Guest Post from Raven Oak: Linguistics in Fantasy"”To Thee or Not to Thee

The Unheard of in Fantasy: Advocacy for the Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing in fantasy and science-fiction

Imagine that you are a huge fantasy or science-fiction fan. You’ve watched every Game of Thrones episode. You own all of the merchandise. You’ve seen the “Lord of the Rings” and “Star Wars” trilogies so often your friends never need to ask what gifts you want for the holidays. Even your cat is named “˜Aragorn’.

Now picture the next big movie you’re excited about is announced. You watch all the actor interviews, cling to every spoiler and hint dropped by the studios, and the week before the premier you have your head shaved to carve your favorite clan symbol into your left temple.

Except when the movie comes out, you can’t watch it. It’s in a foreign language and the only way for you to enjoy it is with a small glass device attached to your chair that keeps slipping. You can watch the words or the action, but not both. At the end of the film all of your friends are going on and on about the wonderful fight scene with the main heroes but all you saw was your subtitles dropping away when someone bumped your chair going to the bathroom and you scrambled to put it back.

Oh sure, you could wait for it to come out dubbed in English, but you’ll have to wait for an entire week. A week of all of your friends ruining the best scenes because they’ve seen it already. Or avoiding all social media and TV because you don’t want to stumble on any spoilers. And when it does come out, you’ve scene all the best scenes already because it’s all people put on your fan sites since opening night.

Now imagine you’re Deaf.

There are two kinds of deafness in the United States: “˜small-d’ deafness and “˜large-D’. “˜Small-d’ deafness is the result of hearing loss. Advancing age, congenital hearing loss, or just too many rock concerts can all cause hearing loss.

Big-Deafness is a culture and history within the United States that communicates with American Sign Language, cherishes Deaf History, and fights for equal access to things like captioning for new movies. Deaf, Hard-of-Hearing, and Children of Deaf Adults can all identify with the Deaf Community, and several more like this author work or live with them as friends or colleagues.

With advances in technology, cellphones and texting have vastly improved the access Deaf people have to everyday conveniences like calling the cable installer or booking a restaurant. FaceTime and video relay enable them to call anywhere and anytime for taxicabs or doctors’ appointments. There is so much access in fact, that places where they cannot have access have become the glaring exception.

Like captioning.

Deaf people buy manga and watch drone races. They buy Millennium Falcon replicas and write Elvish. They roll dice, draw orcs, dream about dragons and buy fantasy novels just the same as every other fan of the genre. The only thing they can’t do is hear.

In cultures defined by their ability to supersede reality, shouldn’t all Fantasy and Science-Fiction be accessible? Shouldn’t conventions be close-captioned and panelists interpreted? Can’t more movies or television series use American Sign Language for their characters like The Dragon Prince show does with their Deaf General Amaya on Netflix? Productions that include Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing actors, even as extras, are still woefully small. Do you really need to hear to dress like a zombie and eat people? Or add shadows to an alien monster’s CGI graphics?

A person’s gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity or social class are not the only obstacles preventing brilliant and invested fans from reaching their ideal careers or childhood heroes. Let all people be Writers. Let them be Artists.

Let them be Dreamers.

Biography: TJ Kahn is an American Sign Language interpreter and retired hospital chaplain living in the San Francisco East Bay. A sci-fi/fantasy enthusiast and a devoted dog parent, he stays active supporting Podcasts and various artists, hoping to become a professional game designer himself someday.

Follow him on Twitter as Theopedes.

At some convention or other, Dave Creek turned to me and said, “Say, I have some thoughts for a story that we could write together. I’ve got a survey team that enters an abandoned orbital habitat and stumbles across some super-intelligent dinosaurs. You’re the one who knows about dinosaurs.” This sounded intriguing, especially when we conceived of it as a short story that we could send off to a magazine that had published bunches of our stories written separately. Ah, but like that recon team, we had very little idea what we were getting ourselves into. Little did we suspect that SAUROTOPIA would expand to become a whole novel. Or that we’d find a publisher who wanted six books.

Science fiction fans have long enjoyed collaborations. James S.A. Corey’s series, THE EXPANSE, is actually a collaboration between Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck. For fantasy readers, Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s THIS IS HOW YOU LOSE THE TIME WAR won the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and Ignyte awards. Other writers who’ve jointly produced well-received novels include Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, as well as Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.

How exactly do writers work together to make this magic? I’m sometimes asked if I wrote the dinosaurs and Dave wrote the humans. That’s a reasonable assumption, especially given that the chapters alternate between human and dinosaur viewpoints. However, for us, this isn’t how it works. Dave created my favorite character, who is an ostrich-like dinosaur best described as a fierce version of Big Bird. The first scene in which this dinosaur appears was Dave’s creation. No, this is not the only dinosaur he created. There’s also the leader of a predatory band of different dinosaurs. Basically, they are feathered velociraptors. I added the parts where they hunt in packs and stalk their prey from branches of trees. Don’t get me wrong, I did create several other characters for both these species of dinosaur as well as some peaceful herbivores.

Here’s another surprise that I learned as we worked together. It seemed natural to suppose that a book can be written by two authors in half the time it will otherwise take them to write it alone. If only this were true! Both Dave and I have a batch of other projects we were working on. I write a regular book review column and am about half way through a different series. Dave has his own series of novels and short stories clamoring to be written. This meant we both needed to find time in between our other work to write chapters of SAUROTOPIA and edit each other’s work.

Then there is the prospect of encountering “creative differences.” Part way through this project I worried about Dave hating my ideas and me hating his ideas. There were certainly times when one or the other of us would come up with something…let’s call it surprising. Looking back, what worked best was for me to sit with his unexpected plot developments. Over time, his new idea would not only grow on me, but I would become really intrigued by where it might take our characters, both the humans and the dinosaurs. Now I am looking forward to the times when he will spring something completely unexpected on me.

If you’ve read this far and are a writer who is wondering whether you might want to collaborate with another writer, I have to say, it can be tricky to figure that out in advance. Even if you have similar approaches, such as you both outline before you start, that’s no guarantee. Nor for that matter is there any assurance that a solo work will come to fruition. So, take another look at those collaborators I mentioned at the start. What the heck, give it a shot.

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Rosemary Claire Smith writes science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories showcasing her interests in dinosaurs, alternate history, space exploration, mythology, genetic engineering, time travel, and aliens. She draws on her background as a trowel-wielding archaeologist, reformed lawyer, and keen observer of society. Her other interests include flower arranging, abstract photography, foil fencing, and astronomy.