Criticism
The Ship Who Searched is the specific reference for "The Future Imperfect" by disability rights advocate Sarah Einstein, a critique of the Brain & Brawn Ship series representing science fiction and modern convention in general. Einstein observes that 40 years later we have
- "many more technological wonders than McCaffrey had imagined. The protagonists in the story would have been much helped, for instance, by a secure communications channel and a GPS system, both of which I have in my battered old car. But most of all, the heroine of this book would have been helped by a future shaped by the actions of today’s disability activists. Because, at its heart, this series of books tells the story of the enslavement of extremely promising children who have the bad luck to be born—or in this one case alone, become—disabled."
The essay serves as a call for reader-submitted stories that incorporate its values. Einstein concludes,
- "This is not the sort of future disability advocates envision. No, we see a future without stairs. ... How will science help us build fully inclusive communities?
- There is too little science fiction written that envisions a fully accessible, universally designed future. And so we are asking you, gentle readers, to do just that."
The editors later posted some clarifying notes by Einstein with the contest details. Evidently a winning essay was published in Redstone Science Fiction, September 2010.
Read more about this topic: The Ship Who Searched
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)
“I hold with the old-fashioned criticism that Browning is not really a poet, that he has all the gifts but the one needful and the pearls without the string; rather one should say raw nuggets and rough diamonds.”
—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)
“However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)