But the internet is what it is; enthusiasm and fan culture are what they are, and I have surrounded myself—very deliberately and lovingly—with nerds. I’m guaranteed that I will know what happens in The Rise of Skywalker months before it comes out in a format I can watch. Not just the broad brushstrokes of a formal review—I’m immersed in fan culture. By the time you read this, I will know this movie’s equivalent of porgs, vulptices, and all the other little details that make a movie fun—but that will be long before I get to have that fun myself.
And… it turns out I’m all right with swimming in spoilers.
In the leadup to The Rise of Skywalker, I kept trying to give myself room to feel sad, angry, anything else negative. And I didn’t. Not being able to see it in theaters wasn’t like an open wound or even a papercut. It was more like a missing tooth, where you keep poking your tongue in the place where it used to be. It felt weird… but not painful. I kept telling myself it was okay not to play the cheerful smiling cripple. But when I went to sit with my actual feelings, they were… fine?
It’s not because I’m not interested in the story. I am. I think it’s not even that I’ve internalized that knowing a plot and experiencing storytelling are two different things—although wow, are they ever. (Try listening to a six-year-old tell you about their favorite movie sometime. It can be delightful, or it can be tedious beyond words—but it is most certainly not the same as watching the movie. Not even a little. Even though they know—and will tell you, with the slightest encouragement—all the best lines and most charming details and, to some approximation, the jokes. Now think of that magnified by an entire internet: that’s what it can be like when you haven’t seen the movie that’s the center of the discourse. You’ve heard the one-liners again and again, often with people getting them wrong or laughing in the middle, but it’s definitely not the same.)
When I gave myself space to sit with my feelings about not getting to see The Rise of Skywalker in theaters, what came out was this: yes, this is a new facet of my disability. Nobody really wants those, and I’m no exception. If you could give me a get-out-of-vertigo-free card, a day pass to go to the movies without side effects, I would absolutely do it. But in general I think this, the capstone of the Star Wars sequence, is actually the ideal movie for me to be a fan who waits.
When I was little, most of my Star Wars experience was not watching. Most of it was discussing and reenacting with other children in the imaginative play that can be the center of fandom for the littlest fans. Star Wars was mediated through other people: my cousin Garrett, my friend Jimmy, sometimes even other children whose names I didn’t know. What do you imagine Han Solo would do here? If I say my Princess Leia does this and you say your Chewbacca does that in response, do we keep running around yelling and playing? Do we argue about it? Tiny child fandoms can be incredibly interactive. Strong personalities—yes, like mine—will hold a lot of sway. But if you want someone else to play that the merry-go-round is the Millennium Falcon with you, you have to listen to them at least a little.
These days I’m a writer, which means that I get to spend a lot of time telling other people what to think. I get ARCs and NetGalley downloads of books. Sometimes I even see manuscripts before their editors see them. It’s very easy to get used to the idea that my opinions are best formed in a vacuum—that I am supposed to be the influencer, not the influenced. But both sides of that equation can be fun. Usually I get to be first in line, but there’s something wonderful about opening a new book knowing that it’s a friend’s favorite.
Even without the vertigo banning me from theaters, I was never motivated enough to be the midnight release person—so I always knew that other people had seen it before me. In between bouts of illness after The Last Jedi, I texted my friend Arkady Martine, “I was squeezing your hand across the miles when Holdo came on the screen,” because of a conversation we’d had about the Vice-Admiral and depictions of femme women in space opera. “I see what you mean,” I wrote to a family member who had already told me she’d fallen in love with Rose Tico.
So I’m leaning into those moments. I can’t avoid my friends and family’s enthusiasm—I wouldn’t want to—so I’m embracing it as part of the roots of my Star Wars fandom. Let’s do this together. If I can’t be there to be the one who sees it first, help me see it best.
Make sure I don’t miss a wonderful thing. I’m not going to be the lone figure out on the plane, facing down the new challenge by myself—so let me go into this knowing that I’m already part of a huge conversation, knowing that I can come out and talk to all of you, that when I do get to join the conversation you’re not going to be saying, “Ugh, I’m tired of that,” but, “Yay, we saved you a seat!”
Save us all a seat. Make sure there’s always more to talk about.
If you’re in the same position as I am—if you can’t go to theatrical releases of movies for medical reasons—and you don’t feel the same way, please know that your feelings are valid too. Angry, sad, frustrated, isolated—even bemused—I’m not trying to say that I’ve unlocked the secret one true way to feel about all of this. But I’m hoping that for me, this time, being late to the party still feels like being at the party—with plenty of verses of the Ewok song yet to sing together.
© 2020 Marissa Lingen
Marissa Lingen is among the top science fiction and fantasy writers in the world who were named after fruit. She has many opinions on Moomintrolls. She has been known to cross international borders in search of rare tisanes. Her personal relationships with bodies of water are intense though eccentric. She lives atop the oldest bedrock in the US with two large men and one small dog, where she writes, if not daily, frequently.
