Read any good science fiction books with disabled characters lately?

[kestrell]

I'm thinking of writing about images of disability in science fiction books which have been published since I wrote my thesis on the subject in 2005.

Peter Watts's _Blindsight_ came out a few months after I submitted my thesis, so that is one, but I would mostly like to hear about recent books.

So, hit me with your recommendations!

Comments

[ambyr]

I think you meant 2005, not 2015, since Blindsight came out in 2006? Anyway, assuming that 2015 was a typo, I'll start with 2005...

Books I didn't like but that have significant disabled characters:

Kay Kenyon's Bright of the Sky and sequels includes a blind character as a secondary protagonist, Sydney.

Jacqueline Koyanagi's Ascension has a protagonist with a chronic pain condition.

Claire O'Dell's A Study in Honor has a protagonist who is an amputee.

Books I liked with significant disabled characters:

Kelly Robson's Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach has a protagonist who is an amputee.

River Solomon's An Unkindness of Ghosts has an autistic protagonist. So does Maggie Shen's An Excess Male (well, a secondary protagonist).

And a short story: Alex Well's "Angel of the Blockade" has a blind protagonist.

[kestrell]

Thanks for alerting me to my typo, and for providing a great list.

[bibliofile]

Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach has a protagonist who is an amputee and who replaced their limbs with many tentacles.

Mishell Baker's Arcadia series has multiple characters with physical and/or mental disabilities. The protagonist of the first book, Borderline (2016), is a double amputee with borderline personality disorder.

Richard Powers's The Overstory (2019) focuses on several characters over time. One of them has significant physical disabilities; another is a veteran with PTSD and related mental health issues, IIRC.

The graphic novel series Polarity, by Max Bemis & Jorge Coelho, is about the experience of bipolar/manic depressive disorder.

Goldenland past dark is a 2013 novel (from ChiZine) about disability and physical difference, centers around a circus in the 1960s.

but wait, there's more (at least, of books that I've read myself)

[bibliofile]

In the rebooted Ms. Marvel comics, my LibraryThing tags tell me that Volume 7, "Damage per second", includes hacks for physical disabilities. I don't recall the details, alas. Written by G. Willow Wilson.

Earth girl (2013, Pyr) by Janet Edwards is a YA SF book about how humans can travel instantly to other plants -- unless you're handicapped in some way. The protagonist is allergic to planets that aren't Earth, so she's stuck there with the other broken humans. However, students do travel to Earth for stuff like archaeological digs, which the protagonist joins.

WWW : wake (2009) by Robert J. Sawyer features a girl who's been blind since birth. Tech to give her vision also lets her see the Web. I remember that parts of this book were mildly annoying, but that sometimes happens with Sawyer's work, for me. It's the first book in a trilogy; I haven't read the other books.

That's all I've got, for now.