From BookRiot:
I’ve always loved sci-fi and fantasy, particularly when it has an anthropological bent, like the works of Ursula K. Le Guin. Because I’m disabled, I always notice disabled characters, or the lack thereof, in speculative fiction world-building. So, I was fascinated to discover Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan saga, whose protagonist Miles Vorkosigan is a military officer with a lifelong disability.
Miles’s home planet of Barrayar is progressive in terms of technology but retrogressive about disability rights. As described in Shards of Honor and Barrayar, Miles was born with skeletal conditions after an assassination attempt during his mother Cordelia’s pregnancy. Abhorring the idea of a disabled heir, Miles’s paternal grandfather keeps trying to murder Miles when he’s transferred to an artificial uterus and after his birth.
The contrast between Cordelia’s feminist home planet, Beta Colony, and Miles’s aristocratic father’s planet of Barrayar is striking. Betans learn about gender equality and sexual agency and consent from a young age, while Barrayar is more traditional in every way—almost feudal. Cordelia is an indomitable heroine who refuses to let her father-in-law intimidate her. I agree with her inclusion on Nikki Vanry’s list of badass middle-aged heroines.
. . . .
I didn’t understand why disabled people still face ableism and even eugenics on Barrayar until I read the prequel, Falling Free, set 200 years earlier. While some science fiction societies eliminate disability through cures or eugenics, the corporate-owned space station in Falling Free commodifies disability. The corporation deliberately genetically engineers mutants whose legs have been replaced with a second set of arms. This would make them functionally disabled on a planet, but it makes them superior workers in the weightless space station environment. The corporation literally owns these mutants, called Quaddies, and controls their reproduction. Even the novel’s hero, a non-disabled engineer named Leo Graf, initially pities the Quaddies and then serves as their savior in a paternalistic way.
Link to the rest at BookRiot
RE: Blind characters
Have you not read The Country of the Blind?
The book with the blind protaganist, is it genre of any sort? I’ve read in SF/F books with blind protaganists, and they don’t get better. Heck, one – by A.Sinclair, DARKBORN – has half the cast blind, and with more a techological society than the other half, even so. They do sonar. They die if sunlight hits them. The lightborn die in the dark and are sighted.
You’re right, Anon, it could be an extremely interesting book if done right. You’d basically be using an unreliable narrator in terms of our easiest sensory cue, that being vision. But due to the bias in publishing, unless the author in question goes indie, I don’t see that book happening anytime soon.
Tradpub is afraid to take risks, I guess. Indie is obviously the solution. No point complaining that the cool kids won’t let you sit at their table if they’re all shallow a-holes anyway.
I’ve recently spent some time commiserating with a fellow writer who’s severely visually impaired (uses cane or service dog) on why her publisher won’t let her write a blind hero/ine. She says the only way it’s “allowed” is if the blind character regains eyesight by the end of the book. Yeah, like that’s realistic. I don’t know what the publishing industry is so frightened about.
The only book I can ever remember reading with a blind protag was a fantasy book where, IIRC (it’s been multiple decades), he had some sort of magical sight. The only potential problem I can see with a blind protag in theory is that so much of description is sight-based, but it seems like you could avoid that by just using third person POV which didn’t rely on what the protag was experiencing. Although doing it from close POV, describing things in ways other than by sight, could actually be different and interesting.
I have one book with a blind protagonist (Peaks of Grace by Alma Boykin). I’m not certain it “works”, but she is based on a composite of several Medieval women. They all found places in convents, where their physical disability wasn’t lethal as it would have been elsewhere. And their wealthy or noble parents all took steps to ensure that the women lived through childhood (open fires, livestock, holes and wells, wildlife, ye gads, the ways for someone without good vision to get into trouble…)
The character loses her sight to scarlet fever, so she was sighted to begin with. That might be a “cheat” compared to trying to write someone who is blind (or profoundly deaf, or who has other challenges) since birth.
Deb Kinnard,
Seriously? Wow. That’s really sad; think of the creative works they’re missing out on.
Oddly enough I’m currently editing the rough of a fantasy where one of the main protagonists is blind; combat injury. Guess it’s just as well I already went indie.
I read a romance with the heroine going blind and ending the book blind in the past couple of years.
So there are not zero books being published a blind character.
Disability is a huge complication in life. And writing a disabled character will either take a lot more time and space (words) by the writer, or have to be handled with cliches, tropes, and memes. Stereotypes all around.
Most writers won’t bother with the consistent effort of making such a character credible. They have ‘more important things to do.’
And even fewer will make such a character anything but a sidekick.
But it opens up the real in ‘real’ life to see a reflection of how things really are – in your books.
There’s also a significant blind spot in the OP.
Two significant cultures are represented in the background of the Vorkosigan books: Barrayar and Beta Colony. So, one expects (in a story setting) that the two cultures will be different. If you decide that Beta Colony is “couldn’t be better :)”, then you will necessarily not like Barrayar as much and lament that it isn’t as simpatico to your tastes.
