My life in books

Haven is the third volume of collected issues of Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda’s brilliant, beautiful, and disturbing graphic narrative, Monstress. Maika Halfwolf and her companions, Kippa the Arcanic fox-child and Ren the cat, are for the moment safe in Pontus, an independent city-state where refugees from all over the Known World have gathered. Pontus is protected by a magical shield, an artifact created by Maika’s ancestor, the Shaman Empress. But the shield was deactivated after the war, and it needs one strong in the Shaman Empress’ blood to reactivate it. The rulers of Pontus offer Maika a deal - permanent sanctuary if she will activate the shield for them. Maika continues to struggle against the blood and power cravings of the creature, Zinn, the Monstrum summoned - and beloved and loving in return - by her ancestor, that dwells within her.

As usual, Takeda’s art is breath-takingly beautiful, intricate, and evocative. Liu’s story continues to give us more clues into Maika’s past, the line of the Shaman Empress, and the mysterious mask, a fragment of which is in Maika’s keeping.. We also discover more about the Cumeae, and how deeply they are controlled by the Monstrum, siblings of Zinn, and their desire to bring about another war.

The complexity of the story and the worldbuilding behind it continues to wrap me up and carry me away to a fully realised other world with each installment I read. Also profoundly important to this story is the deep intention of the authors to make this a story that recognises the ones who are too often forgotten - the refugees, the damaged, the wounded, the victims of all the political games and the conflicts between the powerful who seek only more power, while the people who suffer in their battles want only to live in peace and happiness. And then, there’s the unavoidable fact that every person of importance in this story is a woman. Where so many other texts make women invisible, or limit the women who matter to the story to a rare handful, Liu and Takeda make virtually every plot point in this story turn on the actions of a woman. This in itself would make Monstress a very special text, but when there is so much more on top of this... I admit I’ve not exactly been an rabid consumer of graphic narratives, but this is easily one of the best I have seen.

Nicola Griffith is not a writer to be pigeon-holed. She’s written science fiction, hard core detective stories, and stunningly well researched historical fiction. She is also a person with MS who has not been content to sit back and take received wisdom about her condition. She’s researched it with the same tenacity that has marked her writing, and explored new theories of the disease mechanism for herself.

In So Lucky, Griffith takes her experience in living with MS, in the entire spectrum of what living as disabled is like, and turns it into a compelling, enveloping story of Mara, a woman who is diagnosed with MS just as her wife of over twenty years decides to leave her for another woman. She loses her job, explores the increasingly depressing world of support groups and pharmaceutical interventions. She learns all the things you never know about how the world treats cripples until you are one. And eventually, she takes her experience in the non-profit sector and her rage and builds a new organisation modelled on the fierce personal advocacy of the early year of the HIV epidemic.

So Lucky is in some ways the story of anyone who has suddenly gone from category normal to category disabled, and it chronicles so many of the changes in status, energy, self-image, priorities... everything that changes for the disabled person, which is in most cases everything in your life. It’s powerful, and painful, and in its portrayal of becoming a crip, it is very, very real.

There’s a narrative here, of course, a story to follow, a build-up and a climax and a denouement, and it’s interesting in itself and a parable of the relation between society and the disabled. But it’s Mara’s coming to terms with her own changed status and life that’s the real story. And it’s one of the most compelling I’ve read in a very long time.

In a near-future America wracked by civil war, wounded army doctor Janet Watson, a surgeon who no longer has two flesh and blood arms with which to operate, heads to Washington. In addition to the physical trauma of her injury and the retrofitted prosthesis that doesn’t quite work right, she is dealing with the knowledge that her final military action was a shameful one, its veterans viewed with disgrace. Battered by war, without a promise of work or the skills she was trained in, alone in a city that distrusts veterans and dies not seem too fond of black people who appear homeless or out of work, Watson’s immediate future seems bleak. Then, a chance encounter with another veteran she once treated leads to an opportunity to share an astonishingly inexpensive apartment with the unnerving and enigmatic Sara Holmes, a brilliant, aristocratic, apparently wealthy, black woman who diagnoses Watson’s trauma and insecurities on the spot, and then challenges her to share the apartment.

This is the opening to Claire ODell’s Holmesian science fiction novel A Study in Honor.

Watson’s life with Holmes is indeed a challenge for her. Holmes gives peremptory instructions, never consults Watson, has strange visitors, and generally behaves in an enigmatic and annoying fashion. She takes Watson out to dinner on occasion, gives her expensive gifts, at times almost appears to be courting her in a peculiar fashion. Watson is by turns curious, angry, resentful, and bewildered. She finally wrests a minimum of information from Holmes, who acknowledges that she is government agent, but can say no more fir security reasons.

Meanwhile, Watson struggles with PTSD and her job as a med tech at the VA, where her medical skills are barely utilised - she essentially does initial intake interviews with each patient and records the information in the VA files. She’s frustrated by the inadequate care the veterans receive, and by her inability to be a doctor, to order tests and make the attempt to find out whether there is anything to be done for the people she sees again and again.

