Campbell is and will always be part of science fiction’s history. But history isn’t static, even if the facts of history stay the same. Anyone notable enough to be part of the historical record will find themselves the subject of reassessment, for however long they grace history’s record. It is, weirdly, a privilege not many people get. Campbell was never guaranteed a pedestal, or an award, or a conference in his name, even if he got them for a while. He was never guaranteed to keep them. No one is.
As a person with a disability, there is one aspect of your understanding of Huntington's last days that is a gigantic, glaring problem, for two reasons, neither of which you seem to have considered. And the aspect is this: did he, or did he not, wish to die? For you, this is an important point (and you may well be correct on it). I don't believe that it matters, for two reasons.
First, a desire to die is not rational. It is a mental illness. It is part of depression. If a healthy person desires to die, we get them help. If they kill themselves, it is seen as a great tragedy. But when a disabled person is depressed, oh, of course, what could be more natural! Of course they want to kill themselves! Of course they need help ... but we are quicker to offer help to end their life than we are to offer assistance towards a better quality of life and the sort of therapy and medication that might help them be happy. Why is a disabled person's life less worthy than an abled person's? You may have considered this, but your statement certainly doesn't reflect any such consideration. He wanted to die, so his wife can be excused for making it happen. It fits so well into the common narrative of disability and death. It's even used in cases where we know for a certainty that the murder victim did not want to die ... because even in cases where the victim left a ton of evidence that they were happy and wanted to live, people will ignore it because they believe that disabled people must and should be miserable. Of course they must have wanted to die. So therefore the murderer can be excused for having killed them. Regardless of what resources were available to help the couple in 1987 (or in the decade leading up to that during which everybody seems to have known they were depressed and possibly suicidal and nobody did much), we live now in a world with much greater resources to help and yet people still kill disabled people using this as the reasoning. Regardless of whether or not you rename the award, PLEASE reframe the discussion so that you are not contributing to this perception of depression and disability.
Second, let us assume for the sake of argument that he genuinely did wish to die. How did he come to have such a wish? When someone is completely dependent on another person, as Huntington was on Alice, it is incredibly easy for the dependent person to adopt their caretaker's opinions. It is a psychological defense tactic, and it is the same mechanism that produces Stockholm Syndrome. This extends even to suicide. If the "caretaker" wishes the dependent person to be dead, the dependent person will often passively accept their "caretaker's" wishes. (I use scare quotes here because if someone wants you dead or believes you would be better off dead, the level of care is often ... minimal, if not actively neglectful or abusive.) If they can get to someplace safer, though, where they are not told through word and actions that they should be dead and would be better off dead, their opinions on the subject often change DRAMATICALLY. Even staying with the same primary caregiver but having more social contact with the wider world can be enough to work such change.
So the idea that Huntington was suicidal himself is not the mitigating factor you imagine it to be.
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.H. Ace Ratcliff, Nihil de Nobis, Sine Nobis: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.
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.Haddayr Copley-Woods, Move Like You're From Thra, My People:
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.
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.
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