asterroc | Disability in Sci Fi

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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.

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Oh hey, don't forget the 77...there's another Calzephyr out there and we get mixed up all the time :-D

Here is that link to the io9 article I mentioned...I don't know if any of the books would be good - http://io9.com/5431416/20-science-fiction-characters-who-got-their-legs-back

I really liked the Redstone link you posted...I haven't read any of The Ship Who... books, but I didn't realize that they had the slavery aspect to them.

I have only read three Heinlein books...well, two and a half - Citizen of the Galaxy, Starship Troopers and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. I couldn't finish The Moon...it was just too rambly and the way the characters spoke just drove me up the wall!

I don't think I myself fully understood the slavery aspect when younger.

I just reread Citizen of the Galaxy recently myself. It's kinda odd, it feels incomplete, like it was trying to go somewhere but never got there.

It really does peter out towards the end - I was kind of thankful when I was done!

When Bud was a teenager he amassed a huge collection of paperbacks - he lived near a used bookstore and brought home boxes of books that were somewhat too icky to sell (missing covers, etc). One of them was Hunters of Gor. Oh man, what a poorly written book and I was surprised by just how awful the women were treated. It was a series that was always panned and I can see why. He had no idea he had that until we moved in together and I was going through all the boxes.

I think you recommended All The Myriad Ways to me - I found it while cleaning up the basement btw.

When it comes to advanced-technology future SF, it's a reasonable assumption that disabilities have been cured or altogether prevented by advanced medicine. As for other SF, no idea...

To some extent, disability is a social construct, and certain diseases don't even exist until increased technology allows us to detect them. I think that as long as there is variety within an intelligent species, there will always be things out of the norm that are considered disease or disability by that society. Hm, maybe one way to get rid of disease would be if no individual has any way to compare itself to others of its species.

Then I'd include Jordi from ST:TNG.

Good point. Sometimes I wondered why others didn't use the same thing he had since it was occasionally an advantage.

ooh! i just thought of professor X

There is one episode of TNG where Geordi's visor/disability ends up being critically important to the plot. It is called "The Masterpiece Society."

In that case, add to my list below: a character in Cory Doctorow's _Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom_ that loses his direct brain interface to the global information and trading network...that everyone else on the planet has.

And Bink at the start of "A Spell for Chameleon" (Piers Anthony).

I hear very good things about Lois McMaster Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan books.

Since you mention Heinlein, Manny in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress has prosthetic arms, and the poet Rhysling of "The Green Hills of Earth" is blind.

Gah! How could I have forgotten about Manny? Rhysling, maybe, but Manny? *sigh*

And yes, the Vorkosigan books are IMO excellent, and a better exemplar for this topic would be hard to find.

There's also a minor character in Spider Robinson's Callahan's Place books who's a blind black female ex-cop, because Spider never uses one adjective when four will do.

I'm not sure how much I'd count Avatar in that list, or Daredevil in a sense. Avatar lets the disabled character basically avoid the fact of his disability (and eventually escape it entirely); Daredevil basically has superpowers that make his disability almost irrelevant.

I just scanned my SF collection. Here's what I came up with:

Lois McMaster Bujold: the Vorkosigan saga and the Sharing Knife tetralogy. Both have a central character for whom the disability is significant, and in one case definitive. I highly recommend them for other reasons as well.

Stephen Bury, _Interface_: one of the main characters gets a stroke and the plot revolves around what's done to deal with that.

Stephen Donaldson, the Thomas Covenant Chronicles. The titular character has leprosy, and that defines him in some very, very important ways.

Heinlein has several other characters, generally retired military, that are disabled. (Heinlein himself was forced to take a medical discharge due to tuberculosis; he also got a stroke later.) One of those is a major character in _Citizen of the Galaxy_. Some others: Starship Troopers--the book, not the movie!--has several minor characters that are disabled (Lt. Col. Dubois, two of his instructors in officer candidate school (one blind, one paralyzed from the neck down), and the military 'recruiter' (missing a few limbs)).

Heinlein's Star Beast is an interesting case. It's hard for me to explain why without spoiling it utterly, though.

Frank Herbert's Dune series has at least two major characters that are blind (one by accident, one iatrogenically). Prostheses are available but not entirely trusted.

Katherine Kurtz has a medieval fantasy major/minor character (Tavis O'Neill) in the Deryni novels (the Camber sequence) that loses a hand. This is a big deal for him because he's a doctor.

Kim Stanley Robinson's {Red,Green,Blue} Mars series has a major character that suffers from a stroke; the repercussions are severe and lasting. Also there are a couple of characters that have pretty serious sanity issues.

Tolkein's Silmarillion has a couple of characters (one major, one minor) that each lose a hand. They hardly seem to notice, but then, almost everyone in the Silmarillion is pretty damned badass compared to practically anyone in the Lord of the Rings (Gandalf and Sauron not excluded).

That should do for a start. :)

Daredevil basically has superpowers that make his disability almost irrelevant.

This is a common thing in superhero comics; cf. Professor X.

Oh duh, I forgot about the character in Citizen of the Galaxy, which I finished just a week or so ago. Perhaps that means Heinlein writes them well?

Heinlein doesn't generally make a big deal of his characters' disabilities (which may be why you forgot about Baslim); they're a set of constraints that the character has to work with, but not generally a source of psychological trauma or even angst. Whether this means that he writes them well probably depends on how representative you think that is. :)

CS Friedman's "This Alien Shore" is populated with people whose brains are not neurotypical. The way the society (or at least the society on one planet) handles the range of different brain functionings is really interesting. I liked the book a lot, but it's been a while since I read it and I can't recall if/how problematic her handling of the issues is.

And to a lesser extent, Peter Watts' "Blindsight" also does that; the narrator and the other main characters all have some very unusual things going on with how they function in the world (mostly due to differences in brain structure/functioning, if I recall correctly), which might be considered disabilities in "normal" society. This is also one of the best hard SF novels I have read in years and years.

The an obvious problem I had with This Alien Shore is that it wasn't at all clear to me how a lot of the of non-neurotypical types weren't just mild variations of neurotypical. The autism-like one was obvious. The... I don't even know the real-life label that goes with one of them, since it didn't sound like a textbook description of any mental illness I'd ever heard of (severe mania with psychosis was my best guess), but there was another one that was pretty clearly not neurotypical. And of course there was the deeply inaccurate description/romanticization of dissociative identity disorder (multiple personalities); of all the non-neurotypical types, this is the one that came about in a very similar way to how it does IRL, so it ought to have been the most true-to-life. But anyway, there were at least two other types of variation that were clearly not supposed to be neurotypical--supposed to be as far from neurotypical as autistism--that read as basically neurotypical to me. But at the same time, there was this stated emphasis that they were not neurotypical.

Fredrick Pohl's Gateway has at least one character who has lost legs, so prefers to remain in a zero-g environment.

Robert Adam's Horseclans series has Blind Hari the Bard.

Somewhere in George O. Smith's Venus Equilateral is one of the earlier Brain In A Box characters, but I don't remember the details.

I am assuming that "dumb as a bag of hammers" doesn't count as a disability, since it is so common in fiction.

I am assuming that "dumb as a bag of hammers" doesn't count as a disability, since it is so common in fiction.

Depends how far you take it. What about "Flowers for Algernon"?

Well, I was thinking more Dan Browne

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Disability in Sci Fi

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"The Masterpiece Society"

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