Accessing the Future: A Disability-Themed Anthology of Speculative Fiction Read Free Page A

woman isn’t visibly marked as “disabled.” We’ve as many stories about “invisible” disabilities (anxiety disorder, depression, chronic illness) and neuroatypicality (autism) as we do ones with physical impairments (and wheelchair use and prosthesis). To focus on one kind of disability would not be representative of all the kinds of bodies and minds that are in the stories. We like that the single person (with her expression of calmness and contentment), weightless in space, challenges our conceptions of what disability looks like: in a weightless environment, someone with limited mobility issues, or sight or hearing impairment, would look just as the person depicted on our cover. It’s the new environment—literally, space—that has changed what counts, or what appears, as disability.
    Speculative fiction offers us a peek into what is possible for our world and for our bodies (and minds). It is essential that we imagine futures where we all belong; where our differences in life experience and our knowledge of our communities and of ourselves informs a future that is diverse and adaptable to the needs of all those who will live in it. Disability (as a negative condition) will always be with us if we choose to limit or ignore people’s ability to participate as equal visionaries. Accessing the Future is one small part of this necessary, on-going conversation. The future is what we make it. All are welcome here.

Pirate Songs
    Nicolette Barischoff
    The floater turned out to be one of those shiny, sky island multi-deck passenger deals that would occasionally completely lose its shit in the middle of a jump.
    This one would have been alright—various backup systems humming away, fifty or sixty first-colony licensed pilots determined to discover just what went wrong—had it not jumped straight into something else. Probably a garbage scow; there were a lot of garbage scows this far out. Now, the ship just drifted, listing and rolling like a fat, pretty corpse.
    The Dustpan’s crew all had their faces flat against the port windows, eyeing it like a bunch of dogs with tongues out. That was the only reason Rumer had let them go salvage. You pass up a big, beautiful floater like that, you never get your men to do anything useful ever again.
    We don’t got the time or space to pull her apart, he’d told them. No scrapping. Get yourselves something small and shiny and get back.
    For the most part, they’d listened, filling up their suit-packs with the sorts of little things you always find on a floating hotel like that; alcohol in expensive-looking bottles, VR games with an obscene number of attachments, the palm and wrist PCs that were only considered valuable out here where nobody could afford them. Bottles and needles from a well-stocked sick bay, cards, cash, the turtles out of an elaborate terrarium… Kell, the mutinous asshole, had tried to haul back two of those sultry-voiced concierge kiosks, and a broken servitor droid.
    Rumer wasn’t sure which of them had brought back the girl.
    She looked to be about fifteen, but to Rumer Pilgrim, anybody not born and raised out of New Pelican looked young.
    She didn’t have to be conscious to tell you she was far from home, either Earth or first colonies… German, Canadian, American, some single-nation settlement; she was that same kind of glass-house pretty. Well fed, with pale, untouched, swany skin, and a long, long waterfall of hair that somebody brushed out for her every morning, and a pale pink mouth that looked like it was used to pouting. When her eyes did flicker open for a split-second at a time, he could see they were a pale and brittle green.
    The crew crowded around that narrow infirmary bunk for a full day and a half. Diallo, a skinny kid from the pan-Africas with half a field medic’s education and a permanent shit-eating grin, actually left the pilot’s chair to bandage her head wound. And Kell, the lecherous one-eyed bulldog of a first mate, seemed