Everything changes when Belinda Diaz, a patient that Watson has seen repeatedly, been deeply concerned about, and risked her job to order diagnostic tests for, dies suddenly. Watson digs into the records to see if the death was preventable, but fails to find any indication of the tests she herself ordered. On her way home that night, she’s attacked, almost killed, but Holmes appears unexpectedly, saving her life.

If there was any doubt that the two events were connected, that vanishes when Holmes discovers that three other veterans from Diaz’ unit died the same week. Holmes, with Watson in tow, makes a flying weekend trip to Miami and Michigan, where the other deaths occurred. When they return, Watson reports for work, to learn she has been ‘fired with cause’ - which they are not required to explain.

As they investigate, Holmes and Watson are drawn deeper into a conspiracy that reaches into dangerous places in government, industry and the military. It’s a complex plot, and, like some of the investigations the original Sherlock undertakes for Mycroft, ends up being too politically sensitive for the truth that Holmes and Watson uncover here to be revealed. But through it all, a solid partnership is forged between Holmes and Watson - who ends up getting a real job as a respected surgical specialist, and a brand new prosthesis that will allow her to work with confidence, as a thank you from an intelligence agency that cannot acknowledge what she’s done in any other way.

And yes, the door is open for more of Sara Holmes and Doctor Janet Watson, and I dearly hope that O’Dell is inclined to write it, because these are wonderfully developed characters, clearly inspired by Conan Doyle’s heroes, and yet equally clearly their own fully realised selves. And who doesn’t need a black, female, Holmes and Watson duo in their lives?

When you start reading a book, and the first three named characters are a young lesbian, and two young gay men, one black, one Latino, who have just met and are bonding over The Force Awakens, then you kind of know you’re reading something different and good. But I had no idea just how powerful the experience if reading this would be.

It starts out as a ‘meet cute’ scenario. Moss - Morris Jeffries Jr. - and his best friend Esperanza are stuck on a stalled BART train. When the train starts moving suddenly, the passengers are jostled a bit, and Moss connects, literally and figuratively, with Javier Perez. But the light opening gets dark almost immediately, as they arrive at the station to find police confronting a demonstration against yet another police shooting of an unarmed black man. And that sets the tone for what is to come. Short notes of sweetness amidst the bitterness of life as a person of colour in a racist world.

Mark Oshiro’s debut, the young adult novel Anger Is a Gift, is a portrait of growing up in America today, the kind of America that’s multi-racial, where immigrant families from Korean and Ethiopia mingle with black and Latinx families whose roots on the land go back further than most whites. Where your friends at school are Nigerian and Muslim and trans non-binary and one of them needs a mobility device to get around.

Where there’s an armed guard at the school door and random locker searches. Where there’s no money for school supplies and they sold all the books in the school library, so your English teacher reluctantly arranges for you to get pirated epubs of Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. And you have panic attacks every time you see the cops because you saw your father killed before your eyes just because he was black and in the wrong place at the wrong time - which translated means he was just doing the same things everyone does, stopping off at the local market to do some shopping, but he was black and some cop decided he was a criminal.

This is a book about what it’s like to be young and not white in America, to be the focus of unrelenting racial profiling at school, on public transit, in the streets, in any public place. About the school to prison pipeline. About the brutality of the state toward the young and marginalised. About trying to resist and find joy in the midst if it all.

The narrative follows Moss as he navigates both traditional young adult topics like dating and figuring out what to do when you grow up, and far more difficult issues, like trying to block your school from installing metal detectors and discovering that your best friend, despite her Puerto Rican heritage, doesn’t always see past her privilege as the adopted daughter of well-off white intellectuals who send her to private school where she doesn’t face the same things you do every day. And what to do when the cops strike and your fiends are hurt and dying.

The metal detectors are installed because of a “brawl” - students reacting when one of their own, Shawna, is brutally handled by the school’s ‘resource officer’ because he found her epilepsy medication in her locker and assumed it was illegal drugs. On the first day the metal detectors are in operation, Reg Phillips, a student recovering from major surgery after a car accident that left his legs badly damaged, refuses to go through the detector because he is concerned about its effects on the metal pins and other hardware in his legs. The police officers grab him and shove him through the machine, which malfunctions, tearing the metal in his legs out of position and sending him to the hospital, where surgeons determine that not only has the damage undone the progress he’s made, but it’s made his condition worse - he is now unlikely to ever walk again.

It’s the last straw for Moss and his friends. Drawing on the help of some adults, like Moss’ mother Wanda who was an activist and organiser before the murder of her husband, they call a community meeting and decide to demonstrate as a community against the use of the detectors at school. The students plan a mass walkout to co-incide.

One of the few narrative threads that isn’t overtly filed with tension over the coming confrontation with the authorities is Moss’ budding romance with Javier, who we learn is, along with his mother, an undocumented migrant from Guatemala. Their gentle courting, getting to know each other, all the sweet high notes of falling in love for the first time, is like an island of peace in the midst of the heightened anxiety of waiting for the day of the walkout. And yet.... the very presence of this oasis of comfort and hope is a site of tension because what should be unthinkable, that this innocent awakening of love can not survive the brutality of this place and time, is all too possible.

