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Dark Orbit by Carolyn Ives Gilman
Mar. 29th, 2019 10:18 pmDark Orbit
2/5. Scifi about an expedition to a supposedly uninhabited planet, except whoops it isn't and the natives are a population of all blind people.
No thank you. This would be unexceptional workmanlike scifi if it weren't for the magical disabled people plot. They can do a *handwave* thing with their minds because, like, not seeing has freed up parts of their brains? And a sighted person can learn to do this thing by living in the dark for a long time? Oh, and this unsighted society has no concept of angles or, apparently, of embodiment in the sense that one of them had to have it explained to her that her hand was her hand and that it could reach out to manipulate objects in space once she was learning to see? I'm sorry, I've known a lot of totals in my time, and yeah they sometimes have unusual notions of spatial relations, but honestly. What the screaming hell.
2/5. Scifi about an expedition to a supposedly uninhabited planet, except whoops it isn't and the natives are a population of all blind people.
No thank you. This would be unexceptional workmanlike scifi if it weren't for the magical disabled people plot. They can do a *handwave* thing with their minds because, like, not seeing has freed up parts of their brains? And a sighted person can learn to do this thing by living in the dark for a long time? Oh, and this unsighted society has no concept of angles or, apparently, of embodiment in the sense that one of them had to have it explained to her that her hand was her hand and that it could reach out to manipulate objects in space once she was learning to see? I'm sorry, I've known a lot of totals in my time, and yeah they sometimes have unusual notions of spatial relations, but honestly. What the screaming hell.