ElfQuest

This is honestly closer to a theory-type essay, as I've already talked about more concrete angles like prostheses and assistive devices (in Year Four), and this time around I'm looking more at the dynamics of presenting physical disability in fiction.

Activists for better representation of disability often object to worldbuilding that imagines magic or advanced technology has erased that issue from existence, and advocate for greater visibility for disabled characters in our stories. I want to take a moment to say: in any setting that doesn't have such handwavy solutions, quite frankly, disability ought to be vastly more common than it is.

Let's take the specific example of trachoma and its accompanying condition, trichiasis. It roughens the inside of the eyelid and causes it to turn inward -- eyelashes and all -- resulting in repeated abrasion of the cornea. Though it was eliminated in the developed world during the 20th century and a 21st-century push has thus far wiped it out in thirty countries where it was still endemic, historically, this has been one of the leading causes of infectious blindness. It ran rampant through army camps and other crowded environments; it spread in cities; it infected people repeatedly throughout the course of their lives, until they lost their vision entirely.

How often have you seen it in a story?

Or consider osteoarthritis. We may occasionally note an elderly character being "stooped" or groaning at their stiff joints, but the reality is that any person whose job involves a lot of heavy manual labor is at high risk of developing such problems . . . and "heavy manual labor" is a great description of agrarian life at any point prior to industrialization. (During industrialization, it depends a bit more on what type of factory you're working in.) Archaeologists can look at a skeleton and judge what social class that person belonged to just by comparing their age to the wear and tear on their joints: two sets of remains recently found in Pompeii were fairly clearly identifiable as some middle-aged lady of the house and some younger male servant or slave, based on the damage to his bones -- and the lack of such damage to hers.

Injury in particular plays a key role here. Just in my lifetime, the tendency to send someone to physical therapy after an accident or surgery has skyrocketed, because we now have a much better idea of how to return the body to full function. But in the past? People often had to return to work as soon as they were anything like physically capable of it, instead of taking time to fully heal -- or, if they were wealthy, they got coddled with bed rest that actually made their recovery harder. How often do we see the results of that in fiction, though? Sure, we all know the trope of the character with old injury who can tell when it's about to rain . . . but we say much less about reduced range of motion, persistent loss of strength, or the ways that compensating for one problem (like an uneven gait) can screw up some other part of your body (like your back).

Of course, this is in part because we complain most about discomfort and limitations when we feel like we shouldn't be subject to them. If literally everybody around you starts experiencing arthritis by the time they're thirty because you're all constantly doing backbreaking labor, then when your own aches and pains begin to set in, that's more apt to feel like par for the course. It's a mark of how far medicine has come in the last century that we in the developed world expect we ought to continue to feel good for decades on end.

But also, I suspect that if we were to depict physical disabilities being as widespread as they were in historical reality -- and still are, in many parts of the world -- it would come across as unrelenting misery porn. If we tried to represent the honest rate of painful and disfiguring scars, missing teeth, deteriorating vision, weak grips, backaches, neck pain, reduced mobility, disturbed digestion, and more that probably afflicted the average rural village, market town, or overcrowded city of the past . . . frankly, I'm horrifying myself just trying to imagine it.

And even if you're writing science fiction of the sort that imagines a more technological future, this won't all go away -- or at least, it won't for all of the characters. Anyone on the bottom end of the social scale is liable to experience more disability relative to the elite, who can afford time to heal or expensive treatments and therapies to address their problems. The nature of the problems in question may change, and might include fictional ideas like neurological issues caused by the use of brain implants, but they're still likely to be there.

I am not, for the record, advocating that half of all characters under the age of forty should have some kind of disability, and every single character above that line. I suspect the result would end up distracting rather than effective -- one of those situations where truth winds up seeming less realistic than fiction. But I do think that all of us, not just the disability activists, would benefit from acknowledging more often how much this can be threaded into characters' lives, without them being explicitly marked out as Characters With Disabilities.

Especially because, when these issues are so widespread, they're no longer going to define someone's identity in the same way we might expect today. Having a bum knee or terrible vision or a stomach that regularly sends you to the privy at a run is just going to be how people are. That character can't walk without a cane? The same is true for six other people in the village. Some disabilities will still stand out -- seizures, for example, are going to be rarer, and quite possibly attributed to supernatural causes rather than ordinary life -- but many of them will seem like business as usual.

Which means that, in fiction, noting their presence can be done through simple traces of description. Two characters are having a conversation; one of them, upon being given a heavy object to look at, grimaces and transfers it to her stronger hand. The other one, standing up to leave, leans on the arm of his chair and then gently eases his weight onto his right hip. The servant, summoned to escort him out, stops rubbing at the infection reddening their eyes. The narrative doesn't have to stop and explain that these people have physical problems; it's just part of the descriptive texture, used to break up the dialogue and exposition.

