Accessing the Future: A Disability-Themed Anthology of Speculative Fiction (2 page)

When we first put out the call for submissions (CFS) we were excited by the prospect of stories that would rewrite or revisit our personal favourite genres—feminist SF and especially cyberpunk. As such, the CFS included a call for stories that might feature future assistive technologies and the different kinds of environments—even virtual—that we might inhabit in the near or far futures. As the stories began rolling in, we noticed that those narratives that spoke most saliently to disability and disabled peoples in the future went beyond the mere rejection of “technology as cure” (a common trope in SF that we explicitly sought to avoid); instead, the stories we loved the most were challenging the role of technology in making lives “easier” and thinking through the limitations of technological or pharmacological “fixes.”

One of the goals of this anthology is to express the right of people with disabilities to have self-determination of their lives. While it is important for many disabled people to have independence, it is not the goal for all. Self-determination, unlike independence, underscores agency and, at the same time, recognizes that people rely on one another for care, employment, and fulfilment. We wanted to see stories that explored the different kinds of relationships that sustain us as we make our way through a world that is at times hostile and challenging. Who gets to choose the future we will shape and live in? That question needs to be one that is shared and answered by us all.

While
Accessing the Future
places disabled bodies and minds at the centre of the stories (rather than side-lining them as interesting or moral asides in tales about the able-bodied), it is also concerned with how disability interacts with other aspects of disadvantage, privilege, discrimination and bigotry, including gender, race, sexuality, nationality, class and so many more of the facets that make us each unique. It has always been pleasantly surprising, in the previous Futurefire.net anthologies as much as in this one, that so many of the best stories we receive are effortlessly intersectional. Authors who write from a position of knowledge, experience or sensitivity to these issues know not only that no single vector of discrimination works in isolation, but also that it is precisely those people who are marginalized or disenfranchised in multiple ways whose lives are made the most difficult by the discrimination and neglect of the most privileged in society.

During our editorial process, we challenged each other on what made a story suitable for the this anthology. We were both attuned to the necessity of pushing the boundaries of what most people think constitutes disability and what it means to be disabled. As we read through the submissions, we were reminded of two important things: (1) the power and necessity of art to provoke; and (2) that SF is always about today. And so the stories we have gathered here are about people with disabilities in all of their complexity and diversity. There is no one way to be disabled; and there is no one way to feel or act on one’s disability. The stories and images of
Accessing the Future
are not here to pacify an audience who may be uncomfortable with disability but to share disabled people’s stories of disability in all their wonder and sadness, hope and rage. We wanted stories of adventure and failure (because it’s the determination to act that matters); stories that scream with the passion and intensity of someone who knows what it is to suffer or face discrimination (but who refuses to be made to disappear because it would be “better” for their condition to be “cured” in the future). These are stories that refuse to go gently.

Throughout this anthology surprises await. In our call for stories, we wondered about assistive technology and imagined high-tech futures—and so Nicolette Barischoff’s “Pirate Songs” gives us a story of a teenage girl who has spina bifida but is
without
her wheelchair when taken aboard a ship of space pirates (where she holds her own); and Fabian Alvarado’s “Julienne the Technician” gracefully does her job with no extra tools (or arms) needed. Margaret Killjoy’s “Invisible People” and Toby MacNutt’s “Morphic Resonance” bring us new takes on cyberpunk. Both stories remind us that it isn’t technology that sets us free but our resolution to take risks despite fear and the importance of finding like-minded allies. And while people in the future will make use of prosthetic limbs, it doesn’t mean being turned into Terminators: in “To the Pitch,” L.E. Badillo’s grandfather with his prosthetic foot could be right at home in a Norman Rockwell painting; the augmented and prosthesis-wearing woman in Rachel Keslensky’s “Need More Coffee” recalls the seemingly effortless allure of the 1950s pin-up girl; and Jane Baker’s “High Handed” shows us that when we work together with creativity, we can solve problems that at first appear out of reach.

