Other Bodyminds are Possible Reflections

Other Bodyminds are Possible

It took me a long time to come back to science ﬁc-

tion. Like Sami Schalk, I am a late arrival—except

that where she can open her book by saying, “Con-

fession: I was not initially a fan of speculative ﬁction”

(1), I have to confess that forty-ﬁve years ago I was

a white teenage boy, and read the stu voraciously

for a few years. My favorite writers were Ray Brad-

bury and Harlan Ellison; I was deeply obsessed with

both the book and the ﬁlm 2001: A Space Odys-

sey, so much so that when Star Wars was released,

I thought it was a giant step backward for the genre.

I was ﬁfteen, so I should have been in its target

demographic. But I just couldn’t deal with giant

spaceships blowing up and catching ﬁre and falling

down…in space.

When the Paul Verhoeven ﬁlm Total Recall remind-

ed me that “mutants” are meditations on variant

bodyminds—a point that has since been made em-

phatically by the X-Men movies (and of course was

always there in the X-Men world), I began to revisit

the genre more seriously.

In 2004, after I had given

a talk on disability and science ﬁction, an audience

member asked me if I had read C. S. Friedman’s This

Alien Shore (1998). I had not; and the exchange re-

minded me that up to that point, I had never taught

a course in science ﬁction largely because I did not

have enough conﬁdence to walk into a classroom

where many of the students would know more than

I did. Now, in my ﬁfties, I don’t really care. No, that’s

not quite true: I relish those moments. Those are the

moments in which I learn something.

Like, for example, the existence of C. S. Friedman’s

This Alien Shore. I reread it for this occasion, and

I’m happy to report that ﬁfteen years after my ﬁrst

reading, it is even better than I remembered. It’s

a cyberpunk thriller with a good deal of political

intrigue, but the really brilliant thing about it is its

treatment of intellectual disability and intraspecies

diversity. Humans develop the technical means for

achieving hyperlight speed (the Hausman Drive)

and interstellar travel, and begin to colonize distant

Earthlike planets. So far, standard science ﬁction

fare. But the eects of superluminal travel produce

signiﬁcant genetic mutations in the colonists (the

Hausman Variants); horriﬁed by all these radical

forms of intra-species Otherness, Earth cuts o all

commerce with the colonies, even the ones that are

barely subsisting and simply need supplies—which

could of course have been delivered by spacecraft

without human crews. The mutant colonists who

survive, as you might imagine, develop a profound

distrust and hatred of the blinkered, mutant-phobic

Terrans.

Many hundreds of years later, one of the mutant col-

onies, on the settlement Guera, ﬁnds that they have

the ability to navigate interstellar travel—not via the

Hausman Drive but by the discovery of a system of

fault lines in the universe, the ainniq. But there is a

catch: the ainniq is ﬁlled with terrors, and only the

Guerans are capable of piloting ships through it.

Everyone else needs to be rendered unconscious

if they are to survive the journey. The reason the

Guerans can do this? They are mutants with what

appears to be autism. They are mutants with what

appears to be Tourette’s. They are mutants with

what appears to be OCD. (They are also neo-Asian,

and I can’t decide whether this is orientalist…or the

opposite of orientalism, whatever that might be.

This is the novel’s only treatment of race as we now

know it, in characters with names like Kio Masada

and Chandras Delhi.) Of all the Hausman Variants,

the Guerans are the only ones who physically re-

semble us Terrans. But they have all the forms of

neurodiversity that Terrans foolishly believed they

had managed to eradicate from the species. And

now the Guerans control the galaxy; still they are

merciful toward the benighted Terrans who tried to

consign the colonies to eternal isolation, even wel-

coming them into the new galactic order made pos-

sible by travel through the ainniq.

The plot involves two threats to the Geurans’ be-

nign but ironclad monopoly over interstellar travel

JOURNAL OF SCIENCE FICTION

Volume 3, Issue 2, July 2019

ISSN 2472-0837

Reﬂections

By: Michael Bérubé

JOURNAL OF SCIENCE FICTION

Volume 3, Issue 2, July 2019

ISSN 2472-0837

and commerce: a diabolical virus designed to attack

their pilots, and an experiment by an Earth corpora-

tion to modify a young woman’s brain so as to in-

duce a form of schizophrenia or multiple personality

disorder which will mimic the neurodiversity that al-

lows the Guerans to navigate the ainniq. But I’ll oer

no spoilers here. I’ll say only that This Alien Shore

can be read proﬁtably alongside Rivers Solomon’s

neuroqueer An Unkindness of Ghosts (2018) as ex-

amples of speculative ﬁction that imagine forms of

neurodiversity as—well, not as superpowers, as in

the world of the X-Men, but as valuable talents that

contribute much to the social fabric of human life.

Though the novels could not be more dierent in

their treatment of intraspecies diversity: in An Un-

kindness of Ghosts, the main character, Aster, a

neuroqueer woman of color, resides at the bottom

of a rigid social hierarchy aboard a massive space-

craft of would-be colonists ﬂeeing an uninhabitable

Earth, and in This Alien Shore the neurodiverse

Guerans are the agents assiduously stitching to-

gether the social fabric of galactic human life. In all

its Hausman Variations.

