Redline Science Fiction, an on-line science fiction magazine, is inviting story submissions for a contest called Towards an Accessible Future. The concept behind the contest is to encourage stories that portray disability ” as a simple fact, not as something to be overcome or something to explain why a character is evil.” The winning story will appear in the September issue and the author will receive a $300 prize. The deadline is August 15th.
It’s an interesting idea, but I’m not sure what the contest sponsors hope to prove. There’s no reason why good science fiction can’t be written featuring characters with disabilities. But it should be in the service of a good story. Everything that happens within a story is “a simple fact,” whether it’s the character’s disability or a spaceship crashing into the desert. This contest seems to undermine its own ideal by requiring that disability be portrayed in a certain light. Why can’t I write about a disabled character who’s a misanthropic, philandering badass with a touch of narcissism? As long as the story is good and the characters believable, does it matter?
Hey, I think I have an idea.
Thanks to io9 for the link.
No reason you can’t write a disabled character who is misanthropic, philandering badass narcissist — even one who finds redemption and becomes a better person while/at the same time as/ because of being healed of the disability. But this has been done before, a lot, since back before the time of Will Shakespeare’s Richard III (the hunchback) or the Hunchback of Notre Dame (a different fellow).
Methinks the challenge is to write a character who ‘happens’ to be disabled without writing any of the current tropes. Ya know, just like the challenge of anybody’s local mainstream newspaper to write a story about a Person of Color without either highlighting criminal tendencies or poverty or else expressing surprise that neither is present – that is, without falling into stereotypes.
Me, I’d love to see the stories that result from this contest. High dam’ time we stopped telling our kids-with-disabilities that all fictional people like them have to be either bad or saintly.