't sound like such an awful thing. I may have explained what I've often run into in fiction badly; where I have an issue isn't so much that a character's disability is known and referenced, more that we're hit over the head with it and its effects. Not sure if that falls into the badly-done-heroes camp, the forcing of disability into the center theme one, or somewhere else.

For what it's worth, P.I.E. grew on me at speed. I <3 Brenda and hers. :) Also, the being hit over the head with disability as a trait is something I've crashed into in mainstream stories, not among DW folks. My grumbles aren't aimed at you, in other words.

(no subject)

Date: 2014-09-13 03:52 pm (UTC)
fred_mouse: line drawing of sheep coloured in queer flag colours with dream bubble reading 'dreamwidth' (Default)
From: [personal profile] fred_mouse
I don't think I managed the Ship books, but (restricting myself to McCaffrey), I was fascinated with the way the Crystal Singer set started with such optimism about great opportunity, and ended with such bathos, as the career that was Killashandra's salvation became her destroyer. A very different kind of disability to those that I typically notice in fiction - loss of mind/memory and/or dementia are almost never encountered.

Re: Yes...

Date: 2014-09-15 02:31 pm (UTC)
fred_mouse: line drawing of sheep coloured in queer flag colours with dream bubble reading 'dreamwidth' (Default)
From: [personal profile] fred_mouse
I actually found Memory far less believable, and far less effective. But I think by then I was starting to get cranky with Bujold's characters, and the way that the level of farce kept escalating. I haven't been able to bring myself to read the last one? two? three? of the books in that series, because of the issues I was having with the way the series was going (not a fault, just a mismatch between author and reader).

I'm not familiar with This Alien Shore, so can't comment there.

I also like amnesia fic, but don't think I've seen many that work. There is one SGA aphasia story that has really stuck with me, but I'm not sure I could find it now.

(no subject)

Date: 2014-09-12 04:40 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] songspinner9.livejournal.com
I find it interesting that the person who posted the article complains about the image of a struggle. I have a chronic illness, and when I read those books as a kid, it was the fact that someone acknowledged the struggle and then had characters who were given a job using what they HAD THAT WORKED was wonderful. I didn't like the romance in that first one, but since I had realized by age 13 that I would not be able to be an astronaut because of my body not working properly, it seemed pretty damn brilliant to me. All I saw was characters in books and tv who were to be pitied or who were only "inspirational". Anne's characters were people.

Yes...

Date: 2014-09-12 04:49 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com
>> I find it interesting that the person who posted the article complains about the image of a struggle. I have a chronic illness, and when I read those books as a kid, it was the fact that someone acknowledged the struggle and then had characters who were given a job using what they HAD THAT WORKED was wonderful. <<

Something else I liked from The Ship Who Searched is that it was built on the earlier premise intended for infants ... but when Tia showed up as a small child, they changed the program to accommodate her rather than shutting her out.

>> All I saw was characters in books and tv who were to be pitied or who were only "inspirational". Anne's characters were people. <<

I think she did that throughout her writing. Not all of it grabbed me, but a lot of it did.

Another favorite? Killashandra Ree in Crystal Singer. Not only was she shut out of a desired career because her voice wasn't good enough, but the book had a bunch of other handicapped characters because the adaptation process and the job were so damn hazardous. There were some deaf characters, and some with other impairments, the crystal itself behaved a lot like an addiction ... and people just worked around it, went on with their lives. I liked the sense of community there.

(no subject)

Date: 2014-09-12 09:38 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] msminlr.livejournal.com
I posted a comment over there contending that Helva was an indentured person, not a true slave, as the poem contends. 'Twill be interesting to see the response.

Yes...

Date: 2014-09-12 09:48 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com
From what I remember, that's true; the ships were under contract until they could pay off the cost of their hardware. I don't think it's fair to do that since the process began with children; but then, I also don't think it's fair to basically indenture college students today, like buying a very expensive lottery ticket on the chance that you might be permitted a job that pays enough to live on. It's the difference between de jure and de facto slavery.

Re: Yes...

Date: 2014-09-13 05:33 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] westrider.livejournal.com
Debt slavery seems to almost inevitably follow for at least a while after explicit slavery is prohibited.

Re: Yes...

Date: 2014-09-13 05:45 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com
Often true, and even when debt slavery is outlawed, people still do it or find new "legal" ways of accomplishing the same ends. Humans just like abusing each other. It's frustrating.

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