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Wednesday, September 05, 2007
Science Fiction and physical handicap
I bleg not for me, but for others. A former research student of mine, now a fully fledged PhD, is putting together some ideas for postdoctoral research. One of these is to look at science fiction and the representation of physical handicap. She asked me (and through the marvel that is the internet, I ask you) for any examples of the same that might come to mind. There are, as she noted, a fair few examples of blindness signifying in the genre, from H G Wells’s “The Country of the Blind" to John Varley’s “The Persistence of Vision" (both long short stories, and both excellent); but examples of other kinds of physical handicap are harder to come by. At least to me. The focus is to be on written SF, not film and telly (so not, say, Captain Pike--to be played, I hear on the sf-grapevine, in the forthcoming Trek XI movie by ... Tom Cruise, golly, gosh ... but I digress). I’ll admit I span my mental rolodex and came up blank; except for a distant memory of a legless astronaut who finds leglessness no handicap, and rather the reverse, in the zero-g environment in which he lives and works, in Clarke’s early juvenile Islands in the Sky. Other than that ... well, what am I missing? We can do better than that. Remember: books and short stories only. Scholarship will thank you.
Comments
She should check out Bernard Wolfe’s novel LIMBO, for sure. It’s set in a society where voluntary amputations become desirable, if I remember correctly. There are definitely many amputations and prosthetic limbs, in any case.
In Asimov’s Foundation trilogy (well, it was a trilogy when I read it), the Mule is of course a key character. I can’t remember exactly what his physical handicap is, though; it might just be overall puniness.
Did you want more blindness? Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Blind Geometer makes much of it as I recall.
In Anne McCaffrey’s “The Ship Who Sang” (1961), children born with severe physical handicaps but sound minds are placed into titanium ‘wombs’ equipped with electronic appendages and sensory apparatus. These “shell people” are installed as the thinking innards of interstellar rocket-ships. Sometimes they fall in love with their soft-shell pilots.
Both quadriplegia and severe COD are portrayed in Orson Scott Card’s Ender series ("Speaker for the Dead” and “Xenocide” respectively).
Some stories that spring to mind:
“Waldo” by Robert Heinlein
“Blue champagne” by John Varley
“The winter market” by William Gibson
I can’t think of a novel where physical disability is very central. There is a major character in Gibson’s “Count Zero” who is confined to a tank, and spends his days in a virtual reproduction of Barcelona.
I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.
All excellent examples; thank you.
Dave M.: the Mule’s handicap is that he is sterile (hence, Mule). But I guess that counts.
Zelazny and PKD’s Deus Irae?
That had an artist with no arms or legs.
I couldn’t remember the Mule’s exact handicap, either. Doesn’t Paul Atreides figure as a Tiresias-figure in one of the Dune books? Perhaps Children of Dune.
In Gibson’s Neuromancer the hero, once a hotshot hacker, has had the neural pathways responsible for allowing him to access the Matrix chemically burnt out-- certainly a disability in this near-future. His life course derailed, he becomes a depressed small-time crook and drug addict. The plot is set in motion when someone offers him a corrective surgery that will give him a second chance, if he’ll take a certain job-- and it will be reversed if he fails.
Blindness features pretty prominently in John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids.
Call Me Joe by Poul Anderson. It’s about a paraplegic who remotely controls a creature on Jupiter. It’s from the 50’s. That Only a Mother by Judith Merril, also from the 50’s, is about a mother who gives birth to a child with birth defects resulting from radiation.
I remember a great Asimov story I had in an anthology when I was a kid. I lost that book long ago, and haven’t been able to find to story since--so if anyone can help me, I would greatly appreciate it. The story concerned a human (ambassador?) on a planet populated by an alien species. It turns out that species has an extra sense (in addition to seeing, hearing, etc.), and the alien with whom the human discusses this praises the great art that was made for that sense. The alien then reveals that their studies show humans have a buried potential for that sense too; the aliens have been able to develop a serum which can stimulate that power in humans, but only for fifteen minutes, after which it will burn out and be gone forever. The human (despite being warned against it by the alien) asks to be administered the serum, and for fifteen minutes is able to experience a great piece of art for that sense (performed by an alien on some kind of keyboard instrument, if I remember correctly). That experience is described ecstatically; however, after fifteen minutes, he stops being able to experience it--and it concludes with him feeling doomed forever to “blindness,” though he still has his five human senses, and knowing he can never experience again a great beauty he only felt for a quarter of an hour.
Lois McMaster Bujold’s Miles Vorkosigan is a deformed hunchback with brittle bones, if I recall correctly. He’s the only disabled protagonist I can think of.
A quick Google search turned up a healthy bibliography attached to “Devices and desires: science fiction, fantasy and disability in literature for young people” from Disability Studies Quarterly, Winter 2004, Volume 24, No. 1.
