This is an Important Message Story about disability, in which people also have super-abilities to which society must adjust. The narrator of the tale has laser eyes that can burn stuff but they are also in a wheelchair and require ramps.
I like this story because to me, it seems like what science fiction stories should be: a slice of alternate reality that makes us think about the way things are, and the way they might possibly be. I’m comparing it favorably to the first story, which used alternate-universe switching and leaned heavily on emotional buttons – both things that don’t necessarily move me.
The issue of disability does move me; I have a slew of disabled friends and this year I actually entered the Island of Malfunctioning Toys myself, with an arthritic neck condition that limits the amount and type of fun I can have. And will preclude me from going on any roller-coaster-resembling attractions at the Disney parks. Goddammit.
Our world often does a piss poor job handling disability – and at the same time, as the story points out, sometimes our world fawns excessively upon the super-abled. The pretty, the athletic, the ones like me that have freaky brains that adjust well to screens and text.
I’ve always known I had a freaky brain. I was a bright kid who picked up reading early, to me it was as easy as breathing. As people began writing more about neurodivergence, plenty of that resonated too. These days the only label I use is “gifted” since I’ve never been diagnosed with anything else. The experts consider gifted to be yet another form of neurodivergence, or a way in which people can have a brain that differs significantly from the average/normal. For me it’s always been more of a situation of being super-abled than disabled. I ace tests and pick up new skills fast.
Lots of people aligned with the political faction currently in power have an unhealthy fascination for the gifted, and go around declaring that people who would probably run circles around them are “low IQ” despite a complete lack of evidence. To those types of people, I have one thing to say: livestreamed head-to-head IQ tests where I handicap myself by smoking a doobie first to give you a fighting chance or GFTO. IQ worshippers are usually firmly in the average percentile, fantasizing about the glamorous lifestyles we poindexters supposedly enjoy. Actual gifted folks are kind of like, well, the science fiction crowd. A wide array of skills and abiliities, including lots who are both disabled and super-abled at the same time.
And even though a lot of aspiring types are out there eating superfoods and taking their supplements which they claim will elevate their cognitive skills into the lofty realms of people who check out multiple library books at the same time, they're not exactly appearing in the ranks of inventors and professors and authors (especially the kind who write convoluted overthinky material such as science fiction). Not even at the L. Ron Hubbard level.
It's one of those situations where the people who envy it the most are least likely to have any direct experience. Although if they wanted to get direct experience, as well as witness the wide range of socioeconomic, educational, and charisma score variation found among people who dig discussing overthinky nerd shit, they could just go to Worldcon. And maybe learn something.
Occasionally the gifted are too fractious to deal with as well (see Exhibit A, me), and sometimes with massive deficits to balance out the gifts, which is the main theme of this story about how you can have super powers that make part of your life easy while still struggling with different aspects. I usually don’t go for message stories but this one is exceptionally good, and so far it’s my favorite, so I’ll be voting for it unless one of the next three changes my mind.
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