On the day of the walkout, the students arrive to a sea of police in riot gear. When the time comes for the protest, everything you would expect from a military operation primed to view young people of colour attempting a peaceful demonstration as a gang of violent criminals takes place. There are multiple horrors, and tragedies large and small. Armed cops against children. The essence of modern America.

There’s a lot here that hits hard. I’m a middle-aged white cis woman who has none of the lived experience that kids like Moss and Javier and Shawna and their friends know, but this helps me understand as much as I’m able too - that’s the gift of art. It lets you see from other perspectives, feel what it’s like, to a degree, to be someone other than yourself, to live under other conditions. But this book does something else, too, something that white readers need to see and understand. There are white characters in this book. The cops, obviously. But there are white teachers, some white folks who live in Moss’ neighbourhood, Esperanza’s adoptive parents. Some of them even think of themselves as allies, as people trying to help. But the thing for white people reading this book to understand is that allyship is hard. Because we don’t understand. We don’t get it. And the book demonstrates that. There are no examples of good white allies here. Only white people who don’t try, or try and fail, some of them with disastrous results. And that’s the essence of modern America, too.

But one of the most important messages here is right in the title. Because what moves the story past the tragedy and horror is Moss’ anger. Anger is a gift. These days, there’s a lot of what we call tone policing going on. Marginalised people are angry, and yet when they speak up, act on their anger at the years of injustice they’ve faced, the white liberal response is far too often about being patient, engaging in dialog, being persuasive, using the ‘right’ tactics. Waiting your turn. Not antagonising people who maybe could help your case if you’re properly calm and respectful. Anger hurts the movement, they say.

I call bullshit on that. If being polite and waiting your turn could have made this world more just, we’d all be living in a social justice paradise. And as for not antagonising potential allies - if your commitment to doing the right thing is dependent on people being nice to you, your commitment isn’t worth shit and won’t last past the first rough patch anyway.

Anger is fire. It lights the way, it gives us the energy, the determination, the will, to survive and to keep fighting. It blazes against the darkness of injustice, cruelty, hatred. It burns out evil, and makes a space where we can rebuild something better, if we have the will and desire. Anger is a gift.

Lois McMaster Bujold’s novella The Flowers of Vashnoi focuses on Ekaterin Vorkosigan. The Vorkosigan holdings include a large area, still dangerously contaminated with radiation from the Cetagundan invasion, when the city of Vashnoi was destroyed by nuclear weapons, killing hundreds of thousands. Though the size of the contaminated region has shrunk a little over the many years since the bombing, most of what was once a major metropolis is still radioactive at a level dangerous to human health.

Miles Vorkosigan is determined to find a way to clean the soil and make Vashnoi livable again. Ekaterin has joined firces with another scientist to breed insects that are not only resistant to radioactivity, but are capable of eating soil, plants, and other organic matter, extracting the dangerous isotopes, and depositing them in concentrated packets that can be collected and dealt with as radioactive waste, leaving behind clean matter that can serve as fertiliser.

But when Ekayerin and her team start on-site trials, strange events interfere with the testing protocols. Half of the ‘radbugs’ disappear, and further investigation reveals that a small group of humans have been living - and dying - inside the contaminated area. Mostly children born ‘different’ and abandoned in the unsafe zone - since the war, Barrayar’s people have had both a higher than average rate of children born with genetic defects, and a culture that rejects imperfect children - generations have been nurtured, protected, and buried by a bitter woman who chose exile in the ruin of Vashnoi over execution for and her own unborn child.

Ekaterin’s dreams of creating a garden where Vashnoi once stood entwine with her hope to save the last of the inhabitants of Vashnoi’s ruins in this latest installment in the Vorgosigan story that explores the roles of both technology and human tenacity in the struggle for survival and rebirth.

Lock In is possibly the most interesting of John Scalzi’s novels that I’ve read to date, and not just because of the disability angle, although that is a significant part of it. On face, it’s a science fiction murder mystery, with lots of puzzles and sleuthing, murders and attempted murders and even an explosion, and it all takes place within the context of a cosy-cutting government bill that will materially affect the lives of millions of severely disabled people who are dependent on expensive, usually government-subsidised, life support mechanisms and assistive devices.

The setting is America, in a world changed by the emergence of a new disease, named Haden’s Syndrome after one of its more prominent victims. It looks a bit like the flu, then meningitis follows. Many die. Some recover, unchanged. A small proportion, however, are so neurologically altered that they can no longer control any of the voluntary functions of the body - they are locked in, unable to move, speak, blink, but they are fully conscious. Massive research has enabled these people to be fitted with neural nets - computers integrated into their brains - which allow them to control external devices, from voice synthesizers to robotic bodies, affectionately called “threeps” - and to interact with each other in a virtual space known as the Agora. More, it is discovered that a tiny fraction of Haden survivors who are not locked in, known as Integrators, have neurological changes that allow them, when fitted with a special neural net, to virtually ‘host’ the awareness of a locked in Haden, allow them to experience the sensations of being in a functional human body. All of this - the research, the nets, the robotic bodies, the computer space needed to host the private and public online worlds of the Hadens - is government subsidised, and is the basis of an entire industry. And all will be subject to massive change when the new laws come into effect.