Speculative Fictions, Everywhere We Look
by Malka Older
For me, fiction always starts with a what-if.
The work may start with an image or feeling, but at that point it could still be poetry. It doesn’t really become fiction until that what-if element leads me to a succession of events, a story. It’s a literal counter-factual: the what-if reality were different, if dragons existed or history had played out along other lines or technology allowed us to travel to the stars. What would that be like? How would it change everything else?
These what-if ideas are powerful, because they let us imagine a different future or present, and they are particularly powerful when we do the work of imagining those possibilities through coherent stories. By connecting our wildest imaginings to stories that make narrative sense, stories in which we can see ourselves participating, we expand our concept of the possible.
Although the examples I used above suggest speculative genres, all fiction is speculative. What if there was a family that had these problems, and one of them did this? What if there were people in these positions and they found a passion they could not resist? What if I had written down everything I have semi-forgotten from my childhood?
Still, with the more overtly speculative genres we can break some more rules. We can get further from reality, or closer to what we wish reality was. We can focus a little more on the changes in the world—magic systems, world peace, human cloning. We can imagine something more different.
Maybe that’s why there’s a tendency to think of speculative fiction as more distant from our world. All too often we classify speculative fiction as utopian or dystopian, or frame it as predictions of the future rather than analysis of the present, distancing ourselves from the ways in which speculative fiction intersects with our lives.
We’re a little more used to the role of historical fiction, which has a critical function in the building of identity. We tell ourselves stories about our lives, our childhoods, and our accomplishments, inventing biographies that, whether they inflate our own importance and virtues or not, make sense on some fundamental level where rigorous reality might leave us unsatisfied. The childhood story that has been told so many times by adults that we remember the story rather than the memory; the slightly exaggerated
story told at a party; the CV that is not inaccurate but maybe a little tilted in our favor. We build and layer and contribute to stories about nation or organization, creating missions and meanings and collective identities that allow us to cohere as a group and take action together, even when there is little that objectively binds us together. We embellish or poeticize, invent a little, tweak a little, smooth out loose ends. We may miss this when we do it ourselves, but we’re used to the idea that it happens. We expect unreliable narrators, in real life almost as much as in fiction. We take people’s histories of themselves with salt shakers, imagine between the lines of their imaginative histories.
We use speculative fiction all the time too. We plan, projecting out futures with varying degrees of likelihood. Sometimes these futures are utterly impossible, but imagining them gives us some solace, or helps us ready ourselves for more plausible versions of the same story. Sometimes they are more realistic, and help us role-play upcoming situations.
And this is not just individuals. Countries or businesses develop five-year plans, ten-year plans, fifty-year plans, that imagine increasingly un-evidenced futures. Strategic documents, cost-benefit analysis, profit forecasts, all of these are forms of fiction. Political polls try to tell us what is going to happen, as do weather forecasts, and sports commentators. Our lives are increasingly entwined with a future built out of speculation and spit. Yes, they are based on something—on the past, on calculations, on ideas about what will happen when new products are unleashed on the market— but so is science fiction. Science fiction—if it’s any good—draws from observation of the past and present, the combining of new ideas with existing wisdom, and leaps of imagination based on what is known about current and day-after-tomorrow technology. Our societies draw a hard line between futuristic stories, in which we have fun or romantic or scary or exciting things happen to made-up people, and futurist projections, in which we pretend that we know what the future will be like and describe it without any made-up people at all.
There are public fantasies as well. Disaster researcher Lee Clarke has dubbed the disaster plans of many industrial actors “fantasy documents,” because they comfort the public while having no basis in reality. (As a mostly science-fiction writer I feel I should note here that I mean no slight on fantasy fiction through this comparison, any more than I meant to insult science fiction by comparing it to political polls or weather forecasts). The spin on new political initiatives often verges into the realm of fantasy, with claims not even the writers believe are realistic. Similarly, advertising often attempts to sell us portals into a brighter, shinier, much more annoying world.
We even create alternate universes, as in the form of shadow governments, which in many countries choose representatives for major government roles to talk about how policy would run under their leadership. These storied institutions exist to present alternatives, to act as either an inspiration or a warning, depending on your perspective, inviting their constituents to imagine a different world and they hope that by doing so they can convince them to make that world the next time they have a chance to vote.
It’s striking how much more willing we are to admit that our depictions of the past are partly fictional, than that our ideas about the future, so much more tenuous in their foundations, are based on similar impulses to self-aggrandizement and mythologizing rather than “hard science.” Maybe this is also why historical fiction has so much more literary cache relative to speculative fiction. Having accepted that a lot of our history is fiction already, we are less concerned about drawing a line between stories and reality. We don’t feel as compelled to mark off historical fiction as something that is apart, imaginary, and distant, something that is only of interest to a subset of the population. Science fiction and fantasy, on the other hand, are usually positioned in exactly that way, as something that is too made up to have a real impact on our world, while the speculative trappings of real life are claimed as objective and rational calculations.
