Disability Writing Contest: The Future Imperfect

[davidgillon]

Sarah Einstein has published an interesting essay on disability and science fiction at Redstone Science Fiction and they're holding a story competition to go with it. So pop over there, read Sarah's essay and see if any story ideas pop to mind. And now I'm going to shamelessly use Sarah's essay as the inspiration for one of my own.

Sarah starts her essay talking about the disablism inherent in Anne McCaffery's 'Ship' series. The Ship series, starting with 'The Ship Who Sang', is one of those series nearly every SF fan has read as they were growing up, or is at least aware of, and they are usually regarded fondly. But the whole premise of the series combines the slavery of Cinderella with an SFnal form of locking the embarrassingly disabled kid away in the attic.

It’s sadly rare to find someone who shares my opinion of the Ship books. Too often the disability aspects and slavery are overlooked for the ‘this is cool’ factor. And ‘this is cool’ is something to beware of in responding to Sarah’s idea. As disabled people we don’t just need cool technology to be equal, we need a true change in the way that people regard disability and how they portray it in all media, not just SF. Look how often disability is used to signal that a character is the villain: Darth Vader, Dr No, Davros, both Silas and Lea Teabing in the Da Vinci Code, Long John Silver, Captain Hook... What does that association of disability and evil tell us about the way that society regards disability? If not the villain then the only roles usually open are brave crip, poor crip and bitter crip, reducing us to 'triumphing over disability', objects of pity, or being derided as twisted by our disability. None of these view disability in any sort of positive or even neutral light. How the media sees us is both a reflection of how the public sees us and a way of reinforcing that perception. SF is supposed to be the literature of ideas, giving us the freedom to take flight and consider new technologies and societies without the restrictive bonds of Mother Earth, but all too often the technology triumphs over all else and we have people with contemporary attitudes, with all that that means for perceptions of disability, looking out at us from the midst of the world of tomorrow.

As a disability activist I talk about ‘models’ a lot, where a model is the way that someone responds to impairment. Doctors tend to see us as broken, something to be fixed, often without regard to what we really want, that’s the Medical Model. The public mostly see us through the Personal Tragedy Model, which pities and demeans us as the able man’s burden. For many disabled people the model we chose is the Social Model, which defines disability as the discrimination we experience as the result of our impairment, whether that discrimination be the absence of an access ramp, or someone patting us on the head while prattling about how brave we are. SF tends to see us through the Medical Model if anything, bringing in cybernetic limbs or virtual reality or the gizmo of the week to nullify disability without ever dealing with accepting it. Disability is SF's Kobayashi Maru, the test it always cheats its way around to avoid confronting harsh reality, no matter that that cheat implicitly fails the test of character. Works that truly look at how society reacts to us are vanishingly rare, Lois McMaster Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan series being one of a handful of exceptions, doubly valuable for setting her visibly disabled hero against the background of an explicitly disablist society and mirroring him with Cousin Ivan, six foot odd of ideal hero fodder, the Miles everyone expected instead of the one they got.

SF is a literature of ideas and ideals, where good triumphs and evil is defeated, but the real world isn't like that and disability isn't good or evil, it just is. Even in a utopia fully enabled by the principles of the Social Model, disability will still have an impact. Being disabled takes time and saps energy, for many of us fatigue and pain are the major disabling aspects of our impairment. An accessible world may still be one beyond our ability to fully access it. Can SF show disability in a more positive light? Can it challenge every 'Ship Who Sang' with a Miles Vorkosigan? Can it show an enabled society, and have the maturity to admit that it is still not a solution? I hope so.
 

Comments

[tasseltip.livejournal.com]

This is really interesting. May I pass this post on to the writers' group I attend? About half write fantasy or sci-fi, and our resident sci-fi lecturer may also be interested.

With you on the Bujold reference; I love how she makes all sorts of comments on how society disables its members. Actually I just like how she writes in general, too.

[dwgism.livejournal.com]

Feel free. I want people to think about the points I'm making. Getting people to question the status quo is the only way that we can change it.

[tasseltip.livejournal.com]

I propose to also post on my own journal about this but it may take a couple of days.