The story begins with a murder investigation. It’s newly minted FBI Agent Chris Shane’s first day on the job. Shane, along with Agent Leslie Vann, a firmer Integrator, are part of the FBI section that handles crimes involving Hadens. An Integrator, Nicholas Bell, has been found, seemingly confused, in a hotel room with a very bloody, very dead corpse with no ID. The fact that Bell is an Integrator means that even if his body killed the unknown man, he himself may not have committed the murder. It’s the start of very complicated case involving murder, industrial sabotage and conspiracy to manipulate an entire industry for corporate gain that will end up having implications for all Hadens in America.

The novel explores in considerable detail the practical, ethical and legal issues arising when a person can act at a distance through a robotic body, or through another, specially enhanced human being, and that aspect of the book is fascinating. Inevitably, all sorts of disability issues arise, from the question of financial support for research and accommodation, to discrimination, harassment and hate crimes. Particularly interesting is the debate over accommodation versus cure, which parallels such conversations in and around a number of real life communities, including the Deaf and neurodiverse communities.

Something that’s been noted in other places is Scalzi’s choice not to specify the gender of the protagonist. We have no idea of Chris’ biological sex, nor their identification as man, woman, non-binary, or agender. It makes sense - Chris was infected at the age of three, and has lived outside their human body ever since - gender doesn’t make a lot of impact when one’s primary presentation is a metallic genderless robot, and one can experience physical desire only through the body of another person, who could be of any gender. If Chris has a sense of being gendered, it doesn’t enter into their public life and doesn’t need comment in a book that focuses entirely on their public life. Similarly, it s not until late in the book that it Is confirmed that Chris is biracial - again, it’s nit something you can tell from the metal bodies that Hadens use to move in the physical world.

One weakness of the book is that we have no idea what is going on with research and support for Hadens in other parts of the word, or whether any of these technologies exist in other developed nations, or how international trade might affect the various plots and machinations to take control of the American Haden support industry. We’re not even sure if the Agora is for American only.

All in all, a complex and interesting novel, with a solid story, and more meat on it than one finds in some of Scazi’s other novels, which have tended to be exciting and engaging tales, without a lot to challenge one’s thinking. Lock In does both.

Bogi Takács, “Some Remarks on the Reproductive Strategy of the Common Octopus”; Clarkesworld, April 2017
http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/takacs_04_17/

This is a story within a story, with one sentient being - a genetically enhanced octopus - telling another sentient being - a human - what is remembered in the group memory of the octopi about a great wrong committed by humans. The details unfold slowly, through filters of memory, time and difference, but the issues are familiar, the arrogance and assumption of human exceptionalism, the unthinking use of other living beings, the carelessness of the species. It’s not dramatic in its accusation, but it lingers nonetheless.


“Sun, Moon, Dust,” Ursula Vernon; Uncanny Magazine, May/June 2017
https://uncannymagazine.com/article/sun-moon-dust/

A sweet story of the “swords into ploughshares” variety; a farmer inherits a magical sword from his grandmother, a famous warrior in her day, but has no need or desire for war.


“Goddess, Worm,” by Cassandra Khaw; Uncanny Magazine, January/February 2017
https://uncannymagazine.com/article/goddess-worm/

Khaw deconstructs a Chinese legend about the discovery of silk weaving, revealing the acceptance of gendered violence that underlie it.


“Monster Girls Don’t Cry,” A. Merc Rustad; Uncanny Magazine, January/February 2017
https://uncannymagazine.com/article/monster-girls-dont-cry/

A powerful story about making room for difference. A young girl grows up hating and trying to erase the things that make her a monster in the eyes of the world finally learns to accept herself and demand acceptance from those around her.


“Carnival Nine,” Caroline Yoachim; Beneath Ceaseless Skies, May 11, 2017
http://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/carnival-nine/

Yoachim’s short story places us inside a world of conscious wind-up dolls, living in miniature cities around a model train layout. Each day the maker winds up the dolls, and they live their lives, ever watchful of the number of turns they have - a figure that varies with the conditions of their mainspring and possibly the whim, or degree of attention, of the maker. It’s an extended metaphor for human life, with not a great deal to add to the conversation about life, death, and fate, but does get points for including a situation that parallels the way family dynamics can change with the addition of a disabled child. A touching story.


“The Last Novelist (Or a Dead Lizard in the Yard),” Matthew Kressel; Tor.com, March 15, 2017
https://www.tor.com/2017/03/15/the-last-novelist-or-a-dead-lizard-in-the-yard/

Reuth Bryan Diaso is perhaps the last novelist in a galaxy in which no one reads books anymore. He has come to the planet Ardabaab to finish his last novel before he dies, but he has lost his inspiration. A chance encounter with a young girl whose enthusiasm for knowledge and raw artistic talent gives him the energy to renew his writing, and to share with her his love of books, of the physicality of reading, of the crafts of creating not just the sequence if words that make up a novel, but the actual process of printing a book. This is a story about loss and creation, endings and perhaps beginnings, death and renewal. I found it quite compelling.


