Ascension by Jacqueline (J) Koyanagi
IDs: Black, Queer, Chronically Ill, Physically Disabled, Polyamorous, Bisexual, Sapphic, Amputee
Author IDs: Polyamorous, Nisei, Chronically Ill, Disabled, Neurodivergent
CWs: Violence, systemic ableism, racism
Ascension is a classic space opera, with planet-hopping, a ragtag crew (including multiple disabled and queer characters), a hot spaceship captain, and a journey with larger-than-the-universe stakes. What differentiates this text, however, is that the protagonist is a chronically ill, Black, queer space engineer. In Alana’s world, a mega-corporation controls nearly all aspects of the universe. Unfortunately for Alana, this includes her medical care. She has a degenerative disease called Mel’s Disorder that requires regular medication. Without her medication, her body quickly succumbs to horrible pain and degenerates rapidly. While Mel’s Disorder doesn’t exist outside of the novel, it shares many similarities with real-world disabilities, including chronic pain, medication rationing and withdrawal, medical debt, and more. Koyanagi cleverly uses a mild form of “defamilization,” a concept used by many speculative fiction scholars to explore the ways that speculative fiction removes readers from their known worlds and place them into new ones, in order to demonstrate the lived experience of disability while separating it from reality. In doing so, she allows readers who have different disabilities or are able-bodied to experience Alana’s embodied disability more easily. Some readers, upon encountering a known disability, move away from empathizing with the narrative, as they can clearly recognize that it is not a disability that they experience in their reality. With defamiliarization, however, this shifts. Koyanagi utilizes this to make it easier (or perhaps even force) readers to experience Alana’s embodied existence. And Alana is not the only disabled character. There is a character who is an amputee and uses a prosthesis, as well as a character who is suffering from a rapidly degenerative disease that is not at all recognizable in our own reality. Koyanagi thus uses a blend of familiarization (amputation/prosthesis) with varying levels of defamiliarization (Mel’s Disease, degenerative disease) in order to provide an imagined future with a variety of disabilities. She demonstrates the ways that space presents new challenges for disabled people, and the new disabilities that will undoubtedly arise in the future.
Discussion Questions
1. What is the significance of Alana’s connection to ships?
2. How does Ascension highlight the connection between capitalism and chronic illness? How is this connection visible in our reality?
3. Why does Koyanagi choose Mel’s Disease for Alana to have? Why choose a disability that is not known in our reality?
4. In what ways is space itself inaccessible to Alana? How might this access change with accommodation? What would such accommodation be?