"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."
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CONTENT WARNING: show warningsThis page contains: Ableism Abuse Child sexual abuse Mental health issues Rape/sexual assault Shaming
As a disabled immigrant with limited resources who is also a caregiver, I attend cons very sporadically. But at every single convention until just a few years ago, as well as online, I have had multiple versions of the following conversation:
Me: “Let’s discuss disability representation in SFF literature.”
Person: “Miles Vorkosigan!” or “You should try the Vorkosigan Saga!”
I explain that I have read all the books in Lois McMaster Bujold’s many-volume space opera epic, and reread the earlier ones multiple times so much that I can quote them verbatim, but I’d rather not have repeated discussions of the main protagonist Miles as the model of disability representation.
My focus is to illuminate the stories of queer Jewish women, to write us back into the stories that never mentioned us because we aren’t supposed to exist.
What I wanted, with this universe, was to capture the sense of wonder from the early days of computing. I mean, we sent people to the moon in a jiffy-pop spaceship programmed by women with pencils and pieces of cardstock.
[They are i]nspired by a very effective technique for dealing with anxiety I was taught long ago, which is to let the sensation envelope you without judgement.
Writers Tashan Mehta (The Liar's Weave) and Prayaag Akbar (Leila) and writer-editor Salik Shah (The Mithila Review) got together with Articles Editor Gautam Bhatia to have a conversation about the present and the futures of English-language Indian speculative fiction writing.
Gautam Bhatia: Five years ago, Strange Horizons ran a discussion about Indian speculative fiction with writers and editors, hosted by Anil Menon (Part I and Part II), called "Splitting the Difference." They talked about problems of nomenclature (what is Indian SF), theme (what is, and what should, Indian SF be about), and authorship (which writers—past and present—make up the field). You are all writers and editors, living and working in India and writing in English, who have emerged after that conversation—at the risk of sounding dramatic, the next generation.
I want characters who value their friends, who see perfect strangers as full-fledged human beings worthy of their help, and who fight the world with hope and kindness to be rewarded for it.
