Accessing the Future

by Djibril Al-Ayad, Kathryn Allan

Overview

The fifteen authors and nine artists in this volume bring us beautiful, speculative stories of disability and mental illness in the future. Teeming with space pirates, battle robots, interstellar travel and genetically engineered creatures, every story and image is a quality, crafted work of science fiction in its own right, as thrilling and fascinating as it is worthy and important. These are stories about people with disabilities in all of their complexity and diversity, that scream with passion and intensity. These are stories that refuse to go gently.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780957397545
Publisher:	Futurefire.Net Publishing
Publication date:	02/24/2015
Pages:	244
Sales rank:	652,705
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.55(d)

Editorial Reviews

★ 04/27/2015
Allan and al-Ayad’s powerful science fiction anthology portrays people with disabilities in their full human complexity as they navigate a variety of futures. A privileged wheelchair user who’s saved from a disaster by smugglers learns some horrifying truths about her rarified surroundings—and the smugglers’ grittier lives—in Nicolette Barischoff’s “Pirate Songs.” Sara Patterson’s “A Sense All Its Own” introduces a blind pilot who enters a droid-flying competition. The titular characters in Margaret Killjoy’s “Invisible People” suffer a widespread social disability that’s all too prevalent today. A woman uses her disability as a weapon to better the universe in A.C. Buchanan’s “Puppetry.” Mandating a cure for deafness becomes cultural genocide—and may indirectly lead to war—in Rachel K. Jones’s “Courting the Silent Sun.” Each story highlights humans’ adaptability as a path to triumph, greater understanding, or both. The anthology also makes clear that the entire society suffers when the able ignore or dismiss the disabled. But there are no polemics here, and even readers with no personal experience of disability will appreciate these thoughtful and entertaining stories and their accompanying illustrations. (July)

Publishers Weekly