Blog hop: Accessing The Future Fiction

I just found The Future Fire thanks to a friend of mine, That Crazy Crippled Chick, because she linked me to an article listing 5 positive representations of disability in science fiction. As a disabled person (and a disabled writer who sometimes does science fiction and fantasy,) that's totally a thing I want to see.

Anyways, they author of that post is also crowdfunding for Accessing The Future, a planned anthology of speculative fiction (so basically everything I read and most of what I write) with disability themes. I'm totally going to submit a story once they get to that point.

Also a blog hop.

1. Tell us about your Work In Progress (WIP) / Current Read (CR) and the world it's set in.
   
   I'm almost done with a story tentatively titled Where None Have Known to Look, where a smuggler and her friend visit a race of sentient computers on a planet no one else knows about... and the friend has the choice to become part computer. It'd be useful, certainly, but people already think he's not fully human- is he willing to let them be right?
   
   The reason folks think he's not fully human is that he's autistic, so while I didn't think too much about the world it's set in before... I'm going to say it's socially pretty similar to that of today, just adding in contact with interstellar trade routes and the extra technology involved in making that possible.
   
   By almost done I mean tomorrows post is probably going to be the announcement that you can buy it on Amazon. (I've got other stuff there already.)
   
2. Who are the most powerful people in this world?
   
   At a local to planetary level, there's a good bit of variation, but in general, the folks who control interplanetary trade control most everything else. At planetary levels, that means whoever was rich enough to get into the space trade early (for their planet) has come out on top.
   
3. Where does their power come from?
   
   Controlling trade means they're controlling how goods and services flow, which means they can make or break a planets economy if they really want to. Mostly they just want to have that as an unspoken threat, but it's effective enough. Think the current corporate mess, just at the interstellar level.
    
4. What physical and/or mental characteristics underpin their positions of power?
   
   Whatever underpinned power on their planet before they made interstellar contact still does- so on Earth, being white, male, heterosexual, cisgendered, ambulatory, generally able-bodied, close to neurotypical, and having received a western-style education is still a big determining factor.
   
   If you get off your home planet for whatever reason, most people you meet won't know what your species-typical and culture-typical things are, so it reverts to your place within the trade hierarchy, unless and until you're dealing with someone familiar with your planet and species, at which point the same biases you deal with at home are coming into play.
   
5. How does this affect the weakest people in the world?
   
   It's theoretically possible for someone closer to the bottom of the heap to be an exception and get off-planet, which is totally a functioning escape method: Trevina is Hispanic, and she faces racism on Earth. But she's an independent trader/smuggler (mostly grey market,) and when she's off planet she'll rarely run into anyone who knows enough about humans to understand that skin color has any significance... or even that we come in multiple colors. She'll just deal with her status as an independent trader (common folk love her, big trading companies hate her, law enforcement doesn't really trust her but will probably look the other way unless she does something really egregious because she's considered a little fish) and as a foreigner.
   
   But she's made it to that level, which means she's rather emphatically not one of the weakest people in her society. She's got some social categories in common with her planet's share of them, which is very different, especially considering that she's mostly not on her home planet.
   
   People generally don't starve- it's gotten to the point where starvation would be bad enough publicity that they make sure everyone can eat- but it's not pretty. Shelter is not a given, nor is medical care, unless you can pay. Most people don't actually have any contact off-planet unless a close friend or family member has gone to labor on an asteroid or in helping make a new planet fit for life, but jobs are often moving to planets where wages are lower or resources cheaper. For the moment, resources are fairly expensive on Earth but wages are low, so service jobs and low-resource crafting (artisanal work) are easy to find. 

I didn't realize I knew this much about my universe. I might need to write more in it...

T-21 Blog Hop: Social Justice

IRONY UPDATE: One of the things that inspired this post was an Autism Speaks fail that I thought was over and taken care of. The day after writing this, I find out it's not actually over and that Autism Speaks are white-texting liars and also put the white-texted toolkit back up. Story here.

Today, I'm talking about a social justice issue that probably a lot of you don't think of as social justice or as related to disability. But it is. I'd describe it as "cite your sources," but it's not a full MLA or APA or Chicago citation that we necessarily need as a justice thing. Frankly, making my own citations of those kinds is a cognitive access issue for me, so I either use an automatic generator or get someone else to do my citations. But the idea of saying where you got the ideas you're using and building on? Yes, that is a social justice issue.

So. Here's the part where I talk about why.

Advocacy comes with innovation. People need to figure out what it is in their situation that needs to change, and they need to figure out how to change it. People are coming up with new ideas- that's what innovation is. When people neglect to list where they got these ideas from as they build on them, there's a few things that happen. (Links Democratizing Innovation and my post about the book, because relevant.)

First, people tend to forget where the ideas actually came from. When we're talking about technology stuff like in Democratizing Innovation, that means corporations don't know which customers came up with the ideas.

Then they forget that it even was customer who came up with the ideas. They think they came up with the ideas themselves.

Now the big group probably has control over the idea and thinks they came up with it, but they didn't!