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

Hiya. I found this through your link to it in no_pity, and am making my own post boosting the signal about the contest and Einstein's article (Which says so much more clearly than I've been able to why the whole concept of "Ship" series squicks me out, and why I've never been able to bring myself to read them). And I'd also like to post a link to this rebuttal, if I may.

I don't feel up to entering the contest myself, yet -- but I may get there before the closing date, I don't know. But it did get me thinking about what universal access would look like.

Flexibility is the key, I think, because what makes a space accessible to a wheelchair user often makes it inaccessible to someone who is blind, for example. So the technological infrastructure would, ideally, adapt to the needs of the person using it (through nanobots, or whatever). That's the "OOh, cool!" sci-fi factor, but it could also be the cultural value on the social level -- where flexibility of mind and attitude could be taught and encouraged when meeting someone with different needs and abilities than your own.

Which also makes sense if you're in a culture that routinely interacts with creatures from other planets (isn't in amazing how many "aliens" in sci-fi are bipedal and walk upright?).*

Edited to add: *And also see and hear within the human visual and auditory ranges?

Also, I see where you've given permission to link. I'll go ahead and do that, then. I just didn't want to presume.

[tasseltip.livejournal.com]

The flexibility you talk about is indeed crucial, not only because it mirrors the incredible and real diversity of human life, but because all of these different factors can impair a person differently. But yes, there is an inherent coolness that I think the sci-fi community is very well placed to appreciate, about the flexibility of good design!

This flexibility and equitable environment-sharing is one of the fundamentals in a short story idea I had last year and have been hoping to re-develop - perhaps now is the time!

[dwgism.livejournal.com]

Feel free to link to this. I'm not sure I'd call it a rebuttal, personally, it's more an addendum to Sarah Einstein's essay from a different point of view.

I've an idea for the competition, whether my body has the energy to complete it is another question entirely!

I agree with you on flexibility; physically a lot of
wobblies like me already find that the tactile surfaces used to indicate pedestrian crossings for VI pedestrians are very hazardous WRT balance, while the shared surfaces idea (cars and pedestrians using the same surface) is supposedly good for mobility impaired users (no kerbs) but not so good for the VI population.

Similarly, on the social side we need people (employers especially!) to be flexible enough to realise that a disability doesn't mean we can't do something, simply that we may need to do it in a slightly different way. But beyond that we need to deal with a considerable amount of historical baggage and memes, the fallacious ideas that connect physical ability and mental capacity, the invidious beliefs that we should be pitied and cared for, and all the rest of the disablist claptrap that tries to paint us as somehow less.

SF is potentially a very useful vehicle for challenging the social side of things, because it doesn't have to bind itself to the fixed realities of contemporary life. Truly alien aliens may be sadly rare, but we can use a distinct human society as easily to make our point, as Bujold does with Barrayar.

Universal Design

[(Anonymous)]

I've thought about universal design from a very different perspective. I'm a Disability Equality and Human Rights Trainer at the Birmingham Disability Resource Centre. I can be contacted via bfindlay@disabiliy.co.uk if you want to see my take on it.

[oneoffdave.livejournal.com]

The most 'accessible' future I've read is in Iain M Bank's Culture novels although in that disability can be engineered out. The possibility of a flexible semi-aware environment that adapts to those around it would be interesting. The economic life of the society would affect abelism depending on whether working was seen as the norm and those not able to work in the accepted manner being seen as outsiders. A leisure society where difference and eccentricity are common would be less abelist I feel. Choosing to retain your disability when you can be re-engineered into almost any form would be more about identity than practicalities. The same would be true of gender and race assuming the bio-engineering processes are available.

[dwgism.livejournal.com]

The whole idea of a cure is one that's much more complex than most people readily identify. I was horrified when Weber and Flint's 'Torch of Freedom' talked about the Honorverse's leading medical ethicists, the Beowulfans, 'eliminating' autism. You could lessen the disruptive elements of autism like sensory overload without it being too controversial, but there's a considerable number of people out there who are perfectly happy to be neuro-diverse and have absolutely no wish to be cured, thank you!

