Guest Blogger: In addition to being a Star Trek fan, RoAnna Sylver is the author of the hopeful-dystopian Chameleon Moon series, and is working on a vampire series Stake Sauce and Death Masquerade. You can follower them on Twitter, or check out their blog.
Spend time in a sci-fi fandom, and you’ll notice something, especially if you’re disabled. Even in universes where warp drive is everyday, disabled and physically/mentally ill people are conspicuously scarce, often absent. We’re told our presence would be “unrealistic,” but I think the reverse is true. It’s unrealistic, and very telling, for us to be missing.
Seminal SFF franchise Star Trek isn’t perfect, but it does better than most. Even non-Trek fans know Geordi LaForge from The Next Generation, the visually disabled engineer whose adaptive equipment lets him do anything able-bodied people can, and then some. But there are a lot more disabled (and disability-coded) characters throughout the series, including the new Discovery. No media is perfect, and often, Trek’s complex stories are simultaneously excellent and disappointing. But, fittingly for the forward-looking franchise, there’s a lot of reason to hope.