Am I thinking of these things more right now because I'm moving through my forties? Is that "right hip" example possibly drawn from personal experience, which I only recently mitigated with physical therapy? Nahhhh.

But man, does age give me more sympathy for characters whose bodies don't work perfectly on command, every time.



(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://www.swantower.com/2026/07/17/new-worlds-physical-disability/)

The Tricky Business of Faerie Bargains, Reena McCarty. Something about the marketing of this one -- the cover art, the cover copy, and so forth -- made me think it's a cozy novel. It absolutely is not. Which isn't to say it's grimdark, because it isn't that, either; just that the stakes here are higher than cozy reaches for, and the trials the characters go through have sharper edges.

Which for me was a good thing, because I was extremely uncertain if I was going to like a cozy book about the fae. (That tips over into twee with shocking ease.) So I was very pleased to instead get a novel in a world where fae have always been known to exist, but Europe has largely -- and deliberately -- destroyed its own Otherworld, while the U.S. has set up strict laws governing how people are and are not permitted to make deals with the fae. The faerie courts are not the familiar Seelie and Unseelie, but they absolutely have their own politics, which unsurprisingly turn out to underlie the small-scale disaster the protagonist is trying to set right.

The fae themselves are pleasingly alien (even if I find the human-sounding ones like "Sloan" rather distracting). There's just enough echo of dysfunctional human patterns like narcissism to keep their weirdness from feeling random, and McCarty does a good job of selling the idea that the fae simply do not have the same priorities and mentalities as mortals do. The ending was particularly effective in that regard!

Below the Root, Zilpha Keatley Snyder. Discussed elsewhere.

The Murderer’s Tale, Margaret Frazer. I continue to gravitate toward shorter books at the moment, which is probably contributing to how many mysteries I've been reading lately.

By this point in the series, it is well established that the first scene will be from the viewpoint of the title character. So when you name your book The Murderer's Tale . . . yeah, Frazer is not faking you out. From the start, you know who the killer will be, and you can very rapidly guess who the victim will be, too. The killer is an unpleasant piece of work, thoroughly convinced of his own superior significance and misreading the motivations of everybody around him, who of course are lesser. Though I thought it was a deft touch when you see him being judgmental toward certain characters, and then soon after that you're in Frevisse's perspective and seeing her be judgmental toward them, too. Class distinctions are very real to these people. But this one really does read like a tragedy, because you see what's coming, it shouldn't happen, and of course you can't stop it.

A Case of Mice and Murder, Sally Smith. A newer mystery, set in 1901 London, about a barrister of the Inner Temple very comfortably settled into his routine, who gets piked out of it because the Lord Chief Justice has been murdered -- within the Temple! -- and the guy in charge of the place is extremely motivated to get the case solved as discreetly as possible. I very much like the central conceit here, which hinges on the fact that the Inner Temple's governance means the City of London police can only intervene there if asked; since the Temple is very much an elite bastion of the sort that thinks scandal is the kind of thing that should only happen to other people, having an insider investigate is exactly how such men would handle even a murder.

And Gabriel Ward is a congenial detective, very nerdy and obsessed not only with the law but with a whole array of historical tidbits. I like how Smith handles his very obvious OCD: another book might have made more emotional hay out of the stress and pressure of the condition, but Gabriel has long since arranged his life in ways that accommodate it. He does, over time, become more aware of the restrictions it places on him, but since he's a well-off gentleman cushioned by his residence in the Temple, it is not really a source of angst. It's just how his life works.

I enjoyed this one enough that I started out listening to it in audiobook and then transferred to ebook, not because the narrator was bad -- I liked him, despite fluctuating volume levels that sometimes made the quiet bits difficult to hear -- but because I have approximately 1-2 hours of audiobook listening time in a given week, and I didn't want to wait that long to get the whole story!

Cinder House, Freya Marske. This is the point at which I pivoted to reading the Hugo-nominated short fiction categories. I also read the short stories and novelettes this month, but since those weren't published under separate cover, they don't get tracked here.

It takes a fair bit of effort to make a Cinderella retelling feel original, but Marske manages it well -- starting with the fact that the protagonist gets murdered at the start of the novella and spends the rest of it as a ghost haunting the house now held by her stepmother and stepsisters. Marske also adds in a fresh layer by giving the prince his own story, with a curse that belongs nowhere in the original while fitting well into the general shape of fairy tale tropes. Be warned that there's some fairly heinous abuse here, quite apart from the murder; it turns out there are ways to torture a ghost who is more or less coterminous with the house she haunts, and one of the stepsisters eagerly explores those. The ending, however, finds a lovely and unusual resolution for the core problems.