Hoppy Harrington in Philip K. Dick’s “Doctor Bloodmoney” had no arms or legs.
The is a spacepilot dwarf in Fred Pohl’s “The Space Merchants”; I don’t know if that counts as a handicap. Also, there was a handicapped secondary character in “Gateway”.
Amy Sterling Casil has written often about handicaps.
http://www.fictionwise.com/ebooks/eBook1384.htm
To Kiss the Star:
24-year-old Melodie is confined to a wheelchair with cerebral palsy, a heart defect, and a retinal disease that took her sight six years ago. Amid the dreary routine at the Mary-Le-Bow Center, Melodie eagerly anticipates the bi-monthly visit from her friend John, a famous musician unaware of Melodie’s hidden romantic feelings for him. When a team of American scientists offer Melodie a chance at a new life by transplanting her brain into a spaceship, she knows it’s time to find out the truth about John, and the truth about herself.
Prince Red in Samuel R. Delany’s Nova was born missing an arm, and of course the whole plot turns on the special kind of blindness produced by looking into the heart of a star. Actually, Delany might be a good person to look at in general: for another example, a main character (can’t find my copy to get his name) in Babel 17 has had his language capacity damaged in such a way that he can’t use the first person.
Don’t know if this counts, but [spoiler warning] in Ursula Le Guin’s recent Gifts, a character is disabled in the sense that he doesn’t have the psychic powers of the rest of his family.
Another blindness example is Bob Shaw’s Night Walk, and Shaw was often interested in sight and memory - see Other Days, Other Eyes, for instance.
Hi!
Being somewhat handicapped myself I could not help but contribute…
There is a minor character in Pohl’s Gateway with no legs.
A major character in Tad Williams Otherland series has progeria, another is in a wheelchair and a third is more or less just a brain.
Heroine in a wheelchair (has a symbiont parasite) - I am just now reading Hunted by JA Gardner
At distant recollection (i.e. may be wrong), the mentally affected child in the Strugatskys’ “Roadside Picnic” also carries some physical traits, but I’m not sure she counts as physically handicapped for your purposes.
Also, Davros did feature in a spin-off novel. So, sorta.
Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash” has a character with an elaborate, high-tech prosthetic. And Philip K. Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” includes the character of John Isidore, labeled a chicken head. Though the novel emphasizes his mental disability, he also seems physically diminished. And his boss, I think, is going blind because of the dust. One has to be mentally and physically able in order to leave Earth in the novel.
(sorry for my English)
In Bob Shaw’s novel “Night Walk”, the protagonist Sam Tallon is an Earth agent in a mission in another planet. The enemy imprisonned him and took off his eyes, but he escaped with the glasses he has invented. When he wears the glasses he could see through the eyes of another animal of person. For example: when he escapes he has a bird tied in her showlder; after, he uses the eyes of the other pedestrians and even he saw himself in the eyes of his pursuers.
In “The Stars my Destination” the woman named Lady Olivia is blind. She could see “only” (with a protesis I supose) the infrared and the electromagnetic waves.
Carles.
Try the book “Expendable” by James Alan Gardner - the first in his ‘League of Peoples’ universe.
In the book, people with physical handicaps are members of an Explorers Corps, and are the first people sent down to the surface of a planet to see if they get eaten by the local monsters. They are called ‘E.C.’s or ‘Expendable Crewmembers’. They are, in essence, treated as expendable redshirts by the otherwise physically perfect members of society.
I don’t know if this counts as ‘science fiction literature’, but there’s also Grant Morrison’s fantastic run on the comic book series “Doom Patrol”. In comments he made when he started writing the series, he commented that as a kid he was always made uncomfortable by the Doom Patrol, since they were essentially a team of handicapped superheroes, which is exactly how he portrayed them in his writing.
The leader was confined to a wheelchair (just like Professor X without the telepathy), Rebus/Negative Man was so disfigured by radiation that he had to stay completely wrapped in bandages from head to foot, Crazy Jane suffered from multiple personality disorder, and Robotman was, as Morrison described him, a ‘total body amputee’.
In the novel of the Children of Men, Julian, the mother, has a ‘deformed’ hand and this is why she has been exempted from the fertility screenings all ‘healthy’ women have to undergo.
I recall a story by Theodore Sturgeon (?) in which everyone in the society bears burdens to equal those of the least members; i.e. those with keen sight wear corrective glasses to fragment their vision, the strong carry weights to hobble their abilities etc.
Barry Ross, I believe you’re thinking of Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron (pay no mind to the first paragraph in the link, it’s not part of Vonnegut’s story). It was made into a surprisingly good tv movie starring Sean Astin a.k.a. Sam Gamgee as Harrison.
Talking about Theodore Sturgeon, I’m remenbering more stories.