This applies with advocacy things too, sending credit for ideas up the power gradient- how did Queer Rights stuff start up in the USA? It wasn't about marriage for people of the same gender. Trans women of color started that up, predominantly Black trans women. Today the face of this sort of advocacy is white gay men, and the T for trans that started this movement tend to get ignored. There are people in those movements who legitimately think it was white gay people who started it.

In disability stuff, parents of kids with disabilities generally have more power than people with disabilities do themselves. (Less so if the parents are also disabled, even less if they're openly so, and there are some organizations that make sure to give their power to Disabled people to try to combat this, but overwhelmingly it's parents who get listened to. Check the readership on blogs if you don't believe me.) Within disability, the image we have is usually a young white boy with whatever the disability in question is. Sometimes it's not, but that's the usual. A white man with the disability is probably going to get listened to more than someone who isn't a white man and has the same disability, or than someone who has multiple disabilities. There are a lot of power differentials. Access to academia is one of them.

When we fail to cite/link/acknowledge where our ideas are coming from, we wind up erasing our sources. This can cost them opportunities for authorship and scholarship and other things that can help with being not impoverished. Poverty is a big issue for marginalized groups, like, you know, people with disabilities. People also sometimes act like a group doesn't really exist, which can get into an ugly cycle with this: the idea can't have come from them because they don't exist, and we know they don't exist because they don't come up with ideas! So we ignore the ideas they came up with (or pretend they came from someone else), maybe we'll come up with the idea that they can't think. Wait, that's already a disability stereotype. It'll just get worse.

So yes, if you're building off an idea someone else wrote about, say so. Give enough information that people can find what the person wrote. Since this is the internet and most of us are bloggers reading other bloggers, link it! Links are good! They drive traffic to the people you linked, which is good for plenty of reasons, including social justice type reasons when you're linking disabled bloggers. Boosting the voices of people from the groups you want to help is a big part of how you do allyship.

Oh, and a note for the folks who think citations and copyright law and such are evil and bad: that's great, if you want to tell the world that they don't need to cite you go ahead and do that, but if you enforce that "no citations" rule on others, that's not OK. You might be couching it in the language of justice, but if you're erasing the marginalized folks who came up with these ideas, it's still helping oppressors. And yes, this applies to ethnographic stuff and sociological stuff, if you're talking to members of a marginalized group about their experiences and one of them tells you they don't want to be anonymous, you listen. Enforced anonymity erases scholars who are members of the groups being studied, and that's unacceptable. (Offering anonymity is still important- it's enforcing anonymity that's a problem.)

Also, creative commons is kinda cool and probably has a license that will keep some big corporation from taking your work and making it proprietary like happened to the work of a bunch of MIT coders and which still lets people use your work in the ways you want them to be able to use it.

This was for the Down Wit Dat T-21 Blog Hop.

These posts brought to you by:


Add your post now!

Down Wit Dat's T-21 Blog Hop: December

Wooo blog hops! I should maybe make a blog hop tag. *makes tag.* Now I need to write something don't I?

I crashed pretty hard after my class trip to Jingdezhen (景德镇) back in November. I've been pretty iffy on writing since. I haven't done much of any leadership type stuff or even fully knowing what's going on in advocacy stuff since. I've been aware enough of Boycott Autism Speaks to signal boost them some, at least.

But you know what? It's OK that I can't always do more than just manage my own existence. It really is. Also, at the moment, I'm in a position where just being there and existing and making it to class every day... apparently does have some potentially important activist effect. The university that I'm at in China has apparently been worried about having an autistic student studying abroad at their school for the entire time I've been around. OK, make that ever since I disclosed, which was sometime over the summer. 

Right now, my advocacy is being the autistic student who goes out and is a student and makes at least some of the administrators and teachers think. My advocacy is being there and being visible and saying "Yes, an autistic student can go to college. Yes, an autistic student can study abroad. Yes, an autistic student can reach a high enough level of Chinese proficiency to take major classes conducted in Chinese. Yes, an autistic student can do all of these things, albeit not in the exact same way, still needing supports, still looking rather clearly different." And no, not every autistic student will follow in my exact path. Most won't. [Neither will most neurotypical students, let's be honest here, if you don't live in a multilingual household or in a household where the dominant language isn't the same as the one used in school getting that kind of proficiency in a second language is hard.]

It's still important to open those paths. It's important to make "college" and "study abroad" and "education while still acting obviously autistic" things that people think of as possibilities. I didn't go into the year intending to prove stuff to Tianjin. I figured I'd be spending some amount of time reminding the USA program people that yes, the ADA exists, not that they'd be proactively protecting me from Tianjin so I get the chance to prove competence to them. I might actually be the first openly autistic student this school has had. I'm not 100% sure, but given a lot of the reactions and questions I'm hearing about... it really sounds like I might be. 

So advocacy: Someone has to be that first person to openly go out and say "I'm Autistic and doing the thing." Or "I use a wheelchair and I'm doing the thing." Or "I have Down's and I'm doing the thing." It looks like I may have (predominantly unwittingly) wound up being that person for the university where I'm studying abroad. And I'm kind of being a Lady Knight Keladry about it. This is already interesting and I'm sure it will get more so.

These posts brought to you by:


Add your post now!