“Utopia, LOL?,” Jamie Wahls; Strange Horizons, June 5, 2017
http://strangehorizons.com/fiction/utopia-lol/

It’s millions of years in the future, and human beings exist solely as uploaded intelligences in a vast artificial environment controlled by an AI known as Allocator. Almost all the usable mass of the solar system has been converted into the physical substrate that supports the set of virtual realities in which the human race spends its time, playing with simulations of millions of scenarios. But Allocator has limitations. It cannot interfere with human choices, which means that even as virtual beings, they continue to reproduce, requiring ever more substrate material. Allocator cannot extend its influence beyond the solar system - another programmed limitation - but humans can. Allocator’s dilemma - where can it find humans willing to inhabit space probes that will take them to other solar systems and find more space for the multitude of human minds? It’s a very well thought-out story, which touches on a number of issues related to artificial intelligence and informed consent.


“You Will Always Have Family: A Triptych,” Kathleen Kayembe; Nightmare Magazine, March, 2017
http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/will-always-family-triptych/

Kayembe’s novelette is powerful, terrifying, triumphant, laying bare the worst and best of the binds between family. In the midst of grief over the loss of his wife, a man does the unthinkable, destroys the son he believes caused her death, takes the other son away with him to America. Years later, he is truly haunted by his actions, and pays the price. Yet in the midst of a tale about supernatural revenge, there is also fierce love of brother for brother, mother for child and finally the discovery of self-love for the young woman who survives the toll exacted by the dead.


“Mother of Invention,” Nnedi Okorafor; Slate.com, February 21, 2018
https://slate.com/technology/2018/02/mother-of-invention-a-new-short-story-by-nnedi-okorafor.html

Anwuli is pregnant, almost ready to give birth. She is alone, deserted by her lover, a married man who deceived her about his status, then left her when she got pregnant. Shunned by her family and friends. All she has left is the smart house her lover built for her, an intelligent, self-repairing, self-improving home. But Anwuli has an even mire serious problem - she’s become severely allergic to the pollen of the genetically modified flowers that grow everywhere in New Delta City, and there’s a massive pollen storm brewing, one severe enough to put her into anaphylactic shock. When she goes into labour just as the pollen storm hits, help comes from a most unexpected source.

As a disabled person, a queer person, and a freelance cultural studies scholar, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability, by Robert McRuer is exactly the sort of book you’d expect to find me reading sooner or later. There are many reasons to consider the relationship between crip theory and queer theory, and how they relate to other bodies of theory - feminist studies, race theory among them. Disability and alternative sexualities are situated in the body, they share a history of being pathologised, and seen as states requiring medicalisation, rehabilitation, and isolation. They carry high risks of stigmatisation. They challenge and subvert narratives of normality in a way that gender and race do not. As McRuer notes, “Able-bodiedness, even more than heterosexuality, still largely masquerades as a nonidentity, as the natural order of things.”

The book is structured as a series of essays examining various aspects of disability theory, or “crip theory” with particular attention to how they intersect with queer conceptualisations and experiences. The first chapter focuses on ways of “coming out” and becoming identified as disabled. McRuer points out that self-identification as disabled is something that occurs in opposition to a compulsory ablebodiedness inherent in society, much as coming out as queer occurs in opposition to compulsory heterosexuality.

“In many ways, the system of compulsory able-bodiedness I analyzed in the introduction militates against crip identifications and practices, even as it inevitably generates them. Certainly, disabled activists, artists, and others who have come out crip have done so in response to systemic able-bodied subordination and oppression. Stigmatized in and by a culture that will not or cannot accommodate their presence, crip performers (in several senses of the word and in many different performance venues, from the stage to the street to the conference hall) have proudly and collectively shaped stigmaphilic alternatives in, through, and around that abjection. At the same time, if the constraints of compulsory able-bodiedness push some politicized activists and artists with disabilities to come out crip, those constraints simultaneously keep many other disabled and nondisabled people from doing so.”

The next section of McRuer’s book is titled “Capitalism and Disabled Identity: Sharon Kowalski, Interdependency, and Queer Domesticity” and is centered around the case of Sharon Kowalski and the disability-informed strategies utilised by proponents of same-sex marriage. He argues in particular that “...intracommunity debates over gay marriage and other “normalizing” issues are centrally about disability and disability oppression.”

“...the lesbian and gay emphasis on normalizing issues such as marriage deploys a fundamentally “stigmaphobic” strategy, “where conformity is ensured through fear of stigma” (Trouble with Normal 43). The stigmaphobic strategy is most troubling, for Warner and other queers, because it proscribes larger discussions of social justice and queer cultural generativity. To cite just one crucial example: most of the complaints about lesbian and gay partners not being able to get health insurance through their spouse have not included an acknowledgement of how many people in general don’t have adequate health insurance, let alone a broader critique of the corporate health insurance industry (a critique that was fairly basic to earlier gay liberationist and feminist writing).”

He further discusses ways in which the heterosexual nuclear family, constructed under capitalism as a means of reproduction of (able-bodied) workers, is inimical to disabled domesticity. As a site of (re)production, the disabled are increasingly moved out of the home and into institutions.

