Uncanny Magazine, Issue 24, September/October 2018 Quotes

“The obstacles society puts in his path decrease only marginally, and that in no small part due to his own efforts. But after the transition point of Memory, Miles begins to nurture his mental and emotional health, to harness his manias to a productivity that is not self-consuming, and to find tools to light the way out of depressions. This development is highlighted in the later novel A Civil Campaign: Miles does not cease making bad decisions, but he has learned how to prevent some and identify others much more quickly and has developed tools for recovering from mistakes. For me, this is a healthy vision of life with a disability. It is not a slow freeze or a self-immolation, but a balance of self and selves. I’ve often struggled with seeing myself as a fractured broken assemblage, but I have been slowly discovering that the secret is not to snuff out these selves. There is no me that is free of myself. The challenge is to find that central self and nurture it; to use its strengths to temper other states and selves. Making decisions is still hard, but Miles finds, if not a map, then at least a light in the darkness.”
― Lynne M. Thomas, Uncanny Magazine, Issue 24, September/October 2018: Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction! Special Issue

“You may still have to design this spaceship, even though you shouldn’t have to, but do not let them make you think you have to be grateful for being allocated this patch of emptiness, for being permitted to find a way to exist. Don’t think, when I said to design your own spaceship, I meant you must think it is okay that you have to use every last piece of your precious energy to cobble together a ship from old parts. Don’t think that this means you must carve out your own space because you will never belong in theirs, that you have the right—grudgingly offered—to fly and breathe and eat, but not to pilot and explore and maintain and repair and upgrade. You can fly alone if you like, and you can fly alone if you have to. But we’re not just designing spaceships here, we’re designing whole universes. Universes where you make that choice rather than it being made for you.”
― Lynne M. Thomas, Uncanny Magazine, Issue 24, September/October 2018: Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction! Special Issue

“You’re wary, too, of these people who can imagine the intricacies of hover chairs but can’t even give you accurate information as to whether there are steps into a building, who won’t turn the music down on request. How can they imagine what these futures will be like for you when they can’t understand what you experience now?”
― Lynne M. Thomas, Uncanny Magazine, Issue 24, September/October 2018: Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction! Special Issue

“Remember that if Sector 12 General Hospital5 could have been built to accommodate aliens who breathe chlorine, oxygen, or methane, who communicate through the production of sap or through ripples in their fur, who need different gravitational levels, who have two, four, or twenty eyes, then spaces can be build that accommodate us.”
― Lynne M. Thomas, Uncanny Magazine, Issue 24, September/October 2018: Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction! Special Issue

“One of the key rallying cries of disability activism is the recognition and celebration of interdependence (not independence) because no one truly survives by their own labour and effort (think about the roads you use to get around, the food you eat, or the electricity that powers your house—these are organized communal works).”
― Kathryn Allan, Uncanny Magazine, Issue 24, September/October 2018: Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction! Special Issue

“The passageway leads to a spiraling staircase. Back on Earth I wouldn’t be able to climb anything so steep. But ability is contextual. Whatever we’re able to do—and whatever meaning we make of that—changes from one environment to another. We make all of our own environments now. To design a place that others can’t possibly move through or inhabit is the same as raising up a drawbridge, dropping down a toothy portcullis, or punching a row of murder holes through a ceiling. It writes down a clear, solid message in the language of architecture: You are not welcome here. You don’t even have the right to exist here. Please cease to exist as soon as possible.
That’s what the stairs would have said to me, back on Earth. But we aren’t on Earth. I bound up that staircase, which cannot object.”
― William Alexander, Uncanny Magazine, Issue 24, September/October 2018: Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction! Special Issue

“anthologies like Accessing the Future (gathering together voices of disabled people to create SF tales of disability), The Sum of Us (an anthology complicating ideas of care and caregiving), Alison Sinclair’s Darkborn series (presenting the social changes that would occur in a world where half the population is blind), Tanya Huff’s novel Gate of Darkness, Circle of Light (which features a protagonist with an intellectual disability who resists containment or control), Ada Hoffmann’s short story “You Have To Follow the Rules” (which transports the reader into a world where autism is the norm and asks us to reconsider how we codify rules of social interaction and privilege neurotypicality),”
― Lynne M. Thomas, Uncanny Magazine, Issue 24, September/October 2018: Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction! Special Issue

“So, I’ll let you in on a secret, the thing I’ve learned about having a life-long disability, the thing that lots of stories never quite grasp: The real trick, the true solution to a disability, is to find a balance between your abilities and your goals.”
― Lynne M. Thomas, Uncanny Magazine, Issue 24, September/October 2018: Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction! Special Issue

“He starts struggling to find new things to talk to his therapist about, and they drop to meeting once a month, then as-needed. He keeps her card taped to the fridge. Sometimes he sees transhumanist rallies on television, or chances across articles on the Internet. He’s still not sure how he feels about them. He’d say he’s indifferent, but as a man with a fake leg and fake eyes, he’s one of the media-dubbed “cyborgs” already. Well, screw it. He’s indifferent. It feels satisfying, somehow, to claim his right to have no political feelings about the technology in his body. At night he sleeps well. And in the morning, he opens his eyes and goes about his day. © 2015 by SL Huang. Originally published in Strange”
― Lynne M. Thomas, Uncanny Magazine, Issue 24, September/October 2018: Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction! Special Issue