The Future Imperfect
I am waiting out a spring storm, pulled over to the side of the highway in my old Volvo, sending an email to one friend while calling another to tell him I’ll be late. The audiobook version of Anne McCaffrey’s The Ship Who Searched is playing on my Kindle, which I’ve hooked into the car stereo. As I sit here, surrounded by technologies that did not exist when I was born—cell phones, e-readers, email—it’s impossible not to notice that I’m living in a world that contains more technological wonders than McCaffrey had imagined. The protagonists in the story would have been much helped, for instance, by a secure communications channel and a GPS system, both of which I have in my battered old car. But most of all, the heroine of this book would have been helped by a future shaped by the actions of today’s disability activists. Because, at its heart, this series of books tells the story of the enslavement of extremely promising children who have the bad luck to be born—or in this one case alone, become—disabled.
The basic plot device behind these stories is horrific enough that I can’t paraphrase McCaffrey’s own words without coloring them, so I will let her speak for herself. The first book in the series, The Ship Who Sang, begins:
She was born a thing and as such would have been condemned if she failed to pass the encephalograph test required of all newborn babies. There was always the possibility that though the limbs were twisted, the mind was not; that although the ears would hear only dimly, the eyes see vaguely, the mind behind them was receptive and alert.
The electro-encephalogram was entirely favorable, unexpectedly so, and the news was brought to the waiting, grieving parents. There was a final, harsh decision; to give their child euthanasia or to permit it to become an encapsulated ‘brain…’ (The Ship Who Sang)
In this series, those children who are deemed worthy are turned into productized, commodified “shell people;” brains who manage the complex tasks associated with running hospitals, space stations, and even piloting starships. They can, if they are lucky, eventually earn enough to buy their own freedom but, until they do, their “bodies” are owned by the company which funded their development and implantation.
In other words, in McCaffrey’s world, disability is so depersonalizing that the very promising are rewarded with slavery and disembodiment; those who don’t pass the test for these rewards are put to death.
The friend I am going to visit is named Larry. If I ever get out of this storm, I should arrive shortly after his nighttime aide has wheeled him into his bedroom and, using an elaborate webbed harness that attaches to an electric lift, helped him get from chair to bed. She’ll lay out the things he needs for the night: two telephone handsets, in case one goes dead, a bottle of water, the book he’s reading, the TV remote, and an emergency call button that will summon an ambulance. I have just enough time to hear the entire book read, and if I listen to it the whole way I will have worked myself up into a heady righteous indignation by the time I go to sit by his bedside and have an evening drink. He’ll try to calm me down; Larry doesn’t have my stomach for political debate. He’ll tell me that it’s only a story. I will tell him the stories we tell about our futures become our futures, point out that my phone looks a lot like an old Star Trek communicator, point out that the special mattress he sleeps on was developed by the space program. Over very old Scotch, we’ll agree to disagree.
A truck screamed by, the brakes on fire, just a few seconds ago and now it sits jackknifed across the highway several yards away. Hailstones hit the car so hard that, in a few places, they scratch the paint. What would it be like if that hard, metal shell were my body? And what if I did not own that body, could not decide where it went or what it did?
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35 comments
Unicorn suggests that the shellpeople need life-support, yet in ‘The Ship Who Sang’, Helva, the archetypal shell person, is described as spending three months ‘enjoying the usual routine of the infant’ with no implication that she needed any medical intervention. It seems clear that the need for life-support is a consequence of their implantation in the shell, another facet of their slavery (and one with a 5% death rate), rather than a disability or medical condition.
Unicorn also says “being confined to a wheelchair with life support systems would be incredibly unpleasant”, which completely fails to understand that wheelchairs are incredibly liberating. They suggest that the shell is a better option, but which part of being boxed away and walled up in the attic is better than applying the same enabling technologies to a wheelchair? The walling away is a literary device, not a necessary consequence of the technology, but ironically reflects the very real walling away of disabled people at the time the original Helva stories were written.
