I grew up reading science fiction and I found no mirrors. Reading, then, becomes a means of self-affirmation, and readers often seek their mirrors in books.” Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection we can see our own lives and experiences as part of the larger human experience. When lighting conditions are just right, however, a window can also be a mirror.
SIMS 3 INTO THE FUTURE UTOPIA WINDOWS
These windows are also sliding glass doors, and readers have only to walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world has been created and recreated by the author. Rudine Sims Bishop wrote in 1990: “Books are sometimes windows, offering views of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange. You should know that for the longest time I believed that.Īs Dr. Pervasive, because it tells us, disabled people, the same thing. Othering, because it tells abled people that we don’t belong. It is a future that is pervasive and othering. You should know that the nondisabled future is built on an all-too-current eugenic baseline.
So this one is for you, abled creators and purveyors of the future. The downside of that is that often it means the conversation simply isn’t being had. When you’re faced with surprise!eugenics often enough, you learn to keep your mouth shut in situations that aren’t actively, purposefully inclusive and safe. I’m not always one to bring it up then, either. It comes up less outside of those groups. The nondisabled future comes up in discussions about representation in science fiction a lot in my community of disabled and otherwise marginalized authors. Welcome to our eugenic eutopia: we can see where we’re not wanted. The answer should be a simple, easy, resounding yes. “Do we belong to the future?” a fellow disabled author asks me, after yet another panel turns into a discussion about eugenics, after yet another futuristic perspective handwaves the consequences of disability, perfects technology as cure, or simply forgets about us altogether. Internalized ableism is one hell of a drug. I nearly agree with her, because in all my life, I have seen no evidence to the contrary. Rather, her arguments are thought experiments, challenging the future of medicine and technology, and the boundaries of acceptable humanity. “You don’t belong to the future,” a guest lecturer implies in one of my classes, years earlier, when we discuss medical ethics and neurosciences. Better yet, we prevent them from being born altogether. We can fix those who can’t be happy because they don’t know what abled happiness is. Rather, he talks about scientific advancement, genetic manipulation, and how soon, we won’t have disabled people anymore. “The future doesn’t belong to you,” a friend tells me, when we walk home together one night.