Hopefully in the future that will change, because we need to do better at connecting our predictions to our sense of stories.
© 2020 Malka Older
Malka Older is a writer, aid worker, and sociologist. Her science-fiction political thriller Infomocracy was named one of the best books of 2016 by Kirkus, Book Riot, and the Washington Post. With the sequels Null States (2017) and State Tectonics (2018), she completed the Centenal Cycle trilogy, a finalist for the Hugo Best Series Award of 2018. She is also the creator of the serial Ninth Step Station, currently running on Serial Box, and her short story collection And Other Disasters comes out in November 2019. Named Senior Fellow for Technology and Risk at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs for 2015, she is currently an Affiliated Research Fellow at the Center for the Sociology of Organizations at Sciences Po, where her doctoral work explored the dynamics of post-disaster improvisation in governments. She has more than a decade of field experience in humanitarian aid and development, and has written for the The New York Times, The Nation, Foreign Policy, and NBC THINK.
Street Harassment Is an Access Issue
by Katharine Duckett
It’s late at night on a deserted residential street in Brooklyn. My wife and I are walking to the subway station after a concert, having bid the friends who came with us goodbye at the corner. We’re not thinking much of it—not thinking about the fact that one of the people we left behind is a tall, non-disabled man, and that we’re now two women on our own. We walk all over the city, both as a pair and as individuals, at a variety of hours. We’re not thinking about it until a man starts walking toward us down the sidewalk, and we realize there’s no one else in sight. We’re not thinking about where and how to run until he passes us, turns around, and starts to scream.
“Walk straight, bitch! Are you limping, bitch? I will make you walk straight. Walk straight!”
I used to walk with a cane.
I’ve used one since I was at least twelve, on and off, and every day for three years before I got both of my hips replaced at age 30. When I brought my everyday pick—a metallic blue collapsible model—to an orthopedist’s appointment shortly before my surgery, my doctor lifted it in her hands, admiring the heft. “This is great for walking around the city,” she told me, with the sagacity of a seasoned New Yorker. “You could really give someone a good thwack with this thing.”
I laughed. I’ve been trained to laugh off threats to my life and my body. To laugh off the ways in which I am vulnerable. I’ve been socialized to defuse situations, to make everyone comfortable with my pain. It’s a thing society teaches women, and disabled women in particular. It’s a lesson we instill in marginalized people of all identities—laugh it off. It’s not serious. You know the way you’re in danger just for being who you are? The way leaving the house invites everything from unhelpful advice on quack cures to looks of pity to outright threats? It’s funny. Don’t you get the joke? It’s funny as hell.
My orthopedist looked up as I chuckled weakly, still wielding my cane between her fists. She held my gaze as the fluorescent lights glinted off the metal shaft. “I’m not kidding.”
The man who comes toward us is muttering as he approaches. This isn’t unusual in New York. Sometimes the muttering is aggressive: homophobic sneers; whispered come-ons; rape threats, though I’ve mostly experienced these as public broadcasts spoken full volume on the train.
When I had my cane, my fingers would tighten around the handle as incidents started to escalate. I’ve used it to protect myself when people are jostling me and shoving one another in crowds. The cane drew a boundary between my disabled body and the bodies of the enabled. A physical reminder that they should be careful even though they so rarely are.
I was reluctant to give up my cane after my surgery. The way the device had come to symbolize my identity and the way it felt like protection was central to that hesitation. I only stopped using it when my physical therapist told me I had to, that it was locking my shoulder in p
lace and causing further strain on the degenerating joint there.
I’ve noticed, since I’ve given it up, how much more anger and disbelief I encounter when I ask for accommodation, when I miss a step and trip, revealing myself as other than the able-bodied woman I’m sometimes taken to be by strangers As though my devices are necessary to excuse and contextualize my body. As though the subtleties of a disabled existence, the complications of a disabled body in a world built for the enabled, are the key elements that provoke impatience and indignation. As if having to think about and respond to the nuances of my life at all is license for non-disabled people to turn their frustration, confusion, and distaste back onto me.
My hands are empty as the man draws near. They’re trembling. I have nothing to clutch except my wife’s arm, though I stop myself from reaching out, knowing that could cause more trouble.
My wife isn’t disabled but she’s only half-a-foot taller than me, far smaller than the six-foot-plus, heavily muscled man moving in our direction at a rapid pace. I feel her tense, and we both fall silent, halting whatever un-self-conscious conversation we’d been having as we walked. The man gets closer and I pick up more of what he’s saying. Something about walking. Something about bitches. Something about a limp.
I keep my eyes down and focus on getting one leg in front of the other: smooth, steady, like I’ve been doing it for years. I haven’t. I’ve in fact been in physical therapy for years, and I think about my movement all the time. Ever since my bilateral hip replacement I’ve been gait training, trying to correct the way I rock from side to side, the compensatory walk I developed to avoid putting pressure on my malformed hips and ankles and knees.
Uncanny Magazine Issue 32 Page 14