You have a very valid point about the significance of whether society expects people to work, but there's the parallel point of whether it enables people to work, and by enables I mean something much more positive than Heinlein's repugnant line in Starship Troopers "if you came in here in a wheelchair and blind in both eyes and were silly enough to insist on enrolling, they would find you something silly to match. Counting the fuzz on a caterpillar by touch, maybe." That line becomes doubly disablist when we remember that enlisting is the only route to the franchise in that civilization. In contemporary society we see considerable pressure on disabled people to work, but no matching pressure on employers to employ us and the virtual fetishisation of the 'protestant work ethic', leading to a widespread view, often fostered by the tabloid press, that disabled people are spongers on the welfare state. The problem for SF is in challenging views where society is in denial, 'everyone knows' that ADA and the DDA and the like mean that every building is accessible and no one will ever be turned down for work because of a disability; everyone, that is, but those of us who actually are disabled. I can write something to highlight the double standards, but if people are in active denial that the double standards exist then does it do any good?

The Culture is very much a special case in SF; it's operating at the indistinguishable-from-magic level of technology, which is unusual enough, and it is explicity communist, which is virtually unheard of in a literature often dominated by right-wing American viewpoints. That and the excessive degree of genetic manipulation within the Culture populace makes the physical aspect of disability largely unknown, OTOH it's clear quite a few of Bank's protagonists have definite mental problems, so disability still exists in some form. It's noticeable that Banks tends to write about the fringes of the Culture, areas where Special Circumstances needs to intervene and the ability of the Minds to accomplish anything that is wanted are circumscribed, suggesting that the sheer flexibility of the Culture makes a conventional narrative difficult. In the end the Culture is probably too different for a story set within it to shine a light on contemporary disability issues. Where a Culture-like society is potentially useful is when it's used to compare and contrast with how things really are on Earth, as Banks did with Communism in The State of the Art, but mostly I think we need a less advanced level of technology for the 'this isn't good enough, we can do better' message to work.

[oneoffdave.livejournal.com]

By an 'expectation' of work, I was thinking more of societies where, like the culture everything is provided and work is effectively a hobby, as opposed to less advanced or altruistic societies where work is a necessity to put food on the table so to speak. I find Banks' concentration on characters on the fringe of the culture part of the charm as it expresses an opinion that while a paradise-like society might be utopian, to get 'life' and drive there needs to be a little (or more) conflict.

I was thinking a lot about how his characters choose to manifest and seeing that as their identity and it made me wonder if people would still identify as disabled and choose that 'body-form' whilst allowing effector fields and the like to overcome a lot of the practical issues.

As you say, setting a story in that universe would say little about disability and identity today and the life choices people have to make. I must re-read William Gibson's "The Winter Market" which has a character with a degenerative condition 'going silicon' and transposing their personality into a virtual construct. Each time I read it, I feel differently about it. Half of me dislikes it as it posits a future where the enabling technology (a carbon fibre exo-skeleton) still hampers as much as it enables (causes pressure sores) and the only way the character can earn a living and remain productive is to cross over. But that fact the she has the choice and elects to do this strikes me as positive too.

I grew up reading the 'classic' American rayguns and bugs SF and didn't see the eugenic agenda in the background, even in less gung-ho stuff like Asimov but I never really identified with any character and that's what I think's lacking in SF, that diversity of voices. As you said about autism, there are things that could be done to make everyday life easier but total removal would be a 'disowning' of who one is. Non-disabled authors, either though ignorance, mis-placed benevolence or eugenic beliefs, still stick to the medical model and think that we want technology to 'cure' us. I'd like a better prosthesis but don't want to regrow a leg and foot.

I suppose it falls to those disabled people who can write, to try and develop their voices and move us into the SF mainstream.

[dwgism.livejournal.com]

'The Winter Market' is possibly my favourite short story, though I'm ambiguous about Lise's attitude towards disability -- summed up in the 'I like to watch' comment. The technology does cause her problems, but she's not exactly someone taking good care of herself. Given her situation, going silicon isn't an unreasonable solution for her, but the timing is arguably premature.