As a personal sidenote on this point, when I arrive at a hospital to receive medical care, I am generally assumed to be a transfer patient from a longterm care facility. The idea that I live at home in my condition is not considered. One side effect of this is that ambulance services, which are normally required only in emergency situations by able-bodied people, but which are necessary for me to travel anywhere, are covered by various forms of government or private insurance for disabled people being transferred from institution to institution, but not for me if I travel from home to a medical facility for non-emergency care, a “loophole” which has increasingly placed me in debt. Disability and domesticity are viewed are mutually incompatible and no provision is made for those who insist that it is not.

In the third section of his book, “Noncompliance: The Transformation, Gary Fisher, and the Limits of Rehabilitation,” McRuer starts by discussing the idea of rehabilitation as reflected in the situation of Sharon Kowalski. Where Thompson and Kowalski perceived the possibility of a rehabilitation that involved a return to the home for care, and encompassed the idea of home as a queer and crip space, Kowalski’s parents could only understand rehabilitation as a return to the compulsory state of heterosexual ablebodiedness: “for them, able-bodied/heterosexual normalcy began at home, and if Sharon could not return to such a state of normalcy, then she would have to remain incarcerated in nursing homes.” With this as a starting point, McRuer goes on to “... address disability studies critiques of ideologies of rehabilitation more directly, through consideration of a few texts produced in the normalizing decade after Sharon Kowalski did, in fact, return home to live with Thompson and Patty Bresser.”

The first of these texts is a documentary, The Transformation, which chronicles the intervention of a fundamentalist Christian mission in a community of Black and Latinx transfolk; the film follows the recruitment of Sara, a trans woman, into the ministry and her transformation into Ricardo, showing “...[the] journey from the transgender streets of New York to a housed, married, and Fundamentalist Christian life in Dallas.” The second text is the journals and short stories of black writer Gary Fisher, Gary in Your Pocket: Stories and Notebooks of Gary Fisher, edited and published by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick three years after Fisher’s death from complications of AIDS. McRuer also discusses Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journals.

McRuer presents mainstream concepts of rehabilitation as focused on repairing and removing alterity and recreating homogeneity. It implies that “...the rehabilitative contract (“everyone agrees”), then, essentially stipulates that, in return for integration, no complaints will be made, no suggestions for how the world, and not the disabled body or mind, might be molded differently. No complaints will be made even if the contract in effect relegates disabled people to the margins.”

Rehabilitation becomes a process of normalisation, of demanding that the queer, disabled, damaged, different, degraded self be made normal, or be excluded, institutionalised, outcast. Narratives that bring the subject home, render them as able, acceptable, capable, while remaining a queer and disabled person still are seen as resistant, non-compliant.

The fourth essay in McRuer’s examination of crip theory, “Composing Queerness and Disability: The Corporate Universality and Alternative Corporealities,” is an exploration of composition, corporations, and corporeality:

“Chapters 2 and 3 focused on highly charged institutional and institutionalized sites where cultural signs of queerness and disability appear and where, in many ways, they are made to disappear to shore up dominant forms of domesticity and rehabilitation, respectively. In this chapter, I turn to another institutional site, the contemporary university, where anxieties about disability and queerness are likewise legible. In particular, I extend the critical dialogue on composition and the contemporary university by arguing for alternative, and multiple, corporealities. I contend that recentering our attention on the composing bodies in our classrooms can inaugurate and work to sustain a process of “de-composition”—that is, a process that provides an ongoing critique of both the corporate models into which we, as students and teachers of composition, are interpellated and the concomitant disciplinary compulsion to produce only dis- embodied, efficient writers. Most important, I make the somewhat polemical claim that bringing back in composing bodies means, inevitably, placing queer theory and disability studies at the center of composition theory.”

As McRuer notes, one consequence of compulsory heterosexuality and ablebodiedness is that social and cultural institutions are constantly engaged in a process of composing straight, able bodies capable of production and reproduction within the corporate, capitalist system.The teaching of language usage, of composition, is a part of that process, of creating bodies fit to serve corporate needs through their uniform skills of composition and communication.

The fifth section, “Crip Eye fir the Normate Guy: Queer Theory, Bob Flanagan, and the Disciplining of Disability Studies” begins with a discussion of the politics of how society sees - and represents for others to see - the disabled. Taking the media text Queer Eye for the Straight Guy as a point of departure, McRuer examines the ways in which representations of disability rooted in a model of progress and normalisation fail to serve the disabled but instead support the narrative of compulsory ablebodiedness: “In other words, some things don’t keep getting better; visual rhetorics of disability do not necessarily improve over time, nor do they posit (or construct, instruct, or assure) a disabled viewer.” McRuer offers a counterpoint in the masochistic performance art of Bob Flanagan, who incorporates both bdsm and his cystic fibrosis into his work, to the point if titling one performance piece “Bob Flanagan’s Sick” - suggesting “In a moment of danger and noncompliance, however, “some future person” or collectivity might detect in that sick message the seemingly incomprehensible way to survive, and survive well, at the margins of time, space, and representation (they might, in fact, detect that surviving well can paradoxically mean surviving sick).”

