Did You Know ...

(T. S. Eliot, wearing a white rose)

One of my favorite poets, T. S. Eliot, apparently wore a white rose in his lapel to show loyalty to Richard III (whom he is supposed to have called the last legitimate English king, per this article in The New Yorker about him) and the house of York, on the anniversary of the Battle of Bosworth Field (when Richard was killed).

From this, and from the fact that the Song of Ice and Fire is (very loosely) based on the events of the Wars of the Roses, I conclude that, if he were alive today and would condescend to read science fiction or fantasy (which is probably a greater leap than bringing him back from the dead --- the man was a humongous literary snob), he would probably be a Stark fan. :)

Winter is coming!

Totally Unexpected Gender and Disability Awesomeness from Larry Niven

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: This is a review of hard-science-fiction writer Larry Niven's 1983 novel The Integral Trees. The book is excellent in the ways I've come to expect excellence from Niven --- imaginative world-building, exciting plot, clever application of physics and engineering principles --- but it also surprised me by being a lot better than his books usually are at characterization, particularly its representations of women. It also astonished me by having about half of its main characters --- including one who I consider the novel's most heroic character --- be people with disabilities. In fleshing out these characters, Niven manages to avoid "supercrip" and "bitter, angry cripple" stereotypes, and also to show the role that environment plays in disabling or empowering people with disabilities.
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Like a lot of science-fiction writers of his generation, Larry Niven is sexist. While this does annoy me when it shows up in his work, I also find enough to like in his writing to keep reading him.

(With Niven, the thing that makes me consider myself a fan is the hugely imaginative worldbuilding, backed up with just enough real-world physics to make you suspect that whatever fantastical setup you're reading about might actually be possible).

The Niven book I've read most recently, The Integral Trees (first written in 1983), met my expectations in the originality and skilled, thoughtful realization of its central concept --- a "world" lacking a planet, composed instead of a huge gas torus surrounding a neutron star, which itself orbits another star --- and greatly exceeded them in its rendering of female and disabled characters.

First of all, The Integral Trees surprised me just by having lots of major characters with disabilities, as this is not a thing that happens very much at all in science fiction*.

The plot revolves around a small party of nine people, sent on a reconnaissance mission up the trunk of the enormous floating tree that houses their village to look for potential sites to build a new village, as food is becoming scarce at the old location. (They depend on what blows by them on air currents, along with what little they find growing on the tree itself, for food. While a little gardening is possible on the tree, there's not enough of anything resembling soil in this airy world to support self-sufficient farming communities). Because the village's Chairman is pessimistic about their chances of survival, the scouting party is sent out less as a serious attempt to re-establish the village than as a pretext for getting rid of everyone the Chairman considers a useless eater.

Accordingly, the scouting party is composed of a pretty unlikely bunch of heroes: aside from the leader, who is a skilled hunter who's been exiled for mostly political/interpersonal reasons, most of the intrepid explorers are people with disabilities.

In this passage, the main character, Gavving, surveys his comrades-to-be:

The Grad had long been Gavving's friend, but he wasn't much of a hunter. And Merril? Merril would have been a big woman if her tiny, twisted legs had matched her torso. Her long fingers were callused, her arms were long and strong; and why not? She used them for everything, even walking. She clung to the wicker wall of the Commons, impassive, waiting.

One-legged Jiovan stood beside her, with a hand in the branchlets to hold him balanced. Gavving could remember Jiovan as an agile, reckless hunter. Then something had attacked him, something he would never describe. Jiovan had returned, barely alive, with ribs broken and his left leg torn away, the stump tourniquetted with his line. Four years later the old wounds still hurt him constantly, and he never let anyone forget it.

Glory was a big-boned, homely woman, middle-aged, with no children. Her clumsiness had given her an unwanted fame. She blamed Harp the teller for that, and not without justice. There was the tale of the turkey cage; and he told another regarding the pink scar that ran down her right leg, gained when she was still involved in cooking duties.

The hate in Alfin's eyes recalled the time she'd clouted him across the ear with a branchwood beam; but it spoke more of Alfin's tendency to hold grudges. Gardener, garbage man, funeral director ... he was no hunter, let alone an explorer, but he was here. No wonder he'd looked bereaved.

Glory waited cross-legged, eyes downcast. Alfin watched her with smoldering hate. Merril seemed impassive, relaxed, but Jiovan was muttering steadily under his breath.

These, his companions?

Jiovan has one leg; Merril has none and walks on her hands. Glory is so clumsy she's exempted from most everyday physical tasks that villagers normally share. Alfin, the middle-aged and misanthropic village gardener, has a terrible fear of heights that makes it extremely hard for him to climb. The other four characters --- Clave, Gavving, Jayan and Jinny --- are able-bodied.

I thought the characters of Alfin and Merril, and how they changed --- became more or less able as their environments changed --- worked surprisingly well as illustrations of the social model of disability.