As to whether it is acceptable to make the availability of enabling technology dependent on personal finances — not in any future I want to live in!
Oh, and I’ve written a blog posting to expand Sarah’s discussion of the accessibility side of the equation with the social side of things. See http://dwgism.livejournal.com/1731.html
dwg, seems to have missed my point about the wheelchair – that’s understandable as I was trying to avoid spoilers. If you have not read ‘The ship who Searched’ and wish to avoid spoilers stop reading now (and go read The Ship who Searched).
At the end of ‘The Ship who Searched’ Hypathia has gotten a robotic body with all five senses working. In the scene I was referring to in my previous post she is paraplegic with nofeeling, much less control below her neck confined to a motorised chair which she was forced to control by voice command, (which were not very vlexibile). My point was that they could have provided her with a direct neural link to the chair and the robotic arms and sensors, which while far inferior to the prosthetic limbs and later body that was developed in the course of the book would still be far superior to the situation she was in (the justification in the book is that no one outside of the shellperson program can perform the procedure) potentially allowing her to feel when she’s hugged and hug someone back (with that person feeling something other than machinery) But however libirating wheelchairs are if you are paralysed I don’t think anyone will argue that being paralysed in a wheelchair is preferable to being completely healthy.
As far as Helva ‘enjoying the routine of an infant’ the sentence starts with “For her first three vegetable months…” As there is no description of the “special nursry” we do not know how much or how little life support equipment she was connected to during those months but that line does not suggest to me there was nothing.
As for unlimited medical service, while it would be nice if the resources were available to help everyone regaurdless of the cost the unfortunate fact is that both in real life, and in most realistic futures resources are finite. When the cost of solving one person’s quality of life issue is enough to build an entire new hospital I do not believe you are justified in demanding the tax payers pay for it. Oncet5he cost drops down then having the taxpayers fund the operation could be reasonable.
This essay and the discussion in comments are very interesting and make me think I need to re-read the Brainship stories. It’s funny, because when I read the headline here, and about the contest elsewhere, my immediate thought was, “huh, I wonder if they’ve read the Brainship books?” — as a positive contemplation, not a negative one. The impression that I distinctly have from when I was younger more closely matches Unicorn’s, and the perceptions others above have mentioned — that more than being a discussion of disability, the societal message in the books had to do with socioeconomic separation, class differences — which are accentuated elsewhere in the books beyond Hypatia’s condition.
I also wonder about the flip side of this, and if, also re the Heinlein reference above, SF does not typically deal with disability specifically because it is assumed to be overcome and no longer exist. In Star Wars, Darth Vader’s life support body is not so much as a result of his mind falling to the dark side but as a catastrophic consequence of his inability to overcome his own soul-deep damage which then becomes physically manifest. Luke Skywalker could also be termed “disabled” because of his missing hand, but because of technology his disability is invisible, and because his mind and soul are undamaged he is not portrayed as being punished with it.
And speaking as a person who freaks out her friends by expressing desires to become one with the machine, I’m interested in the aspirational elements of machine life in the future… because as a teenager when I read the ship books I wanted to be Hypatia, ‘challenges’ and all. And perhaps this is the “cool” factor Sarah mentions above, but I also think that there is a technological recapitulation of disability going on in some SF — namely, that Hypatia doesn’t just “overcome” disability, she is a unique new kind of human that had its origins in disability, but because of technology she is in fact more capable than a “meat” human born with full faculties. This is the posthuman future, the furthest extents of which imply people might eventually become deliberately “disabled” in today’s terms in order to have access to a full mind engagement with technology (which is stronger than our physical bodies) that is impossible now. All of these sort of blur the issue and make the subject of what “disability” means in the future (and what our future visions can relevantly say about today’s disability) hard to pin down.
All this said, again the discussion is interesting, and I quite look forward to the story Sarah selects.
