I was on the panel about disability in SF at EasterCon, and we came up with a lot of the same issues as you have, although with different examples in some cases. I'm planning to write up my thoughts on our discussions today, a little over a month late.
I've got a story in an SF Romance e-anthology (out this week, which is slightly scary), in which the hero and heroine have different disabilities. I wanted to get away from both the trope of able-bodied character 'fixing' the issues presented by the other character's disability and the idea that people with 'matching' disabilities should always want to stick together. I hope I've made it work as a romance, rather than a story about people with disabilities.
I'm also working on a story in which the (anti)hero's disability and some of his motivations sprang from years of thoughts and discussions about Travis in Blakes 7. His disabilities were caused partly by the actions of the man he regards as his arch enemy (although the real situation is more complex), but his motivations stem from other crimes blamed on the arch enemy character.
Like Travis, he has SFnal prosthetics/enhancements (although not the embedded weaponry), but they aren't perfect. He has arthritis/arthralgia and fatigue issues combined with PTSD and unresolved grief, the last being his initial reason for going after his arch enemy. I'm never sure whether I'm better off writing him when my joints are behaving and I can be objective, or when they aren't and I can empathise with him.
Again, I'm trying to get away from the tropes, and write an interesting character who isn't exclusively good or bad (neither is his love interest, who is the real protagonist of the current story), and is neither defined by his disabilities nor magically fixed by SF except when not being suits the story.
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I was on the panel about disability in SF at EasterCon, and we came up with a lot of the same issues as you have, although with different examples in some cases. I'm planning to write up my thoughts on our discussions today, a little over a month late.
I've got a story in an SF Romance e-anthology (out this week, which is slightly scary), in which the hero and heroine have different disabilities. I wanted to get away from both the trope of able-bodied character 'fixing' the issues presented by the other character's disability and the idea that people with 'matching' disabilities should always want to stick together. I hope I've made it work as a romance, rather than a story about people with disabilities.
I'm also working on a story in which the (anti)hero's disability and some of his motivations sprang from years of thoughts and discussions about Travis in Blakes 7. His disabilities were caused partly by the actions of the man he regards as his arch enemy (although the real situation is more complex), but his motivations stem from other crimes blamed on the arch enemy character.
Like Travis, he has SFnal prosthetics/enhancements (although not the embedded weaponry), but they aren't perfect. He has arthritis/arthralgia and fatigue issues combined with PTSD and unresolved grief, the last being his initial reason for going after his arch enemy. I'm never sure whether I'm better off writing him when my joints are behaving and I can be objective, or when they aren't and I can empathise with him.
Again, I'm trying to get away from the tropes, and write an interesting character who isn't exclusively good or bad (neither is his love interest, who is the real protagonist of the current story), and is neither defined by his disabilities nor magically fixed by SF except when not being suits the story.