For instance, as the scouting party gets further and further away from their village, which is at one of the ends ("tufts") of the free-floating giant tree they live on, they also move toward the center of the tree, where the "tides" (forces analogous to gravity --- see here for a more detailed explanation) get weaker, until movement becomes so effortless that Merril and Jiovan no longer have to work harder than everyone else to cover the same distances; it's as easy for them to flit around in near-free-fall conditions as it is for the characters with two working legs to do so.

Merril takes particular joy in this development:

... Gavving heard Merril shout, "Who needs legs?"

She was holding herself an arm's-length from the bark by a one-handed grip. He shouted down. "Merril? Are you all right?"

"I feel wonderful!" She let go and began to fall and reached out and caught herself. "The Grad was right! We can fly!"

Gavving crawled toward her. Jinny was already below her, pounding in a spike. When Gavving reached them, Jayan was using the spike for support, with her line ready in her other hand. They pulled Merril back against the tree.

She didn't resist. She crowed, "Gavving, why do we live in the tuft? There's food here, and water, and who needs legs? Let's stay. ... I've eaten enough foliage to last me the rest of my life! But if anyone else wants it, we'll send down someone with legs."

Eventually, the tree they've been living on splits apart, and they have to jump out into the empty sky; into free-fall. There, Merril thrives even more. The group faces all sorts of terrible dangers --- they're accosted by raiders from a hostile neighboring tribe right before the tree splits; their leader, Clave, is gravely injured; when they make their way into a huge free-floating "jungle" of diffuse, mosslike airborne vegetation, they're attacked and captured first by the jungle's giant-sized inhabitants and later by slave hunters in a spaceship --- and consistently Merril's bravery, determination and resourcefulness help get the group out of trouble.

The book is a bit less consistently successful in its portrayal of (non-disabled) female characters: yes, there are a lot more women in The Integral Trees than there are in most Niven books, and they do all sorts of cool things --- there's a female naval officer and scientist-in-training among the technologically advanced people who trawl the jungle for slaves; among the people living in the jungle, women fight alongside men as soldiers, and most of the people Merril, Clave, Gavving et al. end up helping to fight the slavers are female; and finally, much earlier in the book, the tribe living on the opposite tuft of the tree from Gavving's village employ all-female hunting parties (the hunting party that accosts the protagonists right before the tree breaks apart even includes a trans woman) --- but there's still a lot of sexual objectification of female characters. The worst offenders in this regard are Jayan and Jinny, the twenty-year-old, identical twin girlfriends of alpha-male scouting-party leader Clave. (That's why Clave was sentenced to lead this wild-goose-chase: he had been married to the daughter of the village chairman, but she was apparently such a nagging shrew that he couldn't stand to live with her, so he left her and took two younger, prettier, nicer more compliant girls to replace her).

*A notable exception to this rule would be the subgenre of science fiction set post-nuclear-apocalypse, usually written during the '50s and early '60s, at the height of the Cold War. With those, you usually see lots of characters with congenital disabilities or deformities, always attributed to fallout from the bombings. These characters are rarely treated as fully human, though --- their disabilities make them monstrous and Other in their authors' eyes.

The Color and Shape of Thought

Several months ago, Catana recommended Nancy Kress's Sleepless trilogy to me, and just this past couple weeks I finally got my hands on the first book, Beggars in Spain. While there were a lot of things that interested me about this book, I'd have to say that it was Kress's rendering of her characters' thought processes that excited me the most.

While Beggars in Spain is not about autism per se, it is about a neurological minority who are stigmatized for their difference. However, this neurological minority is human-created rather than spontaneously occurring (although, once the people with the mutation --- called Sleepless, since they don't sleep --- grow up and have children, there come to be spontaneously-occurring Sleepless).

Of the two characters whose thinking is most vividly described, one is a genetically-modified, hyperintelligent Sleepless and the other is a baseline human, illiterate and lacking the memory, verbal dexterity, problem-solving skill and reasoning ability prized by his "meritocratic" society*, though his more intuitive, nonverbal thought processes often give him insights his more organized, logical counterparts overlook.

The first character, Miranda (a child who lives on an all-Sleepless orbiting space colony), has a pattern of thinking she calls "strings", in which every semantic component of a phrase gives rise to a chain of associations, and each chain forms part of a larger design. When she uses this method in school**, she often comes up with different answers than the "right" ones:

