I was struggling with what I wanted to say until about 9PM last night when I realised you can interpret The Ship Who Sang as a cure narrative. It doesn't cure Helva and the other shell children by making them 'proper' humans, it cures them by making them starships.
TSWS is SF's cultural touch-stone for how to write disability, and it does it by saying "we don't need to listen to them, they are our burden, we know what's best for them" and "they need to be fixed to be like the rest of society". And that compromises SF's core premise, that we can use the genre to step outside society and look at it from a different angle.
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Date: 2018-02-28 09:35 am (UTC)TSWS is SF's cultural touch-stone for how to write disability, and it does it by saying "we don't need to listen to them, they are our burden, we know what's best for them" and "they need to be fixed to be like the rest of society". And that compromises SF's core premise, that we can use the genre to step outside society and look at it from a different angle.
Which is bad for SF.