0ther Futures
At the beginning of the pandemic, my partner and I watched a lot of science fiction shows, like Star Gate and The Expanse. Sitting quarantined in our little apartment in the dark watching space ships travel through outer space, I could almost imagine myself in a space ship. Our apartment was our space ship, the container holding us through the uncertain journey of plague time, as we wondered where we would emerge.
My partner loves science fiction because through science fiction we can imagine worlds built with disabled people in mind, and we can envision other possibilities of bodies. In our space ship, I imagined a disabled futurist world emerging from plague time.
My ancestors were secular Jewish scientists. Isaac Asimov was a close friend of my father’s family, and Marvin Minsky was my father’s godfather. My father’s bookshelves were full of hundreds of science fiction books, many of them by Isaac Asimov. My father is an engineer and a mathematician, and he worked on some of the first research on artificial intelligence. I always understood him as a human computer of sorts, his mind a work of science fiction.