Changing Capacities, Changing Identities: Disability in Science FictionRia CheyneLiverpool Hope Universitycheyner@hope.ac.uk

Disability in Science Fiction

• Alternative conceptions of ability, disability, and what constitutes a “normal” body.• Changing capacities – the alternative

environment (different worlds)• Changing identities - technological

enhancement• So what?

Alternative Environments• “The Country of the Blind” (1904)• “It was marvellous with what confidence

and precision they went about their ordered world. Everything, you see, had been made to fit their needs; each of the radiating paths of the valley area had a constant angle to the others, and was distinguished by a special notch upon its kerbing; all obstacles and irregularities of path or meadow had long since been cleared away; all of their methods and procedure arose naturally from their special needs.”

Alternative Environments

•Amy Thomson, Through Alien Eyes (1999)

• Islands in the Sky (1954)• Commander Doyle is

“perfectly adapted to his surroundings” and “the most agile man in the Station”

Disabling the ‘normal’ body

• No Man Friday (1956)• “For it came to me instantly [. . .]

that I was not the ‘highest’ life on Mars. On the contrary, I was a highly ill-adapted being. I lived with difficulty and by machines. I was no better adapted to survive on Mars than was a child on Earth that had been stricken by infantile paralysis and confined to an artificial lung.”

Technological Enhancement

• “Tango Charlie and Foxtrot Romeo” (1986)• “Megan Galloway had broken her neck

while still in her teens. She became part of the early development of a powered exoskeleton, research that had led to the hideously expensive and beautiful Golden Gypsy, of which only one was ever built. It abolished wheelchairs and crutches for her. It returned her to life, in her own mind, and it made her a celebrity.”

Technological Enhancement

• “The world was briefly treated to the sight of quadriplegics dominating a new art form.”• “her upper body was traced by

quite lovely filigree of gilded, curving lines. It was some sort of a tattoo, and it was all that was left of the machine called the Golden Gypsy.”

So what?

• Window onto contemporary attitudes.• Implications of technological advances – what if?• World that thinks disability (and normalcy)

differently.• “Readers and viewers find their own personal

interpretations of disability inevitably influenced by their imaginative encounters with disabled people in fictional works” (David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis, 2001).

So what?

• Science fiction “is a discourse that allows us to concretely imagine bodies and selves otherwise” (Sherryl Vint, Bodies of Tomorrow: Technology, Subjectivity, Science Fiction, 2007)• “by imagining strange worlds we come to see our

own conditions of life in a new and potentially revolutionary perspective” (Patrick Parrinder, “Introduction: Learning from Other Worlds” in Learning From Other Worlds: Estrangement, Cognition, and the Politics of Science Fiction and Utopia, 2000)

Try these…• Lois McMaster Bujold, Miles Vorkosigan series• John Varley, The John Varley Reader• Elizabeth Moon, Vatta’s War series• Anne McCaffrey, The Ship Who Sang• Amy Thomson, The Color of Distance and Through

Alien Eyes• Cordwainer Smith, The Rediscovery of Man• Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time• Mary Doria Russell, Children of God• Judith Merril, ‘That Only a Mother’• Tad Williams, Otherland series.