Taken as a whole, McRuer’s book interrogates and challenges assumptions, constructions and representations of disability, showing how disability queers the master cultural narrative if productive, corporatised, consumerist normality. It raises questions, and dies not always offer answers, only new ways of considering the disability identity and its relation to the social structures that surround it. It’s not an easy book, but it is a mist thought-provoking one.

Dr. Arthur J. Ammann’s book on the AIDS epidemic, Lethal ​Decisions: ​The ​Unnecessary ​Deaths ​of ​Women ​and ​Children ​from ​HIV/AIDS, focuses on an aspect of the victimology of AIDS that most of the other books I’ve read have paid limited attention to - the specific concerns of pediatric AIDS and the way the epidemic has affected mothers and their children.

Ammann is a pediatric immunologist, and is the first doctor who publicly identified the presence of HIV in children. His subsequent work was directed to understanding the methods of transmission between mothers and children, and advocating for appropriate care for this vulnerable population.

Ammann begins his account with the early findings of Dr. Michael Gottlieb, the physician who first reported a strange new immunological disorder appearing among young gay men. Ammann’s interest was professional. As he reports, “...I was working as a professor of pediatric immunology at Moffitt Hospital at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) Medical Center, where I had established the first immunology laboratory devoted to the study and diagnosis of genetically acquired immunodeficiencies in both children and adults.”

In August 1981, Ammann was invited to join an ad hoc study group exploring the new disorder, and his lab was chosen as the site for immunologic tests on patients. He soon developed an immunologic profile of the adults - so far, all gay men - with the disorder, but before long, he was confronted with the existence of three children - daughters of a woman who was both a sex worker and an IV drug user - with a similar profile. Testing of the mother showed that she too had the profile characteristic of a AIDS patient. This immediately suggested to Ammann that the condition was caused by an infectious agent. Discovery of a fourth child with the same profile, who has received multiple blood transfusions, added strength to the hypothesis that the infectious agent was blood-borne.

Ammann, along with Selma Dritz, the head of the San Francisco Public Health Department, Herb Perkins of the Irwin Memorial Blood Bank and Harold Jaffee of the CDC were the first to publicise the risks of contracting AIDS from blood transfusions snd other blood products. Later, he would work closely with Elizabeth Glaser in founding the Pediatric AIDS Foundation to further research into HIV infection and treatment in children, and, in response to the need for advocacy for at-risk mothers and children in developing countries, would establish a nonprofit foundation called Global Strategies for HIV Prevention.

Ammann’s narrative of the AIDS epidemic focuses on the effects of the actions, opinions and decisions of all the various actors involved on the risks faced by women, and particularly, children. From blood banks to governments to media to pharmaceutical companies to NGOs, his focus is on the children placed at risk by delays, by denialists, by misinformation, by the valuing of profit over human lives, by failures in planning, funding and implementation of the best available treatments, particularly in developing nations.

Ammann delivers a stinging critique of the response of the American blood and blood products industry to this revelation, stating “...it became ever more obvious that the primary concern driving most people in the blood banking community was their economic preservation and liability. In contrast to the medical research community, which rushed to put all its energy into identifying the infectious agent that caused AIDS, the American Red Cross and other blood banks chose to funnel their efforts, and their vast financial resources, into convincing the public that blood transfusions were completely safe.” He is also critical of the response of the American government, charging that they, like the blood industry, sought to deceive the public about the risks of AIDS. He also discusses at length the problems in obtaining FDA approval for the use of HIV drugs on children, despite their demonstrated efficacy in controlling the disease in adults. His scorn for those who disputed and denied the scientific evidence connecting HIV infection and AIDS, and for the media that gave denialists a stage from which to spread their misinformation, is clear, as is his outrage at the deaths resulting from the availability of denialist narratives.

One issue which he returns to is the approach to AIDS prevention and treatment in developing countries. He points the finger at the attitudes of influential actors on the global scene, particularly in the wealthy, developed nations - including pharmaceutical corporations and the World Health Organisation. Despite the emergence of treatments which dramatically reduced mother-to-child transmission, “...WHO, national ministries of health, and US government-supported research grants would turn a deaf ear and continue to recommend treatment regimens that would neither control HIV progression to AIDS nor dramatically reduce perinatal HIV transmission.” Ammann writes with anger and sorrow of those who began to see the numbers of infections and deaths of children decline with the widespread use of preventative drug therapies, but allowed women and children in poorer countries to remain at risk.

“I sensed that the impact of the successful treatment of HIV by ARVs in the United States and the dramatic decline in perinatal HIV transmission was diminishing the sense of urgency over the much larger and overwhelming HIV/AIDS epidemic in low-income countries. The numbers were telling—fewer than two hundred newly infected infants in one year in the United States but more than 600,000 each year in the developing world.”

At the same time, Ammann is generous in his mentions of many of the scientists, medical researchers, activists, and sponsors and donors who made possible advances in pediatric AIDS research and treatment. He speaks with admiration of Elizabeth Glaser, one of the key co-founders if the Pediatric AIDS foundation, and details the research of many of the scientists whose work was instrumental in finding answers and new treatments, including those funded by the foundation.

