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A review by nyssalis
Vaster Than Empires and More Slow by Ursula K. Le Guin
5.0
(Read overnight, so the different dates are just me reading past midnight lol.)
So good. Drawn in from the start. Afterwards, immediately pored over various analyses, then found myself editing its Wikipedia page. (There had been a typo in a quote from the story, and they’d left out the last reference to Marvell’s poetry in the penultimate paragraph of the story).
As a neurodivergent person, Osden really captured my interest, and the total lack of the word “ableism” in ANY analyses, summaries, etc. that I’ve read was honestly shocking.
…But, of course, it also really wasn’t. How often is ableism, especially in terms of neurodivergence, actually talked about effectively? Not a rhetorical question, and I’ll give you the answer: Not often enough. Not NEARLY often enough. Neurodivergent has a red line under it as I type even now. Themes of ableism are often discussed in more general terms that then allow people to avoid mentioning the actual ableism at all. In this story, every analysis I’ve seen has hidden the ableism conversation under the more general, more “palatable” theme of interpersonal relationships. Yes, that is a theme, but ableism is a BLATANTLY clear sub-theme of that which I have not once seen referred to, even obliquely.
Tomiko and Osden are, essentially, the two main characters. Tomiko serves as almost a stand-in for the reader, as we learn things at the same time she does. Through her experiences (and also the rest of the crew’s, but primarily hers), the reader is given the barest glimpse of what it’s like to live as Osden. The arc of how the crew’s view of Osden changes is, fundamentally, the plot of the entire story. The very first thing the crew does is talk about him behind his back, in a conversation that ranges only from clinically neutral to aggressively negative, until Osden himself walks into the room. The very first line of dialogue is literally Porlock saying, “I can’t stand him.” And Osden doesn’t actually change throughout the story; the crew’s level of sympathy towards him changes, which he simply reflects back.
Osden’s empathetic abilities function similarly to sensory issues. The crew getting a glimpse into what it’s like to experience them, and becoming less antagonistic to Osden as a result, is something that I simply cannot read as anything other than neurotypical people getting a glimpse into what it’s like to have a neurodivergent person’s sensory issues, and learning that neurodivergent people aren’t “crazy”— they’re just dealing with things that the neurotypical people don’t have to.
The ending, where Osden becomes one with the consciousness of the forest, and is presumably at peace— finally away from the constant “smog of cheap second-hand emotions” that’s forced on him whenever he interacts with humans, finally in the company of a consciousness that understands and communicates similarly to how he communicates— is one that, to me, brings up the social model of disability.
(The social model of disability is basically a model saying that disabled people are only disabled if their society allows them to be by refusing to make accommodations/that people can only be considered disabled in relation to the people they’re surrounded by. For example, people in wheelchairs wouldn’t really be considered disabled any more than we consider people with asthma disabled *IF* our society actually made accommodations for them like ramps, accessible layouts of housing, etc. For an example of the second part, if a hearing person were in a room full of deaf people who communicated with ASL, which the hearing person didn’t speak, then the hearing person would be the only “disabled” person in the room, since they would be the only one who couldn’t communicate.)
What other stories’ endings try to do by miraculously curing someone’s disability (yuck to that trope), this story actually does correctly: The disabled character gets a happy ending here because HIS ENVIRONMENT IS NO LONGER ONE THAT ACTIVELY HARMS HIM! He’s still autistic! He still has his empathetic abilities! BUT, he’s no longer in a place where he’s getting assaulted, both emotionally and physically. Hence, social model of disability. His environment is one that accommodates how he functions, and he’s around people/a consciousness that functions the same way. He can just BE. It’s great.
Now, obviously this story was written in the 70s. It’s not exactly the poster child for anti-ableist sentiment (it literally talks about how his autism is “cured” at the very beginning— yay, love eugenics /s) but overall, it far exceeded all of my expectations. The first statement of how Osden had everyone at his mercy, being then contrasted later on when Tomiko realizes that HE’s at all of THEIR mercy *all of the time*, gave me chills. That second one was a great paragraph, and the immensity of the relief that I felt, as a neurodivergent person, reading it for the first time and realizing that, yes, this story was headed in a good (read: not ableist) direction, was beyond words.
