Although it's a sequel to Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead functions as a stand alone novel, and when paired with Xenocide and Children of the Mind, forms a self-contained trilogy. I might return to Ender’s Game at some point in the future, but for now it’s this triad of texts that interests me. Before we get into it, I feel obliged to note that Orson Scott Card is a bigoted and vocal homophobe. Despite his gremlin behaviour, I feel compelled to write about his novels because they are influential works that have generated a lot of scholarship and virtually none of that scholarship has addressed their ableism.
Speaker for the Dead revolves around relations between human beings and alien species and is deeply concerned with the way human beings create and regard the other. The text proposes a framework for understanding human relationships with the other, called the “four orders of foreignness”.1 This framework runs throughout the text and is repeatedly invoked in the relationship between human beings and alien species. It proposes four kinds of foreigner:
“The first is the otherlander...the stranger we recognize as being a human of our world, but of another city or country. The second is the framling...this is the stranger that we recognize as human, but of another world. The third is the raman, the stranger that we recognize as human, but of another species. The fourth is the true alien, the varelse, which includes all the animals, for with them no conversation is possible. They live but we cannot guess what purposes or causes make them act. They might be intelligent, they might be self-aware, but we cannot know it.”2
This framework proves extremely useful to the characters in understanding interspecies relations, but is surprisingly lacking in language to describe members of one's own community who are regarded as different or other. This lack of concern for the othering of disabled people is made apparent in the text's treatment of disabled characters. In particular, Olhado, a disabled boy with mechanical eyes, and his brother Miro, who becomes disabled at the end of the book following an accident, are described and portrayed in starkly ableist terms. Toda I’m going to focus primarily on Olhado. Miro acquires his disability quite late in the novel, and most of his disability story arc (including the most disturbingly ableist “cure” scene I have ever encountered) takes place in Xenocide and Children of the Mind, so I'll be saving Miro for a future post.
Throughout Speaker for the Dead, Olhado's artificial eyes are portrayed as monstrous and inhuman. After losing his eyes in a laser accident, Olhado receives a set of computerised eyes that not only restores his sight but also gives him superior depth perception, allows him to record video footage and permits him to interface directly with computers and other machinery. Despite the fact that these abilities are useful to his community, Olhado is largely ostracised and treated as other. Although the word never appears in the novel, Olhado is clearly represented as a cyborg. The cyborg is a common trope in sci-fi often used to simultaneously cure disabled bodies and to render them less human. In the words of Kathryn Allan, “Many SF narratives portray the 'overcoming' of disability (through technological enhancements) as a way of realising a posthuman figure, but, in doing so, they end up eliding the real and damaging ways people with disabilities are characterised as something other than 'normal”.3 Thus, Olhado's mechanical eyes serve to both cure him and render him less human.
Cure narratives, particularly those involving curative technology and prosthesis, are a common trope of disability representation in sci-fi.4 This trope mirrors larger societal narratives in which disabled bodies are problems to be solved. While there is absolutely nothing wrong or ableist about an individual wanting a cure or treatment for their own condition, when our cultural dialogue about disability focuses on medical interventions and searching for the cure, we simultaneously ignore the very real material and social needs of disabled people and we communicate the idea that disabled people need to be fixed. This results in a great deal of stigma towards disabled people and can significantly skew our perceptions of the risks/benefits of medical intervention—ie. if remaining disabled is unacceptable, maybe a highly risky or painful medical intervention becomes more desirable. Often, in fiction and media narratives alike, these risks and complex realities of medical intervention are omitted entirely. In the case of Olhado, the curative technology of mechanical eyes is presented as an unambiguously good and correct intervention. There appears to have been no discussion or consideration of allowing him to remain blind, and he suffers no physical consequences from the implant. This representation completely erases the realities and complications of using prosthetics or undergoing surgery and reinforces compulsory able-bodiedness.
In addition to curing him, Olhado's eyes transform and other him. Olhado’s character is largely defined by his eyes, and he is repeatedly referred to simply as “the boy with the metal eyes”.5 Nearly every time he appears in the novel, his eyes are mentioned. The loss of his eyes is so significant, in fact, that he is named for it. Olhado, based on the portuguese word for “look”, is a nickname he received after he lost his eyes in an accident. His mother describes this change as “when Lauro lost his eyes and became Olhado”6, as though Lauro was fundamentally transformed by his artificial eyes. Olhado's eyes are variously described by the text and its characters as ''horrifying''7, “repulsive”8, “unhuman”9and “monstrous”10. Even Ender, as the moral centre of the novel, treats Olhado with less prejudice than the others but still describes him in these terms.11 In fact, regardless of which characters' internal dialogue we are hearing, Olhado's eyes are a source of discomfort and horror; a perception the text never challenges.
Card seems to assume that the reader will view mechanical eyes as inherently disturbing. As though to ensure this is the case, Card's depiction of computerised eyes is as othering and jarring as possible. The eyes are “shiny and metallic”12 and, unlike most prosthetics, not made to resemble human eyes. In order to connect the eyes to computers and other devices, Olhado plugs a cord directly into his right eye, a process that elicits disgust in those around him and is vividly, disturbingly, and repeatedly described: “[Olhado] picked up an interface cable and jammed it in the socket in his right eye”13; “Olhado turned to face her, the jack emerging obscenely from his eye. She could not control her shudder”.14
Interestingly, this othering of Olhado doesn't appear to be solely about the tech that's implanted in his body. Ender has a small computer terminal implanted in his ear, but it doesn't result in any prejudice against him; his use of this implant is treated as mundane. Unlike Olhado's implant, Ender's is designed to be unobtrusive and aesthetically pleasing, a mere jewel in his ear. These differences in Card's treatment of implants, depending on what kind of body is using them, is significant and mirrors the larger cultural narrative and norms about technology use. As Alison Kafer notes in her discussion of the cyborg, whether a piece of technology is considered “assistive” or “time-saving” depends on the category of person using it.15 Similarly, aesthetic considerations are generally regarded as less important in the design of prosthetics, mobility aids, and other medical or assistive devices, than in the design of products and technology for nondisabled bodies. Thus, it is Olhado's disability that renders his implanted tech cyborgian and othering.
In his portrayal of Olhado, Orson Scott Card makes use of two common ableist tropes of disability representation in sci-fi; disability as needing a (technological) cure, and the disabled body as cyborgian other.16 Unsurprisingly, Card’s use of ableist tropes continues in the next two books of the series Xenocide and Children of the Mind. These texts include a deeply ableist understanding of acquired disabilities, a truly horrifying cure sequence, and a depiction of obsessive compulsive disorder that is both stigmatising and racist. Stay tuned for my next post where we'll talk about Miro, narratives around acquired disabilities and why it's bad to cure a disabled person by literally disintegrating their disabled body.
Speaker for the Dead, 34
34
Kathryn Allan “Disability in Science Fiction”, SF 101, 8.2
Kathryn Allan “Disability in Science Fiction”, 5.7
Speaker for the Dead, 103, 104, 245, 368
328
92
245
118
116
116
103
118
126
Feminist, Queer, Crip 118
Kathryn Allan, “Disability in Science Fiction”