In “More Than Human”, Sturgeon tell as how… well… I copy de review from http://www.sfsite.com:
“In the first section, “The Fabulous Idiot,” the Gestalt is born, as its components come together for the first time: Lone, a mentally defective youth with a powerful telepathic gift; Janie, a stubborn child with telekinetic abilities; Bonnie and Beanie, twins who are incapable of speech and yet can teleport their bodies at will; and Baby, a profoundly retarded infant whose brain works like a computer. Each of these handicapped, misfit individuals is incapable of functioning on his or her own, but together they add up to a complete being: as Baby tells Janie, “the I is all of us.”
I don’t know if this helps (because I don’t know how capaciously this person wants to define “physical handicap"), but C. S. Friedman’s This Alien Shore deploys intraspecies variation, via autism, in a way that’s inspired partly by Temple Grandin.
In the Robert A. Heinlein’s “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress” the protagonist is Mannie Davis, a one-armed computer technician. He has a mechanic arm.
John Wyndham again: The Chrysalids is set in a post-apocalyptic fundamentalist-Christian society in which a significant proportion of humans and animals are born with physical deformities of some kind. The animals (’Deviations’) are ritually destroyed, the humans (’Blasphemies’) are sterilised and thrown out into the wilderness. The narrator is one of a small group of children whose secret is that they’re telepathic.
_Under Seige_, George R.R. Martin
Charlie in Flowers for Algernon is of course (mainly?) mentally handicapped, but I would think any treatment of disability in science fiction would have to start there.
Interesting question - should be easy to answer: aren’t physical limitations a central subject of SF, if only in the context of dealing with/overcoming? Not much comes to mind, though.
Random brain dust:
Nicola Griffith ‘Slow River’ has a minor character who uses arm and leg prosthetics… come to think of it, there are also explicit differences in health/physical appearance between the overclass and the unwashed masses. None of this very central to the plot, but it has stuck with me.
Several people have mentioned Wiliam Gibson - there are at least two more handicapped characters in ‘Burning Chrome’: the Soviet cosmonaut in ‘Red Star, Winter Orbit’ and the veteran in ‘Dogfight’.
A typical character in classic post-apocalyptic SF (eg Edgar Pangborn’s Davy) is The Mutant, who is picture-book Other, though they might have some compensatory special powers…
... oh, and *Air Raid,* John Varley.
The series “The Runelords” (haven’t read yet, but I plan to eventually) is a fantasy (don’t know if that qualifies here; I tend to lump the genres together under “speculative fiction) where a single physical or mental ability can be transferred from one person to another. This results in the eponymous Runelords who are veritable supermen; in turn, however, they have to care for their now-handicapped subjects, known as “Dedicates”, who might potentially number in the hundreds or thousands.
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Runelords
Thanks for everybody for all of these, many of which made me slap my forehead with the palm of my hand for not thinking of them first. This is all very useful indeed.
Martian Time-Slip by Philip K Dick had a central character with autism and postulated that autism was time lived at a different rate to the rest of us.
The Dark Tower series by Stephen King has the Gunslinger hero with a number of fingers on one hand missing after an attack by a crab-like like critter.
Larry Niven’s stories, collected in The Long Arm of Gil Hamilton, about a one-armed detective who compensates with an imaginary, telekinetic arm
Vernor Vinge’s “The Witling”
Lois McMaster Bujold’s “Falling Free”
In Warm Worlds and Otherwise, James Tiptree has a novella about a girl who is terminally clumsy and ugly. She attempts to commit suicide, which is illegal in public places. And ends up being offered an alternative body to operate: “The Girl Who was Plugged In,” 1973 - the original cyberpunk story (whence, I believe, William Gibson learned how to write it).
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection (SF stories from 1987) [Not the same as “The Year’s Best SF"]:
- “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” by Octavia E. Butler - about someone with a serious congenital disease. (There’s a summary here.) The feeling of being hopelessly flawed pops up a lot in Butler’s work; I suspect it’s her reaction to growing up black in the U.S. She has a theme going and is an excellent writer, which makes her a fit subject for a literature course.
In Butler’s “Speech Sounds,” elsewhere, a disease has taken away humanity’s ability to use language. “A survivor of a strange disease that has detroyed humanity’s ability to use language sets out to travel from Los Angeles to Pasadena.”
In her “Bloodchild,” a young woman wakes up blind, ill, and starving. She recovers gradually but finds out that she is different from, and dependent on, humanity. All of these are well handled, particularly the first and the last.
The Dark Light Years by Brian W. Aldiss.
One of the old classics. Aldiss invents an alien race. Communication with them will always be very difficult because their language is so complex. One man masters it, but no one is interested in his insights. Meanwhile, the aliens are tragically mistreated. Surprise ending. The aliens are handicapped in making themselves understood and humans are handicapped in communicating with them.