Ammann’s personal involvement with some of the key organisations responsible for funding and managing AIDS research means that, unlike many of the other AIDS narratives I’ve been reading, the story here is about the people and processes involved in the scientific quest for treatments. He looks at the actions of other actors in terms of how they helped or hindered both scientific research, and the implementation of findings, and he consistently reports the costs in terms of maternal and infant infection and mortality. Amman draws attention to a number of issues related to ethics in research and treatment, from the decision of the WHO to release treatment guidelines that recommended an inferior standard of care, to the design and implementation of research studies in poorer countries that so flagrantly violated standards of ethics that they would not have been allowed to proceed in developed nations.

A large segment of the book is devoted to accounts of the work undertaken by Ammann’s Global Strategies foundation in various countries, from the Dominican Republic to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. These accounts highlight the difficulties in delivering treatment on the ground in countries plagued by poverty, violence and civil unrest.

In spite of the concentrated efforts of dedicated individuals like Dr. Ammann, the problem of pediatric AIDS remains. As he notes, “At the time of this writing in 2016, 300,000 infants still become infected each year, not because there is no treatment to prevent HIV transmission, but because of delays in protecting women from acquiring HIV infection and in implementing HAART [highly active antiretroviral therapy] for those already infected.”

Kristen Roupenian, "Cat Person"; The New Yorker, December 11, 2017
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/11/cat-person

An all-too-familiar story about a woman meeting and becoming involved with a man, despite all the tiny warning signals that suggest she should be mire cautious. The scary thing is that it ended in a better way than I'd feared, although 'better' is perhaps not the right word.


Carmen Maria Machado, "The Husband Stitch"; Granta, October 28, 2014
https://granta.com/the-husband-stitch/

One reviewer of this short story has said "It’s a horror story in which the monster is heterosexual relationship", which seems to me as accurate as anything else I could say. It's a powerful story about being a woman in a world made by men, about how we fit ourselves into the spaces in their lives and try to hold onto some small thing that is our own. Until they want that too, and we give it freely because we love them, and we have nothing left.


Maureen McHugh, "Sidewalks"; Omni, November 28, 2017
http://omnimagazine.com/sidewalks/

Ros Gupta is a speech pathologist called in to examine a "Jane Doe" of indeterminate racial identity who speaks only 'gibberish' and is currently being held in an institution because the police feared she might be a danger to self or others. She manages to communicate with the woman, whose name is Malni, and what she discovers changes her entire way of relating to the world she lives in. There are some profound messages here, about the fragility of the things we know and love, about connectedness and change, about actions and consequences, and about living as a woman in the world.


Charlie Jane Anders, "Don't Press Charges and I Won't Sue"; Boston Review, October 30, 2017
http://bostonreview.net/fiction/charlie-jane-anders-dont-press-charges-and-i-wont-sue

A brutal story about a woman struggling to hold on to her identity in a world determined to eliminate it. The real horror is that this world is only a few existential tweaks away from our own, and there are people who would not read this as a terrifying and cautionary dystopic narrative. Powerful, painful.


Kelly Barnhill, "Probably Still the Chosen One"; Lightspeed, February 2017
http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/probably-still-chosen-one/

A rather different take on the portal fantasy and the whole 'chosen child hero' trope. Eleven-year-old Corrina finds a portal to a land at war and is identified as the Chosen One by the Priesthood. Her destiny - to lead the people of Nibiru to victory against the evil Zonners. But it doesn't turn out quite the way Corrina dreams it will, or the Priests expect it too. Fun.


C. S. E. Cooney, "Though She Be But Little"; Uncanny Magazine, September/October 2017
https://uncannymagazine.com/article/though-she-be-but-little/

Something strange has happened - the Argentum, the sky turning silver - and strange things have happened - people turning into mythical pirates, floating alligators and parrots that can act like cellphones - and things have arrived from somewhere else, many of them monstrous. Emily Anne was a widow in her sixties before the Argentum; now she's an eight-year-old child and a nightmare creature, The Loping Man, is coming to kill her. Where the story focuses on Emily Anne's resourcefulness, courage, and ability to adapt to this new world, it was enjoyable, but I felt as though I'd been dropped into something complex with no explanation and that aspect was not as pleasing. I'd have enjoyed it more if it were presented as straight absurdist fantasy, but presenting it as something that's happened to a real world not unlike our own makes me want at least some clues toward answers to 'how' and 'why.'


Fran Wilde, "Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand"; Uncanny Magazine, September/October 2017
https://uncannymagazine.com/article/clearly-lettered-mostly-steady-hand/

This one cut me deeply. It's a horror story about the way society and the medical profession deal with "freaks" - those of us who are visibly different - and how those freaks feel and think. The story is told as a monologue by a tour guide through a freak show, but the tone drips with rage at the 'normal' person, the voyeur come to see the horrifying strangeness of the 'different.' Intense.


N. K. Jemisin, "Henosis"; Uncanny Magazine, September/October 2017
https://uncannymagazine.com/article/henosis/

A short story about fame, fans, and legacy. An aging author nominated for a prize that it quite literally intended as the culmination of a stellar career is kidnapped by a fan. Interesting and somewhat savage commentary on what it's like to become famous and to be seen as possessing an artistic legacy.