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Changing Capacities, Changing Identities: Disability in Science Fiction

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Title: Changing Capacities, Changing Identities: Disability in Science Fiction


1
Changing Capacities, Changing Identities
Disability in Science Fiction
  • Ria Cheyne
  • Liverpool Hope University
  • cheyner_at_hope.ac.uk

2
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?

3
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.

4
Alternative Environments
  • Islands in the Sky (1954)
  • Commander Doyle is perfectly adapted to his
    surroundings and the most agile man in the
    Station
  • Amy Thomson, Through Alien Eyes (1999)

5
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.

6
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.

7
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.

8
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).

9
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)

10
Try these
  • Lois McMaster Bujold, Miles Vorkosigan series
  • John Varley, The John Varley Reader
  • Elizabeth Moon, Vattas 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.
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