College Essays

In cleaning out a box of old crap, I discovered a few college essays I wrote. It would have been 1995-1996, and I 17 or 18 years old. I think they were for the college I did attend, as I recall culling more of them once before (though I specifically recall my Honors essay was about the lights of Shea Stadium, and is not in this batch). I wrote them on a word processor that my Mom gave me after she got a better one and I proved to her I could touch-type (it was my reward for learning to touch type). You would type one line at a time, you could edit that one line, and then it would do that one line as typewriter would. The pages are yellowed, except for some areas with white-out. The font is Courier New, because that's what typewriters can do, and despite it being a "word processor," it simply stored one line at a time and then used typewriter keys to rapidly type that single line out. Each page has the page number typed in, presumably manually, - 1 - , etc. The backs of the pages are photocopies of prints from a book of Escher's work, a letter from RIT about their Physics department that must have been in response to an inquiry I wrote, a page of trite homilies about friendship, and a parental signature page (unsigned) for my high school's Jewish Cultural Awareness Club trip from NYC to the US Holocaust museum.

The subject of "Chapter 8" and "Questioning" probably took place when I was around 14. The astute reader will notice that I fictionalized the sequence at the end of Chapter 8 to make it read better. Titles added now for convenience of referral.

( Chapter 8 )

( Questioning )

( Ender's Game )

( Perception )

Disability in Sci Fi

I was recently talking with calzephyr77 about how so few SF pieces include people with disabilities. The only book/series I could come up with, The Ship Who Sang by Anne McCaffrey has the same problem with disability as her other novels have with feminism, in that although she puts the disenfranchised individuals in the limelight, she does nothing to challenge the discriminatory nature of either present day or her fictional society. The only movie I could come up with while thinking then was Avatar, though Daredevil could also do.

I'm currently rereading Heinlein's "The Cat Who Walks Through Walls," my intent being to examine his treatment of women with my current understanding of feminism, rather than how I thought about the issue when younger. I have been pleasantly surprised when ever half hour or so something reminds me that the main character uses a prosthetic leg. It's an unavoidable part of the narrator's life and affects fro the little things like his walking speed to his choice to live in a low gravity environment, but it's not something that permeates every moment of his (or the reader's) thinking.

Can anyone make any other recommendations of SF books with characters with disabilities for me to read? The overall read needs to be good, but I'm curious about both good and bad treatments of disabilities.