‘Blind. Deaf. Disabled. Wheelchair’: Community, History and Resistance in Jane Stemp’s Waterbound (1995)

In “Devices and Desires: Science Fiction, Fantasy and Disability in Literature for Young People” (2004), Jane Stemp, author of Waterbound, recounts a triple history: her own personal history of her relationship to science fiction and fantasy literature; a history of representations of disability in science fiction and fantasy; and, implicitly, a history of dismissal and erasure of disability and disabled representations. She recalls how “In the mid-1970s [she] found that the areas in which characters with disabilities did not appear—with a few noteworthy exceptions—were science fiction and fantasy” (para. 3, italics in original), but “[w]hen [she] did encounter disabled characters in fantasy or science fiction, the sense of recognition was so strong as to add an extra dash of reality to what were otherwise unreal situations” (para. 4). The difficulty in locating texts with explicitly disabled characters, an issue which bore Waterbound as Stemp explains, has more to do with the active exclusion and erasure of disabled people as participants in socio-political life. This concern with the erasures of disabled history is the central aspect of Stemp’s writing, in both the essay and Waterbound. She recalls:Stemp’s own recognition of and with the disabled representations in The Chrysalids comes with a critical attention to the power relations articulated in the novel. Although the above quotation may suggest a criticism of science fiction’s ‘scenarios’ of ‘apartheid’, Stemp employs a similar political framework in Waterbound. While she does not explicitly note this, she admits that “Waterbound owes a certain amount of its genesis to my memories of reading The Chrysalids” (para. 4). Waterbound taps into several of the anxieties that underpin the role and power of government and religion in The Chrysalids; however, it still retains a specific focus on the disability politics of the 1990s with its emphasis on equality, human rights, and inclusion.