James Nicoll Reviews

Reactor passed on this, probably because too many readers would miss the point and leave baffled, angry comments. Sarcasm and such often does not go over well. Inconvenient for me as most of my conversation is made of sarcasm, irony, and gallows humour.

Recently, the tabletop roleplaying game community has been aflame over accessibility within game worlds. The argument, as I understand it, is that worlds favorable to thrilling adventures are short on namby-pamby consideration for the less able. In such dog-eat-dog settings, entirely bereft as they are of any charitable sentiments, even minor disabilities would spell doom. Adventures are therefore the sole domain of physical paragons such as Captain Harlock, Zatoichi, and Götz von Berlichingen.

Although the argument seems superficially convincing, a curious pattern emerges when we examine adventure fiction. 

Characters with significant disabilities not appear, they abound.
Furthermore, the authors all seem to hit on the same dubious
justification why their worlds feature these characters as protagonists.

To show just how common this practice is, I will select at random a particular year, and use as examples the Best Novel Hugo finalists for that year. My dice having rolled 63, the examples are Way Station by Clifford D. Simak, Glory Road by Robert A. Heinlein, Witch World by Andre Norton, Dune World by Frank Herbert, and finally Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Way Station by Clifford D. Simak

Enoch Wallace appears to be an unremarkable recluse, avoiding human society in backwater Wisconsin. In fact, he participates in a thriving community… just not a human community. Enoch runs a way station for transient aliens.

The novel focuses on several crises. The government has noticed Enoch’s unnaturally long lifespan. As well, humans seem determined to destroy themselves. All available solutions appear unsatisfactory.

Complicating the above, Enoch’s eyesight. He can only perceive a narrow range of light frequencies; he is barely able to see in the dark and his color vision is two varieties of cone cell away from being monochromatic. Additionally, his retina is positioned so that it creates a permanent blind spot. Functionally, his eyes are little better than rudimentary light-sensitive patches. Does Enoch allow this to impede his efforts to save humanity? He does not.

Glory Road by Robert A. Heinlein

E. C Gordon survives an unnamed war in Southeast Asia, only to discover life post-military is nearly as unsatisfactory as life in combat. The world appears designed to frustrate the ambitions of men such as Gordon. His future appears bleak or at least disappointing.

Enter Star. Star offers Gordon adventure. Star desperately needs to retrieve the Egg of the Phoenix. The quest will be difficult, possibly fatal. The quest is a challenge to which Gordon cannot say no.

Gordon undertakes his quest in spite of profound mobility deficits. Despite being a tetrapod, a lineage best suited for quadrupedal locomotion, Gordon totters around, balancing on his hind legs. While this frees up his forelegs to manipulate objects, his unnatural stance is inherently unstable and likely to cause lower back pain. Nevertheless, Gordon perseveres.

Witch World by Andre Norton

Fleeing enemies in post-war Europe, Simon Tregarth submits to Dr. Jorge Petronius’ cutting-edge dimensional transportation. Petronius’ device most certainly makes people vanish. Where they go, the doctor cannot say. As the alternative is certain death, Simon takes his chances with world-hopping.

Simon appears in a magic-rich realm just in time to assist a fleeing woman to dispose of her pursuers. While the woman and her witch-kin command powerful magic, they are beset by an enemy whose abilities they do not fully understand. Simon’s war-honed skills may well be of use.

Traveling to an unfamiliar dimension would be difficult enough. Simon’s experiences are enormously complicated by his communicative deficits. Lacking direct means of communication, he resorts to (hopefully) meaningful coded hooting¹. Not only is this inherently low-bandwidth, not only does he have to hope his listeners know the code to decipher his noises, the physiological adaptations needed left Simon prone to choking. Every mouthful of food is a potential existential threat! None of which impedes Simon’s heroism.

Dune World by Frank Herbert

Arrakis is the sole source of Spice, the drug on which interstellar navigation depends. The family that controls Arrakis controls trade. The family that controls trade controls the galaxy. Therefore, Arrakis is the key to boundless power.

As Duke Atreides suspects, Arrakis is a trap. Having had guardianship of the planet forced on him by a hostile emperor, the Duke’s defenses will be at a nadir. Only briefly, but long enough to murder the Duke. How long the Duke’s wife Jessica and son Paul will survive their family’s fall is an interesting question.

A significant part of the backstory is shaped by Jessica’s inability to produce children quickly or in great number. Whereas the females of many species can produce thousands of young at a time, each emerging able to fight and flee, Jessica produces a single child no more frequently than once every nine months. In practice, this is even less frequent because each of her children requires years of care before they can fend for themselves. This seems an equation for rapid extinction… yet Jessica and her children prevail.

Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Determined to write an account of the day the atomic bomb was detonated over Hiroshima, Jonah should by rights interview the father of the Atom Bomb, Felix Hoenikker. As Felix is dead, Jonah must settle for interviewing Felix’s children, Angela, Newt, and when he finds him, Frank.

The picture that emerges of Felix is of a man as brilliant as he was indifferent to the consequences of his creations. Felix’s final creation, Ice Nine, could doom the world if even a small amount of it were to get loose. As Felix did not see fit to destroy his sample of Ice Nine but rather entrusted it to his unreliable children, Jonah will have a front row seat for the apocalypse.

An astonishing detail that emerges is that Jonah is a heterotroph, incapable of sustaining himself on sunlight and basic minerals. Jonah is a sort of living vampire, endlessly consuming other beings. Were this not affliction enough, Jonah is absurdly fragile and incapable of effective suspended animation to sleep away inclement conditions. And yet, none of these distract Jonah from his academic ambitions.

***

Five authors, five very different books and five life-altering deficits. Yet, all of the novels share the same rather implausible detail: these conditions are universal within their species. Every human totter around nearly blind, effectively mute, endlessly on the verge of starvation until they encounter some trivial environmental challenge — a drought, a flood, a thousand sieverts of hard radiation — at which point they perish. Ubiquity means nobody notices, or thinks to question whether humans are fit to be protagonists. No human does, anyway. Tardigrades might have opinions on the matter.

Of course, I left out many unremarkable, universal human short-comings; built-in aging, vitamin C dependency, some absolutely bizarre consequences of trying to repurpose a brain evolved to find brightly colored fruit to do calculus, and so many more. Feel free to regale us with the universal deficits we all somehow manage to circumnavigate each day, the accommodations for which go unremarked, at least for humans, they are universal.

1: Characters also try to convey meaning by making arbitrary marks in the hope other people will spontaneously hallucinate the meaning simply by looking at the marks. Where do writers get their ideas?