Accessing the Future: A Disability-Themed Anthology of Speculative Fiction

Accessing the Future

A Disability-Themed Anthology of Speculative Fiction

Edited by Kathryn Allan and Djibril al-Ayad

Published by Futurefire.net Publishing, 2015

• Acknowledgements
  
• Preface, JoSelle Vanderhooft
  
• Introduction, Kathryn Allan and Djibril al-Ayad
  
• Pirate Songs, Nicolette Barischoff
  
• 19.12.2014_A Future Without Pain (illustration), Comebab
  
• Pay Attention, Sarah Pinsker
  
• Invisible People, Margaret Killjoy
  
• Julienne the Technician (illustration), Fabian Alvarado
  
• The Lessons of the Moon, Joyce Chng
  
• Screens, Samantha Rich
  
• To the Pitch (illustration), L.E. Badillo
  
• A Sense All its Own, Sara Patterson
  
• Better to Have Loved, Kate O’Connor
  
• Needs More Coffee (illustration), Rachel Keslensky
  
• Morphic Resonance, Toby MacNutt
  
• Losing Touch, Louise Hughes
  
• futurecoffee (illustration), Vincent Konrad
  
• into the waters i rode down, Jack Hollis Marr
  
• Playa Song, Petra Kuppers
  
• Flux (illustration), Pandalion Death
  
• Puppetry, A.C. Buchanan
  
• Lyric, A.F. Sanchez
  
• High Handed (illustration), Jane Baker
  
• Courting the Silent Sun, Rachael K. Jones
  
• Everyday Future (illustration), Tostoini
  
• In Open Air, David Jón Fuller
  
• Afterword, Derek Newman-Stille
  
• Contributors
  
• Copyright
  

Acknowledgements

We are very grateful to our generous copy-editors and proofreaders, Regina de Búrca, Maureen Kincaid Speller and Valeria Vitale.

Our eternal thanks to the many people who supported the fundraiser on IndieGogo, which enabled this anthology to happen at all: the 309 people who showed faith in this project by pre-ordering the book or contributing money to the campaign; the extremely kind people who helped to spread the word, wrote guest posts, interviewed us or allowed us to promote the campaign on their websites or networks, or donated rewards, especially Steven Gould, Nicola Griffith, Morgan J. Locke, Lyda Morehouse, Cheryl Morgan, Nisi Shawl, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Jo Thomas and Lynda Williams.

You’re all rock stars, every one of you!

Preface

JoSelle Vanderhooft

The Future Will Be Accessible

My life is a familiar piece of science fiction. You probably know at least a dozen stories just like it. Extraterrestrial gets stranded on Earth. At first they’re baffled and a little bit frightened by the culture, but they quickly learn to hide or disguise themselves by mimicking the behaviors of these strange new creatures—or else. “Else” usually being an evil government agency that does Bad Things to any non-human tourists. Reese’s Pieces, Big Macs, and other product placements are optional, of course.

I’m saying this with my tongue firmly affixed to the inside of my cheek, mind you. On the other hand, being an alien in an alien land is such an accurate description my life that calling it a metaphor feels like lying. I imagine this sentiment might sound familiar to other disabled SF fans and creators, particularly if they, like I do, subscribe to the social model or personal-experience model of disability. To put it another way, although disability is a neutral but ultimately subjective part of the human condition, it is often one that can be isolating, frustrating, and even dangerous at times, given that we live in a world that expects bodies and minds to perform to certain standards and seems unable to cope when they don’t.

As a product of this world, science fiction can be just as abled and ableist as anything else. If we subtract stories of disabilities as superpowers, or metaphor stories like those of homesick aliens (which aren’t always explicitly about disability even though they may ring true to many disabled fans), we’re often left with whole worlds and human futures that don’t address us—or, more worryingly, suggest or outright state that we have been cured and/or eugenicised out of existence. Given the number of pioneering SF authors and creators who were disabled—or who, with today’s medical knowledge might well identify as disabled and/or neurodivergent in particular—the ableism in SF is especially baffling and awful. Given the overwhelming number of disabled scientists—Leonardo Da Vinci, Thomas Edison, Stephen Hawking, and quite possibly Alan Turing to name only a few of the most recognizable—it becomes downright insulting and erasing. Currently, feminists respond to the “fake geek girl” phenomenon and sexism in fandom by reminding men that a woman wrote the first science fiction novel in the West, and that women organized the first fan-run SF conventions. I would likewise submit that disabled people remind the abled that the modern world they take for granted would not have been possible without our minds, our bodies, our genius.

For what is much of science and technology if not the ongoing pursuit of accommodations? Our human bodies and the systems that power them—even when “typical” and “healthy” by social standards—are fragile, prone to the damage of accident, the ravages of disease, the hostility of environment, and, ultimately, death. We can only survive comfortably within a laughably minuscule set of temperatures, so we create shelters, clothing, cooling and heating systems to keep from freezing or baking to death. To speak in less dramatic terms, our bodies are also not designed to travel hundreds of miles per hour, fly, and breathe underwater or at high altitudes. Yet, we have created accommodations to do all of the above.

Likewise, much of science fiction is, at its heart, the story of the search for accessibility or what happens when something we can’t access now—outer space, time travel, telepathy—is or becomes accessible to us. Captain Nemo couldn’t have explored the ocean or planned his revenge without his Nautilus; the Federation could not explore strange new worlds without their starships; the Doctor and his friends could not engage in timey-wimey shenanigans without his TARDIS backed by millennia of Time Lord science and tech.

