Disabilities in F&SF
Sep. 11th, 2014 09:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Here's a post listing speculative novels that address disability.
Over on
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.
Over on
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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)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 02:59 am (UTC)Yeah, that was on the list of parts I didn't like. But back when all I could get were library books and one or two new books a month and sometimes a trip to a used-book store, well, it was like pizza with everything. I learned to pick off what I didn't like and eat the rest.
Crowdfunding: where you can have pineapple-ham without onions if you want it.
>> I'm just not hunting out "books with disabled protagonists" so i don't even know what's out there right now. <<
I've always kept an eye out for it, although not hunting it specifically.
Re: Still looking
Date: 2014-09-12 03:14 am (UTC)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."
Re: Still looking
Date: 2014-09-12 03:21 am (UTC)But wow did that ever teach me a lot about how to assemble a class reading list. I only recommended things I considered really good reading, except for a few examples of "This is what opaque writing looks like." I included a mix of famous and obscure things. It worked pretty well.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-09-12 03:13 am (UTC)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.
Yes...
Date: 2014-09-12 03:57 am (UTC)If I were doing a panel on this topic, I'd stack up a couple dozen examples and sort them by publication date, then look at changes in presentation over time, up through awesome stuff like The Sharing Knife.
Re: Yes...
Date: 2014-09-13 12:53 am (UTC)Re: Yes...
Date: 2014-09-13 01:04 am (UTC)Also well worth mentioning is Dun Lady's Jess for the striking portrayal of different strengths and weaknesses within the human and equine forms. Neither is disabled in the sense of being damaged, but because Jess knows both, the weaknesses of each are always perceived as a handicap. She is physically stronger and faster as a horse, but mentally and emotionally more sophisticated as a woman. And to me, that's very like the decisions faced by some people with a chronic disease, where they have to budget spoons and can only do this OR that, never everything at once.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-09-12 01:50 pm (UTC)Wow!
Date: 2014-09-12 07:29 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-09-13 02:03 am (UTC)Okay...
Date: 2014-09-13 02:26 am (UTC)That's fine.
>> 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. <<
That's called background parity. It is a stage in the evolution of identity fiction. Most writers have to go through the stages in order, and that one comes after things like "no representation, butt of joke or villain, assorted stock characters, poorly done heroes, better done heroes." It takes a while before people have done it often enough that it doesn't automatically steal the show.
Me, I know all the stages and just generally have a taste for diversity. If you want background parity, I can write it. You just have to look closely because it goes by quickly if it's not the focus. Or if you want to go on avoiding literature about disability, that's fine too.
One obstacle is that some people really bitch over "happens to ..." as a phrase and a construction. For me, it's a useful distinction between a story that's about a disability vs. a story that has a disabled person in it but focuses on something else. Torn World has some background parity stuff, along with focal stuff.
Now P.I.E. isn't quite background parity because a protagonist is necessarily foreground, but it isn't about Brenda being in a wheelchair. It's about Brenda being a preternatural detective, which forms one focus. The original inspiration was actually me storming empty-handed out of a bookstore because all the "strong, smart" female characters were falling in love with assholes. I wanted one that was actually astute enough to discard the assholes and pick a nice guy. The one I found happened to be in a wheelchair, and I'm okay with that. So that romantic thread is the other focus, and the plotline loops around the two of them as an ellipse or figure-8. I have done some poems that touch on the disability angle more directly after people started asking for that, but they're later ones.
In my observation, when people stomp on "happens to be" that discourages background parity. They're forcing disability into the center theme. That's not what everyone wants to write, or read. It puts a drag on the evolution of idfic featuring disabilities. Frustrating. >_<
And that echoes a division in other identity communities. For some gay folks, homosexuality is just what they like to do in the sack. It's not a big part of their personality. For other gay folks, it IS their core trait. Both of these things are okay. What's not okay is when they get into a big bitchfight saying that sack-gay people are somehow Less Gay or core-gay people are making caricatures of themselves.
Same with disability. It can be a defining feature of your life, or it can be just this thing that happens to you.
It can even be both for the same person. Some of my physical limitations I'd pay dearly to shed. But my glasses? They're part of my body. I'd hesitate to give that up, even if I could have perfect vision for free. I don't think I look like "me" without glasses, and indeed, a fairly specific style.
I think the diversity of tastes is fascinating, how some people want to see representation in literature and others just aren't interested in it.
Re: Okay...
Date: 2014-09-27 03:10 am (UTC)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.
Re: Okay...
Date: 2014-09-27 05:53 am (UTC)It's great if done responsibly. Like anything else, it can be messed up.
>> 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. <<
Probably forcing disability into the center theme, though it may also overlap badly done characters. Another version of it is preachifying. Yes, it sucks.
Where background parity can go wrong is if a trait is mentioned, but the author fails to account for that would affect the character. It can happen in main-focus stories too.
Mostly these things happen when people don't bother to do their homework.
>> For what it's worth, P.I.E. grew on me at speed. I <3 Brenda and hers. :) <<
Yay!
>> 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. <<
That's good to hear. *ponder* I've had no trouble finding writers, especially in crowdfunding, who are talented, entertaining, and capable of handling diversity responsibly.
>> My grumbles aren't aimed at you, in other words. <<
I didn't think they were, just considered it a topic worth discussing. And checking, because it's a habit of mine to check my work when someone says "there's no X" or "X is often handled wrong." Usually I'm satisfied that I have X and it's at least capably rendered. Occasionally I can't find any and then want to make some, or I'll find a place where I didn't realize something was a problematic portrayal.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-09-13 03:52 pm (UTC)Yes...
Date: 2014-09-13 07:48 pm (UTC)Re: Yes...
Date: 2014-09-15 02:31 pm (UTC)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)Yes...
Date: 2014-09-12 04:49 am (UTC)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)Yes...
Date: 2014-09-12 09:48 pm (UTC)Re: Yes...
Date: 2014-09-13 05:33 am (UTC)Re: Yes...
Date: 2014-09-13 05:45 am (UTC)