Murder by Memory, Olivia Waite. SFnal murder mystery in space, aboard a vessel that's not so much a generation ship as a reincarnational one: people regularly save their memories to data "books" and upload the contents to their new body after their old one dies. The crux here is that someone has been murdered at the same time that several books were destroyed, with many complications ensuing.

I do tend to engage less with SF titles, but given the mystery kick I'm on right now, this one fit right in with my current mood. I enjoyed it a lot, even if I'm not sure it stands out in a way that would make me say it's award-worthy. There's another one out in the series and a third one on the way; I may well hunt them out.

Automatic Noodle, Annalee Newitz. Also SF, this time firmly in the cozy corner. In the aftermath of a war that saw California win independence from the United States, robots have their freedom . . . sort of. They're still discriminated against in a number of ways, many of which pose problems for a group of bots who want to open a restaurant.

I am extremely hit or miss with cozy books, because sometimes the warm fuzziness winds up making the perils feel a bit too toothless for my taste. Here, Staybehind lists at the outset several things that could go badly wrong, and then almost none of them happen. I suspect that actually dealing with those would have required this to be a novel, not a novella, and also it would have been markedly less cozy.

The River Has Roots, Amal El-Mohtar. This, on the other hand, is so firmly up my alley that I might as well have painted a target on myself. Folkloric-mood novella based on a murder ballad, with a central motif that plays off the connections between language and magic? YES PLEASE. And the writing is a lyrical (without being overwrought) as usual. If Amal wants to write another six of these, all riffing on different ballads, I will be first in line for them.

And All Between, Zilpha Keatley Snyder. Discussed elsewhere.

The Summer War, Naomi Novik. Last of the novellas, and I'm a little puzzled: in the Hugo packet it gets labeled as a "sample," and there's a link to request the whole thing on Netgalley. I wasn't minded to create an account just to do that, so I figured I would read what's here . . . and it feels like it's all but maybe the last two pages? Anybody who's read the full thing, I'd love to know how much the sample cuts off.

Anyway, I was feeling jaundiced because of that whole "sample" business, but this won me over. There's a tenuous peace between Faerie and the mortal world, but given the way faerie memory works, that means almost nothing: the events that set off the original war are as fresh today as the day they happened. The main character winds up in the thick of that, of course, and has to figure out how to protag from within very constrained circumstances.

The pacing of this one did feel a little odd to me, in that it spends a lot of time on setting the stage before we get to the main act. In ways I understand -- without that setup, much of the resolution would be less satisfying -- but it took me a bit longer to get into it as a result.

Until the Celebration, Zilpha Keatley Snyder. Discussed elsewhere.

A Case of Life and Limb, Sally Smith. Second of the Gabriel Ward mysteries, and the last for now, though there's a third coming next year. While eventually you get a murder here, much of the novel concerns someone sending packages with desiccated body parts to an assortment of men in the Inner Temple. (There's an entertaining discussion about whether this is even a crime, under the laws of the era.) Gabriel is once again tasked to investigate lest -- oh, the horror -- the journalists of Fleet Street find out and splash it all over their papers.

I should note that each book also involves some trial Gabriel is involved in, with the investigation taking away from the precious time he needs to prepare for that. I like that his trials are not murder trials; the first concerns a very tangled question of intellectual property rights around a beloved children's book, and this one concerns a defamation case brought by a popular stage entertainer. Topsy Tillotson is a delightful character, and I like how getting involved in her situation causes the rather mousy Gabriel to grow some unexpected teeth. (In my head he is played by Eddie Marsan, specifically channeling Mr. Norrell, sans that character's less admirable qualities.)

One other note I want to make, though, I'll put behind rot-13 -- not because it's directly spoilery, but because it might prejudice a reader's thoughts in spoilery directions: Gur jnl gung Tnoevry'f pheerag pnfr unf gb or gvrq va fbzrubj jvgu gur pevzr jvaqf hc aneebjvat gur svryq bs aneengvir cbffvovyvgvrf snveyl funecyl. Bs pbhefr vg jbhyq srry n yvggyr enaqbz vs vg jrera'g pbaarpgrq, ohg abarguryrff, gur aneebjvat fyvtugyl qvfncbvagf zr.

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://www.swantower.com/2026/07/09/books-read-june-2026/)

Following on last month's re-release of The Writer's Little Book of Naming, The Writer's Little Book of Platitudes is back out in the world!

“Show, don’t tell.” “Murder your darlings.” “Write every day.”

Certain pieces of advice are widespread in the writing community — but what do they really mean? And are they nuggets of universal wisdom, or do they only apply to some writers in some circumstances? Award-winning author Marie Brennan tackles these old saws, dissecting each one to see what purpose it might serve . . . and when you should toss it aside.

And starting next month, there will be a brand-new Writer's Little Book -- stay tuned for news on that . . .

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://www.swantower.com/2026/07/07/the-writers-little-book-of-platitudes-returns/)