At times, the challenges we face are of the “everyday” kind and we must decide on how to face them. In “Better to Have Loved,” Kate O’Connor imagines a world that has become uncomfortable with even the temporarily disabling experience of grieving the loss of someone loved. The more narrowly we define “normal” and “not normal” bodies, minds, and experiences, the more inaccessible life becomes. Louise Hughes’s “Losing Touch” takes us into the far future when even what counts as human is in danger of being lost entirely to technology, while Tostoini’s “Everyday Future” ambiguously features a woman who is in the process of (re)creating herself. In order to surpass barriers—whether environmental or intra-personal—the stories in this anthology underscore the need for us to come together. Petra Kupper’s “Playa Song,” Comebab’s “A Future Without Pain,” and Vincent Conrad’s “Future Coffee” all show how different kinds of people are able to talk to one another and work towards shared goals (and mutual survival against steep odds).

As it does today, technology will help us achieve our dreams, whether they are those that stem from individual ambition, like in Sara Patterson’s “A Sense All its Own,” whose blind protagonist wants to be the best pilot when everyone else tells her she can’t, or a collective desire to explore new worlds against competing, but still very human, interests as in David Jón Fuller’s “In Open Air.” Of course, technology does not come with easy answers (or even instructions): in “Pay Attention,” Sarah Pinker’s cognitively-augmented military vet must find her way in a civilian world that is rapidly changing; and in “Screens,” Samantha Rich complicates the benefits that might come with wearable tech that makes our “invisible” disabilities visible. And although the potential for continued exploitation of people with disabilities will exist in the future, it doesn’t mean that we won’t fight back. Both A.C. Buchanan’s “Puppetry” and Rachael K. Jones’ “Courting the Silent Sun” tell the stories of individuals who embrace their disability identity and turn themselves into vessels of leadership, change and hope. And the disabled protagonists in Joyce Chng’s “The Lessons of the Moon,” Jack Hollis Marr’s “into the waters i rode down,” and A.F. Sanchez’s “Lyric” do not succumb to the pressures of those people who claim to have their best interests at heart—in each story, they subvert expectations of what’s “normal” and carry out their own deep, conflicted understandings of what it means to live (and die) well.

Communication about and appreciation for our diverse experiences is essential for an accessible future. These are stories that recognize sometimes a person with disabilities has privilege in other areas of their identity, that neither cancel the disability nor negate the privilege. Some of these are stories in which people with disabilities are as strong and skilled as anyone else, or more so, although they’re not super-powered “magical PWDs.” These are stories in which choice, sometimes including the choice not to have our disabilities cured (or not in the ways that are intended), is fiercely fought for and defended. In both the stories and illustrations, people with disabilities engage with the world around them on their own terms—sometimes acting with quick cleverness and at other times with heavy hearts.
Accessing the Future
is just as much about everyday trials (the bad hair days and annoying friends) as it is about grand adventures and plots of revolution in far off places.

One of the reasons we chose the cover image that Robin E. Kaplan so beautifully created for the anthology is because our space woman
isn’t
visibly marked as “disabled.” We’ve as many stories about “invisible” disabilities (anxiety disorder, depression, chronic illness) and neuroatypicality (autism) as we do ones with physical impairments (and wheelchair use and prosthesis). To focus on one kind of disability would not be representative of all the kinds of bodies and minds that are in the stories. We like that the single person (with her expression of calmness and contentment), weightless in space, challenges our conceptions of what disability looks like: in a weightless environment, someone with limited mobility issues, or sight or hearing impairment, would look just as the person depicted on our cover. It’s the new environment—literally, space—that has changed what counts, or what appears, as disability.

Speculative fiction offers us a peek into what is possible for our world and for our bodies (and minds). It is essential that we imagine futures where we all belong; where our differences in life experience and our knowledge of our communities and of ourselves informs a future that is diverse and adaptable to the needs of all those who will live in it. Disability (as a negative condition) will always be with us if we choose to limit or ignore people’s ability to participate as equal visionaries.
Accessing the Future
is one small part of this necessary, on-going conversation. The future is what we make it. All are welcome here.

