That oral language is not primary in a film made by abled people, and that interdependence and disabled survival is meant to be important, is revolutionary.
We should be able to write stories and invent technologies and have them be recognized for what they are, instead of worrying about whether they will be counted as steampunk.
Is a film about circles that loops its ending into its beginning more than a gimmick? Is a story about boredom that’s intentionally boring a big deal? Is a sprawling book about the sprawl of existence doing anything interesting? By its nature, Always Coming Home contains a kind of resistance that other books by Le Guin did not, though maybe resistance is the wrong word.
I wanted humanity to lose its sense of exceptionalism and specialness. We’re just one species out of countless others, and we cannot survive without banding together and developing a more communal mindset.
I like to write from the point of view of monsters. I’m a Muslim-Arab man, and I think a lot about demonization—who gets turned into monsters and who gets viewed as monsters.
I look forward to reading more works of science fiction, especially space westerns, that can envision a future where tools of death, regardless of their shape or function, are not considered indicative of the “advanced” state of a culture.
"There’s something sterile to the environments so often preferred by hard and military SF, where everyone is in uniform without a hint of how they live outside of it, that forgets that, even in the far and dazzling future, people are still people."
