Disability In Science Fiction

In this groundbreaking collection, twelve international scholars – with backgrounds in disability studies, English and world literature, classics, and history – discuss the representation of dis/ability, medical "cures," technology, and the body in science fiction.

In this groundbreaking collection, twelve international scholars – with backgrounds in disability studies, English and world literature, classics, and history – discuss the representation of dis/ability, medical "cures," technology, and the body in science fiction.

Examining the intersection of disability and genre in popular works of horror, crime, science fiction, fantasy, and romance published since the late 1960s, Disability, Literature, Genre is a major contribution to both cultural disability studies and genre fiction studies. Drawing on recent work on affect and emotion, the book explores how disability makes us feel, and how those feelings shape interpersonal and fictional encounters. Written in a clear and accessible style, Disability, Literature, Genre offers a timely reflection on the rapidly growing body of scholarship on disability representation, as well as an innovative new theorisation of genre. By reconceptualising genre reading as an affective process, Ria Cheyne establishes genre fiction as a key site of investigation for disability studies. She argues that genre fiction's unique combination of affectivity and reflexivity makes it ideally suited to the production of reflexive representations of disability: representations which encourage the reader to reflect upon what they understand about disability, and potentially to rethink it. Examining the affective--and effective--power of disability representations in a wide range of popular genre fiction, this book will be essential reading for academics in disability studies, literary studies, popular culture studies, and the medical humanities.

Helva had been born human, but only her brain had been saved—saved to be schooled, programmed, and implanted into the sleek titanium body of an intergalactic scout ship. But first she had to choose a human partner—male or female—to share her exhilirating excapades in space! Her life was to be rich and rewarding . . . resplendent with daring adventures and endless excitement, beyond the wildest dreams of mere mortals. Gifted with the voice of an angel and being virtually indestructable, Helva XH-834 antipitated a sublime immortality. Then one day she fell in love!

The fifteen authors and nine artists in this volume bring us beautiful, speculative stories of disability and mental illness in the future. Teeming with space pirates, battle robots, interstellar travel and genetically engineered creatures, every story and image is a quality, crafted work of science fiction in its own right, as thrilling and fascinating as it is worthy and important. These are stories about people with disabilities in all of their complexity and diversity, that scream with passion and intensity. These are stories that refuse to go gently.

In Bodyminds Reimagined Sami Schalk traces how black women's speculative fiction complicates the understanding of bodyminds—the intertwinement of the mental and the physical—in the context of race, gender, and (dis)ability. Bridging black feminist theory with disability studies, Schalk demonstrates that this genre's political potential lies in the authors' creation of bodyminds that transcend reality's limitations. She reads (dis)ability in neo-slave narratives by Octavia Butler (Kindred) and Phyllis Alesia Perry (Stigmata) not only as representing the literal injuries suffered under slavery, but also as a metaphor for the legacy of racial violence. The fantasy worlds in works by N. K. Jemisin, Shawntelle Madison, and Nalo Hopkinson—where werewolves have obsessive-compulsive-disorder and blind demons can see magic—destabilize social categories and definitions of the human, calling into question the very nature of identity. In these texts, as well as in Butler’s Parable series, able-mindedness and able-bodiedness are socially constructed and upheld through racial and gendered norms. Outlining (dis)ability's centrality to speculative fiction, Schalk shows how these works open new social possibilities while changing conceptualizations of identity and oppression through nonrealist contexts.

A Deafblind writer and professor explores how the misrepresentation of disability in books, movies, and TV harms both the disabled community and everyone else. As a Deafblind woman with partial vision in one eye and bilateral hearing aids, Elsa Sjunneson lives at the crossroads of blindness and sight, hearing and deafness—much to the confusion of the world around her. While she cannot see well enough to operate without a guide dog or cane, she can see enough to know when someone is reacting to the visible signs of her blindness and can hear when they’re whispering behind her back. And she certainly knows how wrong our one-size-fits-all definitions of disability can be. As a media studies professor, she’s also seen the full range of blind and deaf portrayals on film, and here she deconstructs their impact, following common tropes through horror, romance, and everything in between. Part memoir, part cultural criticism, part history of the Deafblind experience, Being Seen explores how our cultural concept of disability is more myth than fact, and the damage it does to us all.

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The Chrysalids" by John Wyndham. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.