Lois McMaster Bujold (Modern Masters of Science Fiction) by James Edward

Author:James, Edward [James, Edward]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2015-06-26T14:00:00+00:00

DISABILITY AND GENETIC MODIFICATION

At the time of the London Paralympic Games in September 2012, the magazine SFX published a list of “10 Inspirational Disabled Characters from Sci-Fi and Fantasy.”1 Given the bias of the magazine toward the visual media, SFX naturally led with the autistic Gary from Alphas and the blind Geordi LaForge from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Indeed, there was only one inspirational disabled character from books: Miles Vorkosigan, coming in at number 7. The authors noted that they could not find an illustration of Miles from any book cover (they did not look hard enough), and so they had to use pictures from Steve Jackson’s role-playing game based on the Vorkosigan books2; they end by remarking that this is “a sad comment on what publishers think is sellable.” Sellable or not, disability is something that permeates Bujold’s work, and numerous readers have found inspiration in what she has written. Bujold has said that when she realized how her work resonated with the disabled, she was “croggled.”3 She has rationalized it as simply “good characterization,” thinking herself into someone else’s skin.

I’ve had engineers ask if I was an engineer, mothers ask if I was a mother, medical people ask me my medical background, military men ask me in which branch I served, gay men thank me for “getting a gay man right.”4

Typically she adds a caveat: reader feedback is not a good sample, as a writer hears from those who like the stories a lot and not from those who throw the book across the room “or, worse, wander away bored.” However, Bujold is being somewhat disingenuous here: after all, she was close to her engineer father and brother, she has been a mother, and she worked in a hospital for years. She has used whatever experience she could to help her. What remains is thus not just “good characterization” but “empathy.”

For the remaining chapters of this book I have selected a number of themes Bujold explores throughout her fictional work. This chapter is about disability, including attitudes toward disability and ideas about deviations from the bodily norm. It is interesting both how rarely disability is treated in science fiction and fantasy and how ubiquitous it is in Bujold’s work. Most visible is Miles Vorkosigan himself, whose fetus was damaged by an insurgent’s attack and who struggles with his brittle bones and other problems throughout the early decades of his life. But to Miles can be added many other characters whose physical or mental disabilities are a crucial part of the narrative, from the brain-damaged Dubauer in Shards of Honor to the one-handed Dag in the Sharing Knife sequence, and Cazaril, with a mutilated hand and a demonic stomach tumor, in the first Chalion book. Bujold has declared that she was never writing books about issues: they are about character. The disabilities with which her characters have to cope “do not comprise the sums of their characters nor the reasons for their existences, but are just plot-things that

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