Damn - Stella Young, RIP

I logged on this evening to find my Facebook full of fellow crips posting links to pieces by/about Australian disability rights campaigner Stella Young, had an 'Oh, shit' moment and tracked them back to an announcement she's died at 32.

Her piece on Inspiration Porn is probably the piece of disability writing/performance I link to more often than anything on the net and I can't think of a better way to tell you about her:

I'm Not Your Inspiration (TED version - there's an older text version which is the version I first saw, but which I can't currently find)

ABC piece on her with more links: Stella Young: remembering a high-profile disability activist through comedy, public speaking

And in her own words "I am not a snowflake. I am not a sweet, infantilising symbol of the fragility of life. I am a strong, fierce, flawed adult woman. I plan to remain that way in life, and in death."

December Dazed - Re-reading one of your Formative Books as an Adult

From the moment jesse_the_k suggested this there was only one book I was going to write about.

Well, actually there were two, but I'm going to write about them both for the same reason. (And this is really helpful because I've been meaning to write an essay starting with them for several months now, and this may be the kick I need to get the thing done).

My two books are both Golden Age of SF classics, Heinlein's Starship Troopers (1959) and Anne McCaffrey's The Ship Who Sang (1969) (Ship is a little late for the Golden Age label, but I'd argue it shares the same aesthetic).

I guess I encountered them both in late teens - I strongly suspect both my copies came from the bookshop at Lancaster University, so I'd be 19-20ish when I read them in around about 1982/3. My local library when I was growing up had a reasonable supply of juvenile SF, so I grew up reading Heinlein, Clarke and Norton, but it was less good on anything adult, while my small market-town home town didn't have any large bookshops (a small W H Smiths was about it), so uni was really the first chance I had for regular access to a bookshop with a reasonable selection of adult SF and I had some catching up to do. Nowadays I'd probably call Ship Who Sang YA, and you can make a case for it for the Heinlein too, which apparently was written first as YA, then re-written as more of an adult work, but has probably drifted back to being a YA as genre boundaries shift.

They were both books that seized my imagination and left a lasting impression, the Heinlein predictably as I've always been a fan of military SF, the McCaffrey less so, a heroine who's a singing spaceship? There are some shared elements of bildungsroman, but otherwise few common elements - at least as most people read them.

Starship Troopers is the story of Johnny Rico who is recruited into the Mobile Infantry, given a suit of powered armour and a nuclear grenade launcher and goes off to fight anything non-human as a soldier for the Terran Federation. There's the requisite training segment (flogging as an approved training aid in a modern military?), followed by all-out war with the arachnoid Bugs. Scattered through this are various characters acting as glove-puppets for Heinlein in didactic mode, which isn't exactly news WRT Heinlein books, but Troopers probably takes it to an extreme not present in most of his other books. The Terran Federation has a distinctly authoritarian edge and the Heinlein glove-puppets lecture us on how the franchise and right to hold public office is only extended to those who have undertaken a term of Federal Service and why that is for the good of all (plus the usual Heinlein cult of the gun stuff). When I read Starship Troopers it was the height of the Cold War, and I fully planned on making a career in the defence industry if not the military itself, so the appeal was obvious (and I was significantly more right wing in my general politics at that age than nowadays), but even then I found the political system disturbing in ways I wasn't then able to define.

The Ship Who Sang, by contrast, is the story of Helva, who is born disabled, selected by Central Worlds for service as a shell-child and treated to limit her future growth so that she can be encased in a shell for future service as the central brain of a city or starship. She grows up in a state orphanage to become a spaceship, discovers she can sing, has adventures, finds a guy who can love her in spite of the whole spaceship thing, and heads off into the sunset with him. Not my typical fare, but I did like McCaffrey's writing and Helva is a very lovable character.

And there we stayed until I happened to re-read both in the early-Noughties. I was active on Compuserve's SFLit at the time, which had a book club element, and ISTR we did both of them, probably as they were books lots of us were aware of and could easily lay our hands on, and I found my reading of both books had utterly changed. Two (maybe three) things had happened to drive that change: I'd settled into my adult politics, which I usually describe as bleeding heart liberal, I'm in general fairly well to the left of any of the major parliamentary parties on social/economic policies; and I'd become noticeably disabled and started to develop an understanding of disability politics (when precisely I became disabled is a messy question, but I started thinking of myself as disabled in the very late 80s and my politics settled on the activist setting in the early Oughties). And the third thing is that I was late to adult maturity in the neurotypical sense of things - hell I'm still working stuff out. And it was fair to say that both books now horrified me.

