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Magic and technology often minimize disability in SF/F. How can authors meaningfully engage with disability and the ways that speculative elements can affect disabled characters?

When we talk about disability and sci-fi/fantasy, the first thing many will think of is the magical disability trope. But what does this trope entail and imply? And how can you subvert it?

This series is a fascinating look at how a writer can acknowledge the “magical cure” trope and improve on the portrayal in later books.

These magical or futuristic “fixes” seem rooted in a discomfort with disability: many writers cannot (or don’t want to) imagine a life without sight and therefore create excuses to give their character equivalent sighted experiences.

Although the process of coping with and accepting sudden blindness seems rushed, this is one of the best books depicting blindness that I’ve read. Natalie’s emotions and time at a school for the blind are spot-on.

I used to think there would be a magical cure for my blindness. I don’t remember this, but my mother assures me it’s true.

Audiobooks are an essential part of making reading as accessible as possible, so we’re excited to sit down with marketing manager Jennifer Rubins and head of production Dan Zitt and talk about the behind-the-scenes process of audiobooks.

Although the author got some of the details about blindness wrong, she seems very committed to diversity, and I enjoyed this book a lot.

Eric Lindstrom wrote an excellent portrayal of a blind teenage girl, so we’re happy to invite him to the site to discuss his approach, blindness tropes, and more.

Parker Grant is a complex, flawed character whose blindness was handled realistically; a big part of her life, but not the only part of her life. This is definitely a book I will be recommending.

Although I sometimes genuinely enjoyed myself while reading this book, those times were unfortunately outweighed by the serious inaccuracies.

It’s sadly hard to see beyond Emma’s reflections on what she can’t do now that she’s lost her sight to actually find out how she’s adapting and adjusting.

It felt like the author used Moritz’s echolocation as a way of avoiding a realistic portrayal of blindness; too many tired blindness tropes popped up throughout the book for me to love and champion it the way others have.

Today we get most forms of entertainment at the push of a button, so we tend to hate having to wait. The situation is even worse if you can’t read print — resulting in an endless waiting game for blind readers.

Although Laureth didn’t represent me as a blind person, Sedgwick didn’t feed off tropes and stereotypes; instead, he met with many young blind people and found out about their lives.

At its core, the Mystical Disabled Person trope is about a disabled character — frequently mentally ill, developmentally disabled, and/or blind — with some sort of unusual ability. This trope is varied, flexible, and depressingly common.

Clichés, ableist language … what kinds of words, phrases, or situations used in book or character descriptions send up warning flags for our contributors?

April Henry’s main character in Girl, Stolen is a well-researched, well-written example of blindness, and we were thrilled to discuss the book with her.

If our contributors could tell an author writing a character with their disability one thing – besides “do your research” – what would it be?

What’s so wrong with the Beautiful Tragedy trope? Why is it wrong to emphasize the supposed irony of a person with beautiful eyes who can’t see or a good-looking person “confined to a wheelchair” (another horrible, tragedy evoking phrase) or the like?

I can feel their eyes on me. They’re all staring, judging.

Blind characters seem to always go too far in either one direction or the other—either completely ruled by their disability, or completely unfazed. The truth is, I hate both, because neither is honest.

What you won’t be able to see when you first meet me is this: I’m a published author. I read all the time. I write all the time, too. I dictate, using an old-fashioned cassette recorder, and my mother types up my finished drafts.

The notion of people faking disabilities is not at all new or novel–and, like many, many disability tropes, it’s a harmful one.