In what possible constructed universe can you achieve anything besides pastel & gray if all elements are without conflict or distinction? Why would that be a good thing? A great deal of the tension engine that drives the books is the conflict between the two cultures instantiated in the primary characters. Not to mention the good old “opposites attract” option.
This is why I found it so irritating that Bujold decided to jump the shark in the Red Queen book with the concealed gay relationship between Barrayar characters which is treated in such an ordinary way in a Barrayar context. It violated (for me) the explicit distinctions between the cultures for the purposes of virtue signalling.
virtue signalling?
Aral was already known to be bisexual; this was established in the very first book. The later book just built on existing established character traits.
It was a shock, yes, but it was one of those things that we could have seen coming.
Um. No. ‘Fraid Grace Lapointe got that wrong. The quaddies escaped and created a home entirely separate from the Barayarans, who were exiled to Barayar by a wormhole collapse long before the quaddies were ever dreamt of or created.
The reason the Barayarans have a horror of mutation (and the disabilities it can create) is because of their long exile, during which the native flora of their planet (“alien” to their biology) causes a higher rate of mutations, most of which are deleterious. They lost the advanced technology (both medical and mechanical) that can heal or compensate for disabilities. So the higher rate of disability in a medieval society was a serious problem.
And as Miles’ parents knew, the mindset couldn’t be cured – only outlived as the next generation showed what modern medicine could counter (as Bujold showed us in several of her stories – and in Miles himself.)
The changing attitudes are a critical element of both KOMARR and A CIVIL CAMPAIGN. Bujold’s BARRAYAR isn’t a frozen society; it’s evolving over the years of the stories.
Which is what made the series such a good read. 😉
There was old vs new thought clashes all over the place with Miles stuck in the middle.
My favorite old vs new clash is from A CIVIL CAMPAIGN where the traditionalist Count tried to misuse the new biotech to fend off the new social reality and was stymied by invoking a traditional custom.
(The baby girl farm affair.)
And, of course, one of the better twists in the series is that Miles is a traditionalist to the core who lives the old mores. He just understands that to preserve the Vor ways the Vor must adapt to the new age.
(Substitute any society or culture for “Vor” and you can see why the series endures and will endure indefinitely. We live in a technological civilization. Cultures that do not accept this will not long endure.)
His children will be Vor, just not the Vor of his grandfather. And if they are half as clever as their parents, the then current Vor had best watch out!
I’m hoping Bujold will get around to showing the trouble Helen Natalia and Aral Alexander stir up.
Felix,
That is insightful. Kudos!
I suspect the OP hasn’t read Mountains Of Mourning.
Or totally missed the point of that story.
Whups! The mutation rate is attributed to the war with the Cetagandans, not the native flora. Nuclear strikes, biowar agents, etc.
Many also ignore the fact that in a society on the edge of survival, the vast majority of the “differently abled” are under a death sentence, and a quick one – no matter what the attitudes of society are.
Plus natural mutations reinforced from being an iso!ated population for centuries before that.
The specific (treatable) mutation central to KOMARR is natural and seems to predate the invasion. Bujold knows her biosciences.
There were a number of inherited genetic diseases that dated to before the Cetagandan invasion.
Also, Miles’s grandfather – Count Piotr – had a fear/hatred of mutation that was so ingrained that he had to have learned it in the cradle rather than after he fought the Cetagandans in his 20s.
I am convinced now that I need not read the OP. Perhaps someone summarized the series and she didn’t actually read it.
Many also ignore the fact that in a society on the edge of survival, the vast majority of the “differently abled” are under a death sentence, and a quick one – no matter what the attitudes of society are.
I don’t know if they’re ignoring so much as they’re utterly clueless about what life is like without modern conveniences. Some stories I’ve beta read strongly hint that people don’t grasp the implications of a way of life where you have to get home before dark to light oil lamps or candles, or draw water from a well to cook, clean, and bathe, etc.
That life ages you fast — I still remember the film strip in high school that mentioned how the washing machine in the early 20th century allowed women to stop looking 50 when they were only 30. And if the OP were to visit places where washing machines are a pleasant fiction, it’s still possible to see the looking-50-at-30 effect.
And it’s not as if those times are so far back or aren’t fully documented. There’s people still around who lived it.
30-going on-50 reminded me of this:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/roadshow/stories/articles/2014/4/14/migrant-mother-dorothea-lange
Took me just three clicks to find it by merely searching for “classic depression photo”.
I had forgotten about the Lange photo! I should use it the next time I have to demonstrate that very point. It conveys the reality better than a Norman Rockwell painting I had used as an example for the guy I was beta reading for. Poor Mrs. Thompson was only 32 in that picture.
There’s non-Hollywood 50 year olds who look younger, without surgical assistance. Totally different lifestyles, barely a generation apart.
yes, but a disabled person having different thoughts about the book is about what i would expect.
A bit of a misrepresentation.
Beta colony is by no means a “feminist” society. Nor is it a place for identity politics of any sort.
But one thing it has in common with a certain modern orthodoxy is that they value and enforce conformity with their “liberal” values. Just ask Cordelia.