SF 12: The Year’s Best SF: 12th Annual Edition (stories from 1966):
- “Chicken Icarus” by Carol Emshwiller. A “thalidomide baby” lives an imaginative life of the mind and a secret life of the body.
SF 10: The Year’s Best SF: 10th Annual Edition (stories from 1964)
- “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” by Roger Zelazny. This is a classic of literature in any genre.
The physical handicap is a bit of a surprise at the climax. But this is such a good story I want to sneak it in. It is available in collected Zelazny elsewhere, e.g. Four for Tomorrow.</i>
The Best of Fritz Leiber has
- “Space-Time for Springers” - about a kitten that wants to write a book when he grows up. That’s a handicap!
“Rachel in Love,” by Pat Murphy, is about a chimpanzee that has the memories of a human girl and thinks herself human. It’s in A Woman’s Liberation: A Choice of Futures by and About Women.
In Sisters of the Night, an anthology edited by Barbara Hambly:
- Deborah Wheeler’s “Survival Skills” finds a vampire single mom, much to her chagrin, turning into a more-or-less normal member of the PTA.
-Barbara Hambly’s contribution, “Madeline,” strikes a slightly more somber note with a ruthless vampire who becomes cursed with hearing the voices of her victims. --which also happens to a ghost in Tanya Huff’s novel, Blood Debt. Isn’t it a handicap to be a vampire? Huffs entire Blood series starts with a Toronto police officer who had to resign from the force because she’s going blind, at least at night--so she becomes a private investigator.
In The Year’s Best SF 8 (stories from 2002), edited by David G. Hartwell
- “Geropods” by Robert Onopa shows elders at an old-age home dealing humorously with disenfranchisement brought on by being less than hale.
“Even the Queen” by Connie Willis.
You might remind your students that in the Harry Potter series, members of wizarding families born without the talent are called “Squibs” as in “damp squib” I suppose.
James Tiptree, Jr., “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” and “With Delicate Mad Hands.” More precisely these are about the terrible consequences of being female and considered unattractive, but there are thoughts in common.
Going back to Wells, disablement in his novels often has to do with ineffectual eyes. There is of course the (short-lived) crippling of Mr Davidson in ‘The Remarkable Case of Mr Davidson’s Eyes’. In addition to this, I think you make an interesting case for ‘The Invisible Man’ being about a particularly strange kind of bodily disablement. Besides these two, the only characters that immediately come to mind are the unlucky cleaner in Frederick Pohl’s ‘Gateway’, who ekes a living in zero G; the people who are cared for in the cage in Delaney’s ‘Einstein Intersection’; and the poor fellow in your own latest novel, perhaps, Adam?
In Niven’s “Long Arm of Gil Hamilton”, the head of ARM was also a paraplegic (Jubal Early?)
I found this thread because I was searching for the title of the T Sturgeon? story about the government mandating handicaps to enforce equality.
Another Sturgeon—In Man Plus, an astronaut is made handicapped by having his genitals sliced off. Don’t know if that counts, but certainly sounds like a handicap to me.
Isn’t the old man in the beginning of Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy missing a leg?
A lot of the characters in Dick’s Ubiq are dead—the ultimate handicap? Lots of brain damage in Dick’s stuff, but mostly self imposed. A Scanner Darkly and Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, for example. The protagonist of his mainstream novel, The Confessions of a Crap Artist, suffers from something—autism, perhaps? Been a long time since I’ve read it.
Adam Roberts of this site wrote The Land of the Headless. Bad handicap imposed as punishment.
Is being behind the game in terms of evolution a handicap? In that case, most of humanity in Clarke’s Childhood’s End. Or for that matter, Ben in Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child and Ben, in the World.
http://www.journalofliterarydisability.com/
http://www.wordgathering.com/: a journal of disability poetry
Mieville’s The Scar. Sturgeon’s “The Clinic” (about the social construction of disability) and The Dreaming Jewels; to some extent “The Comedian’s Children.” Nicola Griffith and Samuel Delany as authors whose disabilities inform their work. Rebecca Ore’s Gaia’s Toys. L. Timmel Duchamp’s Marq’ssan novels, in which men of the Executive class are deprived of sexual sensation. X-Men, and, if you find that medium interesting, Grant Morrison’s The Filth (superhero comics often have surprisingly progressive attitudes toward disability, while the artier graphic novels are more retro). Zelazny’s novel with the blind woman and the psychiatrist. “Wednesday’s Child” by William Tenn. Nancy Jane Moore’s Changeling.
There’s disability-in-SF panels every year at WisCon, and I was the respondent to one at MLA 2006; Rob Spirko and Mike Levy are recognized names in the field.
http://books.google.com/books?id=d4owSJMPZvcC is related.