In 2018, Aisha Matthews graciously invited me to

be part of a panel on neurodiversity and science

ﬁction at Escape Velocity, but unfortunately my

schedule did not permit me to accept the invitation.

In 2019, she even more graciously reinvited me,

and this time my co-panelists would be Sami Schalk

and Melinda C. Hall—which is why we’re all in this

issue together. Escape Velocity was easily one of

the coolest conferences I have attended in my thirty

years in this business, and being on that panel was

a rare pleasure. (Professor Schalk’s and Professor

Hall’s essays here will give you some idea why). Ms.

Matthews had cannily suggested that we all read

each other’s work before convening together with

An Unkindness of Ghosts; Octavia Butler’s Para-

ble of the Sower, Parable of the Talents, and Pat-

ternmaster; Laura Tisdale’s Echoes; and Octavia’s

Brood, the remarkable collection of short stories

edited by adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imari-

sha. The idea—that is, Ms. Matthews’ idea—was that

we would talk extemporaneously about these texts

and whatever others came to mind, rather than read

academic papers in an academic manner. (“Wow,” I

thought upon getting that reading list in my email,

“this is way more work than writing an eight-page

paper. And way more fun.”)

I had read Professor Schalk’s Bodyminds Reimag-

ined: (Dis)Ability, Race, and Gender in Black Wom-

en’s Speculative Fiction almost as soon as it came

o the presses, not only because I knew I would

learn much from it, but because I imagined that

even though my own The Secret Life of Stories

merely gestures at the work of Octavia Butler and

oers no analyses of works by black women writ-

ers, we had something else in common: the desire

to persuade our colleagues in disability studies that

they need not conﬁne themselves to “realistic” rep-

resentations of disability in ﬁction, and (more radi-

cally) need not conﬁne themselves to “representa-

tions” of disability at all.

I made my argument in whispers, suggesting ten-

tatively that I prefer Philip K. Dick’s representation

of autism in Martian Time-Slip (1964) to Mark Had-

don’s in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the

Night-Time (2003) because no one could reason-

ably object that Dick’s novel was an inaccurate por-

trayal of a person with autism. It’s hard to imagine a

reader saying, “See here, that’s not right, an autistic

ten-year-old (on Mars) can’t possibly see decades

into the future and warp other people’s sense of

space and time.” I wanted to persuade critics not

to read literary texts by reference to the DSM-5,

but rather to see how manifestations of and even

ideas about intellectual disability are rendered as

textual eects. (In other words, I don’t care if Chris-

topher Boone, the narrator of Curious Incident, has

Asperger’s, though I know that he pisses o plenty

of people with and without Asperger’s. I care about

the texts-within-the-texts, starting with the title, that

render intellectual disability as a distinctive form

of relation to texts.) Professor Schalk, by contrast,

blows the doors wide open in her introduction, writ-

ing that “the focus on realism as the proper or pref-

Other Bodyminds are Possible, continued

JOURNAL OF SCIENCE FICTION

Volume 3, Issue 2, July 2019

ISSN 2472-0837

-erred avenue for politically eective literature for

marginalized groups like black women and dis-

abled people overlooks the immense possibilities

of speculative ﬁction as well as the limits of realism”

(20). My copy of Bodyminds Reimagined has this

note in the margin of this passage: “O Yes.”

I suspect, dear reader, that you would not be here if

you were not of the “O Yes” party as well. And if I am

right about that, I’d like to ask you to reﬂect not only

on the richness of the essays before you here, but

upon the fact that the genre of science ﬁction has

been exploring forms of neurodiversity for decades.

One wonders why it took so long for literary crit-

ics to catch on—except that, well, it took me a long

time to come back to science ﬁction, and I know,

we know, that much of the literary and lit crit world

will never take the genre seriously. That world, like

the mutant-phobic Earth of This Alien Shore, is so

much the poorer and more isolated for that. But as

Ms. Matthews told me, the 2018 discussion of dis-

ability and science ﬁction at Escape Velocity proved

to be so provocative and generative that they just

had to do it again the following year (and so much

the better for me!). I don’t trac in predictions—or

speculative ﬁctions—but I will hazard a guess that

the neurodiverse genie is not going back in that

bottle. Thanks to Ms. Matthews and to the essayists

here, including my awesome copanelists, the topic

of neurodiversity in science ﬁction now looks like a

permanent agenda item for criticism. Other body-

minds are possible. And this genre may prove to

the best venue to pursue the lines of thought and

the lines of ﬂight (through the ainniq!) to which that

injunction invites us.

Notes

And can I just say how much I loved Deadpool

2, not only for its humor and the narrative self-re-

ﬂexivity but for its representation of the history of

institutionalization and “cure” of people with devel-

opmental disabilities?

References

Schalk, Sami. (2018). Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)

Ability, Race, and Gender in Black Wom-

en’s Speculative Fiction. Durham: Duke UP.

Other Bodyminds are Possible, continued