So, overall, I REALLY liked this story. I might go read it again right now.
So good. Drawn in from the start. Afterwards, immediately pored over various analyses, then found myself editing its Wikipedia page. (There had been a typo in a quote from the story, and they’d left out the last reference to Marvell’s poetry in the penultimate paragraph of the story).
As a neurodivergent person, Osden really captured my interest, and the total lack of the word “ableism” in ANY analyses, summaries, etc. that I’ve read was honestly shocking.
…But, of course, it also really wasn’t. How often is ableism, especially in terms of neurodivergence, actually talked about effectively? Not a rhetorical question, and I’ll give you the answer: Not often enough. Not NEARLY often enough. Neurodivergent has a red line under it as I type even now. Themes of ableism are often discussed in more general terms that then allow people to avoid mentioning the actual ableism at all. In this story, every analysis I’ve seen has hidden the ableism conversation under the more general, more “palatable” theme of interpersonal relationships. Yes, that is a theme, but ableism is a BLATANTLY clear sub-theme of that which I have not once seen referred to, even obliquely.
Tomiko and Osden are, essentially, the two main characters. Tomiko serves as almost a stand-in for the reader, as we learn things at the same time she does. Through her experiences (and also the rest of the crew’s, but primarily hers), the reader is given the barest glimpse of what it’s like to live as Osden. The arc of how the crew’s view of Osden changes is, fundamentally, the plot of the entire story. The very first thing the crew does is talk about him behind his back, in a conversation that ranges only from clinically neutral to aggressively negative, until Osden himself walks into the room. The very first line of dialogue is literally Porlock saying, “I can’t stand him.” And Osden doesn’t actually change throughout the story; the crew’s level of sympathy towards him changes, which he simply reflects back.
Osden’s empathetic abilities function similarly to sensory issues. The crew getting a glimpse into what it’s like to experience them, and becoming less antagonistic to Osden as a result, is something that I simply cannot read as anything other than neurotypical people getting a glimpse into what it’s like to have a neurodivergent person’s sensory issues, and learning that neurodivergent people aren’t “crazy”— they’re just dealing with things that the neurotypical people don’t have to.
The ending, where Osden becomes one with the consciousness of the forest, and is presumably at peace— finally away from the constant “smog of cheap second-hand emotions” that’s forced on him whenever he interacts with humans, finally in the company of a consciousness that understands and communicates similarly to how he communicates— is one that, to me, brings up the social model of disability.
(The social model of disability is basically a model saying that disabled people are only disabled if their society allows them to be by refusing to make accommodations/that people can only be considered disabled in relation to the people they’re surrounded by. For example, people in wheelchairs wouldn’t really be considered disabled any more than we consider people with asthma disabled *IF* our society actually made accommodations for them like ramps, accessible layouts of housing, etc. For an example of the second part, if a hearing person were in a room full of deaf people who communicated with ASL, which the hearing person didn’t speak, then the hearing person would be the only “disabled” person in the room, since they would be the only one who couldn’t communicate.)
What other stories’ endings try to do by miraculously curing someone’s disability (yuck to that trope), this story actually does correctly: The disabled character gets a happy ending here because HIS ENVIRONMENT IS NO LONGER ONE THAT ACTIVELY HARMS HIM! He’s still autistic! He still has his empathetic abilities! BUT, he’s no longer in a place where he’s getting assaulted, both emotionally and physically. Hence, social model of disability. His environment is one that accommodates how he functions, and he’s around people/a consciousness that functions the same way. He can just BE. It’s great.
Now, obviously this story was written in the 70s. It’s not exactly the poster child for anti-ableist sentiment (it literally talks about how his autism is “cured” at the very beginning— yay, love eugenics /s) but overall, it far exceeded all of my expectations. The first statement of how Osden had everyone at his mercy, being then contrasted later on when Tomiko realizes that HE’s at all of THEIR mercy *all of the time*, gave me chills. That second one was a great paragraph, and the immensity of the relief that I felt, as a neurodivergent person, reading it for the first time and realizing that, yes, this story was headed in a good (read: not ableist) direction, was beyond words.
So, overall, I REALLY liked this story. I might go read it again right now.