Pirate Songs

Nicolette Barischoff

The floater turned out to be one of those shiny, sky island multi-deck passenger deals that would occasionally completely lose its shit in the middle of a jump.

This one would have been alright—various backup systems humming away, fifty or sixty first-colony licensed pilots determined to discover just what went wrong—had it not jumped straight into something else. Probably a garbage scow; there were a lot of garbage scows this far out. Now, the ship just drifted, listing and rolling like a fat, pretty corpse.

The Dustpan’s crew all had their faces flat against the port windows, eyeing it like a bunch of dogs with tongues out. That was the only reason Rumer had let them go salvage. You pass up a big, beautiful floater like that, you never get your men to do anything useful ever again.

We don’t got the time or space to pull her apart, he’d told them. No scrapping. Get yourselves something small and shiny and get back.

For the most part, they’d listened, filling up their suit-packs with the sorts of little things you always find on a floating hotel like that; alcohol in expensive-looking bottles, VR games with an obscene number of attachments, the palm and wrist PCs that were only considered valuable out here where nobody could afford them. Bottles and needles from a well-stocked sick bay, cards, cash, the turtles out of an elaborate terrarium… Kell, the mutinous asshole, had tried to haul back two of those sultry-voiced concierge kiosks, and a broken servitor droid.

Rumer wasn’t sure which of them had brought back the girl.

She looked to be about fifteen, but to Rumer Pilgrim, anybody not born and raised out of New Pelican looked young.

She didn’t have to be conscious to tell you she was far from home, either Earth or first colonies… German, Canadian, American, some single-nation settlement; she was that same kind of glass-house pretty. Well fed, with pale, untouched, swany skin, and a long, long waterfall of hair that somebody brushed out for her every morning, and a pale pink mouth that looked like it was used to pouting. When her eyes did flicker open for a split-second at a time, he could see they were a pale and brittle green.

The crew crowded around that narrow infirmary bunk for a full day and a half. Diallo, a skinny kid from the pan-Africas with half a field medic’s education and a permanent shit-eating grin, actually left the pilot’s chair to bandage her head wound. And Kell, the lecherous one-eyed bulldog of a first mate, seemed to think he was going to wake her by flicking her nipples.

“Haven’t even seen one like her in a while,” he said, rubbing his scrap glass eye, a sort of endearing nervous tic once you got to know him. “Kind of forgot they made ’em like this.”

“With two eyes and two whole titties?” said Diallo. “Not every woman’s like your New Pelican dock-workers, Kell. Back up, man, an’ stop gettin’ in the light. This one’s never seen anything ugly as you.”

Kell grinned. “I’m sure she’ll just love that child-fucker smile you got.”

Rumer ignored their dick-swinging. “Who brought her?” he asked.

Diallo shrugged. “She was the only thing alive on that boat, Captain, her and that mess o’ turtles.”

Rumer frowned. “Bad time to have a hitchhiker, you forget that already? What’re you thinking we’re gonna do with her when we have to make our drop?”

“Don’t ask me,” said Kell. “You ask me, we shouldn’t have the stuff in the first place.”

“Right. But I didn’t ask you, and we do have the stuff, and we’re going to have to make a drop before much else happens.”

“You mean before the shit’s no damn good to anybody, or before big Papa Kang figures out who took it and sends a team after us? Because I can guarantee you that second thing’s already happened.”

“I’m thinking, Captain,” said Diallo, making the sort of diplomatic silencing gesture that made Rumer like him, “she is very far from home. She might help. With carrying, with distribution. In exchange for passage, you know.”

Rumer cocked his head. Nodded.

“It’s useful to have someone who looks like her, where we are going, what we are doing. People trust someone who looks like that. Nice pretty white face. They’ll take it from her. No need to tell her where it comes from.”

“So she plays little White Mother for us, we put her down wherever she wants, she goes on home having gratefully agreed to tell nobody, and everybody’s happy and still alive, is that it?”