davidgillon | Disability Writing Contest: The Future Imperfect

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.