I now recognise Starship Troopers as a sort of forerunner to some of the more openly/clearly libertarian works of SF we see today from a clique of right-wing US authors of military SF. It's fetishization of Federal Service is probably a consequence of Heinlein being invalided out of his military career before WWII, but as I'm writing this I'm comparing it with the outright fetishization of the openly Fascist society of the Draka in S M Stirling's eponymous series (which I've been flicking through recently) and if it falls short of Fascism then it's only by degree. Starship Troopers openly says democracy belongs in the hands of military veterans and that civilians who haven't served are beneath contempt (look particularly at the characterisation of Rico's father). A lot of people criticized Paul Verhoeven's film for playing up the fascist elements in Starship Troopers, but to be honest they're there to play up (it's possible this is more apparent if you're European rather than American as America does have a distinct element of fetishizing military service and demanding it for most political figures). And then there's Heinlein's attitude to disability (and remember, invalided out): firstly we have Rico's recruiting sergeant, who is visibly a triple amputee, uniform tailored to make this clear to scare the potential recruits with what might happen to them - but he has a perfectly good set of  prosthetics to put on once he's done for the day. Beating people with the 'disability is something to be scared of' stick is particularly problematical as we campaign to try and make people treat disability as normal, so that was never going to go down well.  Then there's a comment mid-way through the book that if someone who was severely disabled, say deaf-blind, wanted to serve, then they would find them a way, probably by sticking them in a room and getting them to count the hairs on a centipede as make-work. Not only does this have echoes of locking the unpleasant crip away in the attic, but there's an underlying contempt that says severely disabled people are only good for make-work. Of course the reality is that with contemparary reasonable adjustment policies there are deaf-blind people holding down high-powered jobs, and for that matter I had a 20-odd year career doing cutting-edge defence stuff, most of that while pretty significantly disabled. All-out war against the alien hordes, which has the greatest value for society - enabling the disabled person to be a weapon scientist (or whatever), or locking them away doing make-work counting centipede hairs?

So yes, nowadays I find Starship Troopers deeply problematical.

Turning to The Ship Who Sang, as I read it now as a disabled adult I see:

• That Central Worlds euthanizes the overwhelming majority of disabled babies
• That it chooses a select few with high IQ to enslave as shell-children (comparisons with child soldiers seem entirely valid)
• That those children are taken away from their parents (and that their parents willingly allow that).
• That no effort is made to treat the children's disabilities or enable them to become normal members of society - Helva would be entirely capable of living independently at current levels of technology, never mind Central Worlds levels
• That those children are then deliberately stunted and neutered in a way reminiscent of the worst of the Baby Ashley/Pillow Angel atrocity
• That in an echo of Victorian and Pre-Victorian locking the cripple away in the attic those children are then deliberately locked away in shells lest any right-thinking person see them (and made life-support dependent even if they weren't)
• That they are brainwashed to believe this is for the best, with anyone who disagrees subjected to mockery (look at the treatment and characterization of the 'do gooders' who monitor the shell children).
• That having had their childhoods stolen they are then charged for the privilege of becoming literal cogs in the Central Worlds machine in a system of indentured servitude/debt peonage - oh hell, let's just call it what it is, slavery.
• That having shut the crips away in the attic once by encasing them in the shells they are then shut away for a second time by encasing them in the controls of their ship/city/whatever, removing the little independent mobility they had left to them and forever barring them from going anywhere in their society - they become not so much citizens as infrastructure
• That Helva is then sent out, with little training and some decidedly dubious choices for her 'brawn' partner as a Central Worlds troubleshooter into situations which repeatedly nearly get her killed.
• That she is stalked in decidedly creepy fashion by her boss, and eventually decides that he's the man for her.
• And that they all live happily ever after.

If I find Starship Troopers problematical, then I find the society of The Ship Who Sang utterly loathsome, and yet Helva is still a lovable character and it's Rico's society most contemporary readers find problematic. Both books are products of the eras in which they were written, eras in which the idea that disabled people are equal were even less understood than today, but when we read them today, we necessarily judge them with the understanding we have today, and neither fares well.