Worldcon panel: Death and disability

I'll start this post with a brief rant about political correctness, and how trying to solve a problem by wallpapering over it with words never works. At the root of the notion of political correctness lies the laudable goal of not denigrating people through our choice of words, which is something I can support. But the movement has recently fallen into disrepute in many eyes (mine included) because it made no attempt to correct the attitudes that lie at the root of the problem, and instead took the easy way out by changing the labels and hoping that would solve the problem. Sadly, the world doesn't work that way. Given enough motivation, any word, no matter how inoffensive its denotation, can be turned into something pejorative, and eventually it will be.

Here, my specific rant is about the word "disability", which was originally chosen because the word "handicapped" had somehow become offensive as a result of its frequent pejorative use. Unfortunately, in recommending this change, the forces of political correctness have replaced a word that means only "having a more difficult time doing something" (handicapped) with an offensive word that means "incapable of doing something" or "lacking in ability" (disabled). It's inaccurate, and disingenuous.

I have no doubt whatsoever that there is significant discrimination against those who suffer from one or more handicaps. What I won't accept is the notion that replacing a perfectly descriptive word (handicap) with one that offends (disability) isn't the solution, and I refuse to use the word "disabled" other than when forced to (as here) by a published panel title, or (elsewhere) in official names such as the Americans with Disabilities Act. As someone who has only the most minor of handicaps (impaired vision that can be easily corrected using eyeglasses), I don't presume to have the right to dictate how the handicapped should refer to themselves. I can only say that several handicapped colleagues also refuse to use the term "disabled", which they find patronizing and offensive. If you are handicapped and prefer the term "disabled", that's your choice, but I will not use such an offensive word for that reason alone.

Harumph.

All that being said, the issue of disability in fantasy and science fiction is an interesting one, because as authors, we face a choice about how to deal with handicaps and disability. First, we can treat them as problems to be solved and ones that are solvable, whether by means of magic (fantasy) or technology (science fiction). Second, we can treat them as something that is part of the human condition and therefore to be dealt with the same way we deal with other aspects of the human condition. In both cases, we need to take a long step back from the issue and ask ourselves whether our characters really want to be fixed. As is the case in the thriving modern deaf culture, many people embrace their condition and find ways to make it meaningful and rich and something that should not be feared or loathed—or patronized in any way.

The famous H.G. Wells quote on this topic, "in the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king", is enlightening because it highlights an assumption we often make, usually without recognizing that we're doing it: that handicaps or disabilities somehow make a person inferior. As in the Wells story, it often doesn't turn out that way. As is the case in deaf culture, it's a very human response to recast our condition in such a way that it becomes the default definition for "normal". There's nothing wrong with that so long as it doesn't lead us to deprecate or discriminate against someone else's "normal".

It's interesting how something such as blindness that is seen as a handicap may in fact be a powerful skill in some contexts; the blind have a much easier time getting around in the dark than those of us who rely excessively on our vision. Conversely, something that initially seems to be a powerful advantage may become a powerful liability (perhaps even a disability) in other contexts. Consider the ability to regenerate yourself and heal from any wound: a great thing under most circumstances, but not if you happen to be captured by a vivisectionist, as happened to the character Tempus in the Thieves World series, or if you happen to have opponents who have no qualms about killing you repeatedly, as happened to Jack Harkness in the Torchwood mini-series Children of Earth. Similarly, immortality seems awfully attractive if you don't consider the downside, such as the toll taken by the constant loss of friends and loved ones as the centuries roll by; Robert Heinlein described this well in Time Enough for Love, and this is a frequent theme in most of the modern overly romanticized vampire stories.

Things that seem advantageous, such as the human ability to tolerate an enormous range of environmental conditions, may suddenly seem unimportant under other circumstances. Imagine, for example, making contact with a race of intelligent machines, who have no need of oxygen. We'd be at a severe disadvantage visiting them because we would need to carry our environment with us.

In fantasy, disability is relatively rare, mostly because we have traditionally preferred shiny, unblemished, larger-than-life protagonists. But in recent decades, we've come to accept that the world is rarely this simple, and have begun to consider that most of us have some form of handicap, whether emotional, psychological, or physical. As a result, increasing numbers of characters in fantasy grapple with handicaps of varying degrees of severity. Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant, a leper, is the first fantasy book I remember encountering with a physically (and morally) imperfect protagonist, but later, I encountered Shakespeare's Richard III and discovered there's a long history of such characters—though sadly, older examples such as Richard tend to use handicaps as the outward manifestation of inner flaws. My own fantasy novel Jester has a human dwarf as its protagonist, and normality as one of its themes.

In science fiction, the notion of transcending our physical bodies is seen to be an attractive solution, presumably based on the assumption that our human bodies are not just limiting but are actually disabling. I beg to differ, but that's a topic for another blog entry. But science fiction does deal with handicaps, often severe ones, as in the case of Lois McMaster Bujold's character Miles Vorkosigan. In my story Flatlander Pro Tem, the protagonist's handicap is psychological.

Most often, handicaps and disabilities are simply ignored in fiction because they place inconvenient constraints on our characters, or because discussing them makes us uncomfortable. Those who choose not to include handicapped characters in their stories are assuming that handicapped characters cannot act in an effective way, and that turns a handicap (difficulty achieving something) into a true disability (inability to achieve something). Sam Gamgee from The Lord of the Rings trilogy is handicapped by his short stature and lack of any martial or magical skills, particularly in contrast with the heroes who surround him, but he overcomes that handicap by sheer force of character and in so doing, becomes arguably the most interesting character in the books.

Disabilities and handicaps can be literal, but they can also be metaphorical; the latter category includes any social or economic handicap. Any person who belongs to an ethnic minority (e.g., Blacks or Muslims in Western society), a gender minority (women or anyone with an alternative sexuality), or another group that makes them "alien" to the surrounding majority may face severe handicaps compared with members of the majority. In some cases, the handicap may even become a disability. Economics often creates a handicap or disability. The poor are often seen by the rich as being (at best) handicapped, and at worst, disabled; certain people even believe that poverty reflects the punishment for some underlying moral or intellectual or other flaw. At some point, the rich may literally become a different species from the rest of us if they can afford genetic engineering or even uploading into a mechanical body that we cannot afford. In that context, poverty could serve as an important metaphor for disability: it would simply be impossible to achieve some of the things these superior beings can achieve.

With a little thought, we can discover many other forms of disability. For example, childhood or other forms of immaturity can be a severe handicap: they disempower us, whether from a social perspective (e.g., we're not legally allowed to drive cars until late in our teens) or a physical perspective (e.g., a lack of physical strength, insufficient emotional maturity to deal with a challenge). As another example, any time we move from our familiar culture into a different culture, we are handicapped by our lack of familiarity with that new culture. If the spoken and nonverbal languages are sufficiently beyond our grasp, we may become fully disabled until we acquire at least basic competency in those forms of speech, or hire a translator. If the speech includes any significant component that we are incapable of mimicking, such as communication via pheromones or infrared or ultraviolet light, we are fully disabled until we can develop a technological fix that serves as a prosthesis. Our disability may even be abhorrent to those who possess the attributes we lack, which raises another whole set of problems.

As authors, we should not completely ignore handicaps. But if we choose to use them as aspects of character in our writing, we should carefully consider whether we are using them purely as a plot point, or as something deeper, such as a way to explore the concept of what is normal or to explore a neglected aspect of the human condition. Should we attempt this, we must ensure that we understand the people who deal with the handicap well enough that we can play fair with them, and that will require a measure of effort to ensure that we've done the job right.