Crystal Rain by Tobias S. Buckell

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


The one about a land war on an isolated and technologically

retrograded colony world, with shadowy aliens working behind the

scenes.



. . . Yeah, no. This book is a study in how social justice

awareness isn’t transitive. Buckell’s name got tossed around a lot a

couple years ago in race fail because he’s an author of color who, my

goodness, writes nonfaily science fiction about people of color. What

no one told me was that he simultaneously fails at disability. He

fails at disability like a boss, you guys.



[I just wrote and deleted over 1000 words of spitting rant about how

many of the exact same people who were bringing out the racism

pitchforks a couple years ago suddenly in the disability context of

Vividconfail wanted to have “a compromise dialogue.” Let’s just leave that

as the soundbyte and move on under the assumption that my anger with

and alienation from my community hasn’t lessened a single iota in

seven months. Kay? Kay.]



Anyway. The point is, as you know, Bob, that awareness of one

axis of oppression has the potential to give a person some awareness

of others, but there’s no auto fill. It’s not like dragging the

function across multiple rows in Excel.



See Tobias Buckell, whose main character is missing an arm and much of

his memory. The presentation of his physical disability is clumsy and

shallow; it’s basically just repeated references to a half dozen

things he does one-handed. There’s no grasp whatsoever on what it’s

like to experience that sort of embodiment, or the psychological

consequences of losing a body part and some function in the traumatic

way he did.



Oh, and then he gets the arm back when he gets his memory back.

Because now he’s a whole person again, get it?



If I had a quarter for every – okay. One more time.



Disability is not your metaphor. Using a piece of someone’s identity like that is dismissive and demeaning. And disability is particularly not your metaphor for incompleteness, unwholeness, lessness, damage, etc. That is the little kernel of evilness at the very center of ablest thought, right there. This is where it all comes from. Because using disability as an outward-facing metaphor for inward-facing unwholeness depends on the ablest assumption that the disabled body and the disabled person are less, are incomplete, are unwhole. Ask someone who’s been disabled for a while how it feels to be only part of a person, see how well they take it.



And if anyone really needs a sharper point on this one, the most obvious analogy I can think of is that writing disability this way is very much like the way a character’s shadiness/evilness/thuggishness is visually coded in movies through darker skin.



. . . Also the book was clumsily written and it just didn’t interest me much.





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