However, the ultimate question in science fiction as in our nonfiction lives remains: accessible for whom? Just as few abled people see stairs, printed books, or air-conditioning as accommodations, starships, time travel, and telepathy largely remain the playgrounds of the abled. Not so, though, in the anthology before you. The fifteen stories herein center disabled people on every page, in every keystroke, in futures disarmingly likely and uncannily unfamiliar. And just like the futures from which they hail, no two of them are interchangeable—something that abled discourse has yet to understand.

Because life itself is a constant search for accommodation in an unaccommodating universe, many of these stories feature disabled people trying to navigate environments whose designs are anything but universal. When pirates save her from a wrecked space ship, the clever but coddled heroine of “Pirate Songs” must learn to navigate a ship—and a culture—that has never heard of spina bifida. An autistic in “Lyric” uses a program to communicate with the allistic (non-autistic) people around them while reaching out to a Frankenstein’s monster of a creature that the neurotypical world can’t figure out what to do with. Some are also critical of assistive technology—which, like all things in life, is not without its flaws. In “Screens,” where the titular devices have made the invisible world of brain chemistry visible, our protagonist grapples with the question of whether this tech has made the world a more welcoming place for invisibly disabled people, or a more intrusive one. “Better to Have Loved” even goes as far as to question what defines a disability in a future that considers grief to be disabling and thus something to be gotten rid of. Where does the line fall, it asks, between a part of the human experience society defines as abnormal and one that would cause pain, suffering, and other “undesirable” effects even in the most accommodating of cultures?

Of course, no one spends 100 percent of their time thinking about or wrestling with accommodations, and not all stories about disabled people should be about such struggles. Some, for that matter, should also celebrate the talents endowed to disabled people by our disabilities. Throughout history, after all, we have been leaders and revolutionaries, philosophers and artists, titans and shapers of the world for centuries to come. And sometimes, perhaps more importantly, we have been average, everyday people whose differences and quiet acts of defiance have made all the difference. This is the case of an ordinary soldier in “Puppetry,” an army doctor with ADHD in “Pay Attention,” a legally blind pilot of fighter robots in “A Sense all Its Own,” and a mother who can barely move enough to leave her bed yet who changes her body—like the moon itself—to save her family in “The Lessons of the Moon.”

I would be remiss to finish the preface to this astounding anthology without mentioning the other ways in which it is diverse. One continuous problem of disability activism—at least in the United States, where I’m from—is its failure to resemble and include the people it represents. As in many other movements for social change, those taken more seriously by doctors, commentators, and other authorities are frequently white, male, cisgender, heterosexual, not immigrants, and at least vaguely Christian in practice or heritage. Few of the people in
Accessing the Future
fit all or even a few of the above. Many are girls or women—and women in STEM or military fields in particular; some are of no specific gender; many are lesbian, gay, or bisexual; and many are of color. If we are ever to make any significant gains as disabled individuals, we must prioritize the stories of disabled people who are also oppressed because of sex, sexuality, gender identity, race, economic status, immigrant status, or other marginalized identities—both in fiction and in our nonfictional everyday lives. The book before you is, I think, a strong movement toward a vision of accessibility that truly typifies the motto “nothing about us without us.”

A part of me would like to say, in closing, that I felt a little less alien after reading these unforgettable stories. To a degree, this is true, as the stories of people like us often have that effect. More accurately, though, I think that I am now more comfortable in my alienness for the experience. Chances are, I will never feel entirely at home in a world where my needs for accessibility are often dismissed as “special treatment,” “laughable,” or even “cheating.” But you know what? Being an alien isn’t necessarily bad. It can be a neutral thing—or even a good thing. In any case, it isn’t a reason to hide away or try to become something that I simply am not.

May all our futures be so positive, so accessible.

Ft. Lauderdale, FL

March 2015

Introduction

Kathryn Allan and Djibril al-Ayad

Disability, like all assumptions of what is and is not “normal,” is defined by society’s expectations—it is not a person’s ability or impairment but the willingness of our culture to include and accommodate all people that draws the line between disadvantage and accessibility.

In other words, disability is located, not at the site of the individual, but at the site of culture and society. When we imagine an accessible future, the question is not how should any one disabled person change to fit (or, even worse, be eliminated from) that future, but how can society adapt to that person and all people.

One of the questions that we were asked during the campaign to crowdfund this professional-rate anthology was why were we interested in editing a volume of disability-themed speculative fiction (SF). The initial answer to the question was relatively simple: we want to see more SF stories that feature people with disabilities as three-dimensional characters, as people who have strengths and flaws, who succeed and fail, dream and scheme, as they are and as they want to be (and not as flat inspirations or as nightmare villains for an able-bodied audience). In addition to this response, however, was our desire to move disability into the larger “We Need Diverse Books” conversation. As disability still largely bears the aura of “something not to talk about,” there are too few mainstream conversations that address disability identity with words and insights from people with disabilities themselves. We want to open up the conversation to challenge what (especially able-bodied) people think of when “disability” is raised. Each of the fifteen stories in
Accessing the Future
deals with some aspect or aspects of what it means to identify as disabled and how the experience of being disabled impacts the ways a person moves in and interacts with the larger world. In addition, the eight illustrations (and our cover art) tell stories of their own in order to further open up the anthology to people who are better able to engage with and think about disability through pictures than through words.