Disabled People Destroy Science fiction!

Every year, Uncanny Magazine does a special "Destroy Science Fiction!" issue. (Women Destroy Science Fiction! Queers Destroy Science Fiction! People of Color Destroy Science Fiction!") This year, it's "Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction!"

The issue itself isn't out yet, but many of the personal essays about disability and science fiction are available for free on the Kickstarter page. They're all good, and you should totally check them out.  Here are some of my faves:

K.C. Alexander, We Are Not Your Backstories:

Science fiction shapes generations—how we think, the way we act. It influences the careers we choose and our thirst for knowledge. It cautions against the worst of our impulses, and quietly teaches us empathy. Without knowing it, we are slowly acclimated to people and beliefs that live outside our rigid monocultures.

A.T. Greenblatt, The Stories We Find Ourselves In:

So, I'll let you in on a secret, the thing I've learned about having a life-long disability, the thing that lots of stories never quite grasp: The real trick, the true solution to a disability, is to find a balance between your abilities and your goals.

Michael Merriam, We Are Not Daredevil. Except When We Are Daredevil:

I live in this world. I can't toss my white cane aside when I need to spring into action: the cane goes with me everywhere. I travel around my city on public transportation. My other senses are not supernaturally sharper because I am blind. I simply pay better attention to those other senses. It's a learned skill. I live within my blindness every day, and I want to read about fictional characters who also live with and within their blindness.

 

Marissa Lingen, Malfunctioning Space Stations:

I have a major balance disorder. When I am awake and able to use all my senses, I can reason out the vertical. If you make me close my eyes, I can still get it to within about five degrees of the correct answer if I'm sitting still on a firm surface. If I’ve got a squishy surface, motion, or other things confusing my senses, doubtful. Asleep? All bets are off. I literally do not know which way is up.

Since I have read and written science fiction for decades, what my sleeping brain knows to do with this much disorientation is to process it into a malfunctioning space station. And so I dream. Occasionally my dreams veer into carnival rides, roller coasters, giant swooping swings. But that is someone else's genre. This is mine.

H. Ace Ratcliff, Nihil de Nobis, Sine Nobis:

I narrowly avoided the temptation to throw my Kindle and watch the book shatter into a million plastic pieces. If it had been a printed paperback, I’m positive I would be able to show you the dent in the wall. “For the record,” I tweeted out to the hashtags The Expanse was using, “you can be a fucking Valkyrie in a goddamn wheelchair.” I can assure you that any human with the wherewithal, sheer willpower, and pain tolerance to put her skeleton back into place on an hourly basis absolutely deserves a place in any mythological pantheon.

Day Al-Mohamed, The Stories We Tell and the Amazon Experiment:

As an example, I once asked a room full of authors what their response would be if I asked them to make the protagonist in their current Work-in-Progress a woman – most nodded, yesses were heard around the room. Then I asked if they could make their character a person of color – again, nods around the room. Then I asked if they would make the character disabled – silence. The discomfort was palpable. In theory diversity and disability was great to include in fiction but when it came to implementation, they couldn’t easily connect disability with their protagonist. They had trouble adjusting to the practical reality of disability existing outside of the boxes they knew. This is why 134 stories on Amazon could be broken down into five story categories.

Ada Hoffman, Everything Is True: A Non-Neurotypical Experience with Fiction:

When I read #ownvoices autistic characters, I often think the authors have had that same feeling. Many of these characters have devoted family, friends, romantic partners, even when the world at large is awful to them. Most of them first have to overcome a broken relationship with themselves. To learn to believe that they're worthy as they are.

With autistic characters written by NT authors, it often feels like everyone is tired of their shit from the start.

You don't have to be tough. People sometimes say things like, "If you can be discouraged from writing, you should be," and use that as a way to justify being unkind to people who are tender. I don't think it's meant as a cudgel against disabled people specifically, but it can function as one. If you doubt your abilities, if you are sometimes crushed, if you feel like an impostor—that's fine. It's normal. If only tough people wrote stories, then we'd only have their perspectives, and we would lose all the things other people—you—have to offer.

Haddayr Copley-Woods, Move Like You're From Thra, My People:

I was glad I didn’t have this unfortunate internalized disableism stilling my movements, but I didn’t know why I’d found it so easy to make the switch until I sat down with my little boys to watch The Dark Crystal, which I hadn’t watched in decades.

I didn’t know. It took my breath away. The reason why I am fine with moving like this, the reason I am fine with people staring and why I love myself this way, is because of The Dark Crystal.

 

The issue is more than fully funded, right now they're adding content left and right as more people pledge, and if they get to $45k (they're at $39,425 with 9 days left to go) they'll do a hardcopy of it for supporters pledging $50 or more.

Star Wars Vid Rec: That's What's the Matter

I bought a vid at the Vividcon Auction, from the lovely and talented grammarwoman! My music tastes are eclectic and nonstandard (basically, everything BUT modern popular pop/rock and modern country--it's not that I don't like them, it's that it all tends to blend together and sound the same), and I don't vid, which means there are a lot of songs that I think would make AWESOME fanvids that I know nobody will ever make, sigh.  (Okay, some of them might get made.  I'm actually surprised that nobody's done a Spock vid to The Logical Song by Supertramp, or a Goa'uld vid to Jeepers Creepers by Louis Armstrong.  Others ... I might think a werewolf vid to the old Big Band classic "Moonlight Becomes You So" would be hilarious, but I doubt anybody else would think it was funny enough to spend the time and effort to make, particularly given that it's a slow song and most vids are done to upbeat/fast songs.)

Anyway, I have a number vid ideas that will never get made if I don't pay someone else to do it, and so I'm always on the lookout for vid auctions featuring vidders offering those sources that I think would do a creditable job with the idea.  Which is how I bidded on (and ended up winning) grammarwoman's services to make a Star Wars fanvid to that old American Civil War hit, "That's What's the Matter."  And she did a really great job, and the vid is SO FUNNY.  You have to go see.

Title: That's What's the Matter
Source: Star Wars movies (Rogue One, Episodes IV-VII)
Music: "That's What's the Matter", Stephen Foster
Vid Download Link: 183 MB m4v file at Sendspace (If you'd like it in a different format, let me know.)

AO3 link.
DW link.

Summary: The Empire would have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn't been for those meddling Rebels and incompetent Imperial officers.