SF does historically suffer from a predominance of straight, white, male, middle class, over-muscled heroes, but it's gradually seeing the rise of writers who aren't afraid to create characters from different social or ethnic groups, who are female or gay (though male and gay still seems to be under-represented). What it's not really gotten to grips with is disability in primary characters that's more than a footnote, there are a few, but they're few and far between, largely it's still failing the Kobayashi Maru test by giving them prosthetics or whatever that fully enable them (c.f. Honor Harrington). I think that reflects the way that equality is developing in contemporary society. Most forms of overt discrimination stopped being generally acceptable sometime around the 1970s-80s, full acceptance lags a bit, but people generally wouldn't dream of articulating any issues they feel, because they know that won't go down well with others. But disablism lingers on, lagging a good 20-40 years behind the other 'isms. People are still in denial that their attitudes are disablist, or that disablism even exists, and that society-wide disablism carries through into the characters our writers create.

[orbitaldiamonds.livejournal.com]

I haven't read the "Brainship" books but now I'm really wanting to.

I'm here via your link in the comments of Einstein's article and am an amateur disability activist myself. I use the Social Model too, and also the Empowerment Model (PWD are customers, Doctors/carers/etc. provide a service).

I'm working on a story for the contest, and mine takes place in an underground moon colony that I was writing about for something else so it's a good exercise anyhow. It's not a Super Accessible Earth, it is a separate group of humans who made a fresh start with the help of aliens. While there wasn't much of a big deal regarding all the accessibility things in the various cities of the colony, but those who did whine about the cost were told "Dude. Someday you will be really old and you'll want that ramp for your scooter. You'll want font size options on your restaurant menus. You'll want SDH captioning at the bottom of every TV and movie screen." And so on.

Um...I hope that made sense, or at least was relevant.

P.S. Totally OT, but in ST:DS9, Nog won the Kobayashi Maru without cheating by bribing one of the captains. :P

[dwgism.livejournal.com]

All comments gratefully received ;)

To a degree we can excuse McCaffrey for 'The Ship Who Sang', I doubt she really thought about what her stories were saying about disability, but it's the excuse that comes from the ignorance of an earlier time, before we fought our way out of the attic. The later Brainship stories are more problematical, they were written in the early to mid '90s when the problems with the setting should have been more apparent.

As for doctors providing a service, they're just mechanics with delusions of grandeur ;)

[orbitaldiamonds.livejournal.com]

Right on. ;)

*fistbump*

[dwgism.livejournal.com]

I've been offline most of the month or I would have done this sooner.

Redstone's contest is now over and the winning story has been published. The winner is 'Lunar Voices' by Nick Wood, which you can read at http://redstonesciencefiction.com/2010/09/lunar-voices/ , while Sarah Einstein talks about the judging process at http://redstonesciencefiction.com/2010/09/possible-future/

I think 'Lunar Voices' is perfectly passable as a story, but for me, as a disabled SF fan, it falls foul of the situation I talked about in my initial blog. Once again a story cheats its way around the Kobayashi Maru of disability with technology that makes disability irrelevant, rather than truly engaging with the interaction of disability and society. An accessible environment is far more than just the physical dimension within which disabled people exist. Mary, and disability, are basically along for the ride here - disability as foreign language fails to challenge the issue SF has with creating believable disabled characters with a real depth to them. Phulani has depth, but Mary seems a cypher who talks without us every learning about her, the complex person for whom having BSL as a first language is only part of her identity, part of the person with whom society interacts. I can't help thinking that the story would have been so much stronger with Mary as the viewpoint character.

Of course, all this could just be me pouting because it wasn't my entry selected, but I hope I'm deeper than that. If I raised my concerns by blog then I had to similarly raise them in fiction, and if those concerns still exist with the result then I have to be true to my beliefs and say so.

I don't think I disagree with anything that Sarah says in either of her essays, I applaud her for her discussion of the judging process, and kudos to Redstone for running the contest, there are simply wider aspects of disability, and environment and society, and the way that SF/F approaches them, that I'd hoped to see addressed.