Erin,
You make many interesting points. I wonder if your reading of the books would be different now, though, than when you first read them? For instance, I remember reading them as a child and giving no thought at all (until I got to “The Ship Who Searched” and then only briefly) to the way in which this disembodiment impacted sexuality. As an adult, that question is of significantly greater import to me than it was during that early reading. Also, the question of bodily ownership was not as clearly fraught for me then; but now that I have greater knowledge of history and enslavement, well… I think the choice between euthanasia and slavery is a very poor choice indeed!
I hope you enter the contest; I am sure your unique take on these things could make for a very interesting story and I’d be interested to see how reconsidering these questions changed your understanding of disability in the future.
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if I listen to it the whole way I will have worked myself up into a heady righteous indignation
indignation about what, exactly? the dystopian future described in the series? or the fact that mccaffrey wrote the books that way?
if it’s the former, i can understand the debate. if it’s the latter, i’m afraid you’ve lost me. indignation at where an author’s imagination takes her – or that she’s had the temerity to write something you find politically incorrect – is silly. if her subject matter so offends you, don’t read it.
laloca,
It is, of course, the nature of literary criticism to read works and to comment on them. Sometimes those comments are negative, sometimes they are positive. It is part of the conversation that all works of literature begin. These conversations are, it can be argued, the entire point of literature.
So yes, it is the dystopian future described that makes me indignate. Like most voracious readers, I lose myself in the world of whatever book I am engaged in at the moment, and can feel the same anger at injustices in that world as in our own. For all I know, McCaffrey wants the reader to experience this indignation… she may have intentionally created the shell people as slaves to a corporation to point out any number of dangers facing our own culture. I may be responding exactly as she wants me to respond.
At the very least, I am engaging her work on the level of the work–you’ll notice I don’t attack the author, only the work–and that’s what literary critics do.
S
A quick reminder that this is the work of Anne McCaffrey. If you are over twelve (maybe fourteen if you are a slow developer), you probably should be reading something written for adults, by adults.
But never let’s mind the lack of sophistication, let’s talk about her politics. She’s not a socially evolved thinker, Ms. McCaffrey. She’s got that sense of her own superiority that would do any libertarian proud. Oh yeah, she’s entitled, but those she considers beneath her are not. In her dragon books, she flushes any feminist notions right down the crapper and if you’ve read any interviews with her, you’ll see she has the stuff of a dandy republican. The rich are rich because they deserve to be. She sees the universe as a place where virtue is rewarded, you see. And the poor, like the undeserving drudges in her dragon books, are poor because they are lazy. And with this sort of mindset, how can anyone find it a shocker that she doesn’t see folks with physical handicaps as people entitled to full human rights?
Her books are dimestore gothics written to appeal to the horseback-riding crowd. They sell, oh yes they sell. But so do the Twilight books and the slop masquerading as food at Applebee’s.
Laloca suggests we should just ignore any story we don’t like, but if that story proposes something I find morally evil as a positive then shouldn’t I take issue with it? Imagine a best seller that hypothesizes the reintroduction of slavery and portrays it as a good thing, wouldn’t you expect civil rights advocates to take issue with the book’s concept? Fighting disablism is the area where I’m a civil rights advocate, so The Ship Who Sang is precisely the kind of thing you should expect me to take issue with, particularly as I can then use it as a springboard to educate people about disability and disablism and why society needs to change. (Which is precisely what I was doing in the blog posting mentioned early in the discussion).
As a belated reply to Unicorn, we’ll have to agree to disagree on pretty much everything.
Can we submit a chapter or a portion of a story?
@dwg – you missed my main point, which was that i find debate about content to be legitimate, but debate about the existence of the work not to be. perhaps it was my own fault, for ending with “if it so offends you” (which in my mind is a far higher bar than “don’t like”) “don’t read it.”
in your example of the slavery book, it would probably be more useful to question why the book became a bestseller, than to get exercised about the book’s concept. not to say you shouldn’t do the latter, but figuring out the former would be more useful to work for social change.