The terminal was in visual mode only: they were practicing reading. The problem was "doll:plastic::baby:?" Miri said, "My turn," and typed in "God." The terminal flashed a frowning face.
"That's not right," Joan said, with some satisfaction.
"Yes, it is," Miri said, troubled. "The terminal's wrong."
"I suppose you know more than the terminal!"
"God is right," Miri insisted. "It's four strings down."
Despite herself, Joan looked interested. "What do you mean, four strings down? There's no strings in this problem."
"Not in the problem," Miri said. She tried to think how to explain it; she could see it in her mind, but explaining it was harder. Especially to Joan. Before she could begin, Ms. Patterson was there.
"Is there a problem here, girls?"
Joan said, not nastily, "Miri has a wrong answer, but she says it's right."
Ms. Patterson looked at the screen. She knelt down beside the children. "How is it right, Miri?"
Miri tried. "It's four little strings down, Ms. Patterson. See, a 'doll' is a 'toy' --- the first string goes from doll to toy. A toy is for 'pretend,' and one thing we pretend is that a shooting star is a real star, so you can put 'shooting star' next in the first string. To make the pattern work." So many words was hard work; Miri wished she didn't have to explain so hard. "Then a shooting star is really a meteor, and you have to make the string go real now, because before you made it pretend, so the end of the first string, four little strings down, is 'meteor.'"
Ms. Patterson was staring at her. "Go on, Miri."
"Then for 'plastic,'" Miri said, a little desperately, "the first string leads to 'invented.' It has to, you see, because 'toy' led to 'pretend.'" She tried to think of a way to explain that the fact that the little strings were one place off from each other was part of the whole design, echoed in the inversion she was going to make of the same words in substrings two and three, but that was too hard to explain. She stuck to the strings themselves, not the overall design, which troubled her because the overall design was just as important. It just took too long to explain in her stammering speech. "'Invented' goes to 'people,' of course, because people invent things. The people string leads to 'community,' a lot of people, and that string has to go to 'orbital,' because then the two strings lined up next to each other make the problem say 'meteor:orbital'."
Ms. Patterson said in a funny voice, "And that's a reasonable analogy. Meteor does bear a definable relation to orbital: one natural and inhuman, one constructed and human."
Miri wasn't sure what all Ms. Patterson's words meant. This wasn't going right. Ms. Patterson looked a little scary, and Joan looked lost. She plunged ahead anyway. "Then for 'baby,' the first string leads to 'small.' That leads to 'protect,' like I do [my brother] because he's smaller than me and might get hurt if he climbs too high. Then the little string goes to 'community' because the community protects people, and the fourth little string has to go to 'people' because a community is people, and because it was that way upside down under 'plastic,' and a lot of our orbital is made of plastic."
Ms. Patterson still had her funny voice. "So at the end of three sets of strings --- Joan, don't change the screen just yet --- at the end of these strings of yours, the problem reads 'meteor is to orbital as people is to blank' and you typed in 'God'."
"Yes," Miri said, more happily now --- Ms. Patterson did understand! --- "because an orbital is an invented community, while a meteor is just bare rock, and God is a planned community of minds, while people alone are just one by one bare."
...
Afterwards, Grandma was quiet a long time.
"Miri, do you always think this way? In strings that make designs?"
"Yes," Miri said, astonished. "Don't you?"
Grandma didn't answer that. "Why did you want to type in the analogy that exists four little strings down on the terminal?"
"You mean instead of eight or ten strings down?" Miri said, and Grandma's eyes got very wide. (Italics in the original, emphases mine. I have also removed Miri's stutter for the sake of readability.)

I thought this passage showed particular empathy for how it feels to try and communicate a train of thought like this. Miri's desperation and panic, as she worries that Joan and Ms. Patterson aren't following, are very familiar. Am I crazy? Is this just not logical at all, and I don't see it? Am I not logical? Or am I just failing spectacularly at showing them the logic of it? I also recognized Miri's strategic decision not even to try to convey the more abstract, spatial qualities of her thought --- later in the book, her brother will create a computer program that allows them to display the whole pattern, thus obviating the need for speech and its misleading simplification.

My thought is not exactly like Miri's, though, because even though the relations between her "strings" might be more geometrical than verbal, each "little string" --- the single steps between elements in a design --- is semantic in nature. It's a relationship between elements that is easily describable in words: for instance, many of the examples in the above passage are linked by category, properties or function. If anything, this is perfectly conventional linear thinking extended to one more spatial dimension.

Interestingly, there's another character in the book whose thought shares with mine all the traits that Miri's does not. It's completely nonverbal, and visual at a more immediate level:

They told him he had to learn to read, and he worked at the terminal every day, even though it was slow scooting and he didn't see how he would ever use it. Terminals spoke you whatever you wanted to know,and when there were words on the screen there wasn't as much room for graphics. Graphics made more sense to Drew than words anyway. They always had. He felt things in graphics, colors and shapes in the bottom of his brain that somehow floated up to the top and filled his head. The old lady was a spiral, brown and rust-colored; the desert at night filled him with soft sliding purple. Like that. But they said to learn to read, so he did.

While Miri's thought is essentially verbal, with words (or other semantic units --- bits of code, amino acids, whatever) serving as the basic unit and the spatial qualities only emerging at higher levels of complexity, Drew's thought is visual on its simplest level. My thought, while structurally a lot like Miri's, also uses vague visual symbolism rather than words or logical formulations. The elements of my thought are images, and the connections between elements --- Miri's "strings" --- can be visual associations. An image, as it moves or subtly changes color, comes to mean something else, and that meaning does not always map easily onto a logical statement. (The motion is also a crucial part of my thought: like Miri's three-dimensional logic webs, the movement of my mental images adds a layer of complexity).

One thing I find striking, in light of the ongoing discussion of intelligence and functional labeling in the autism blogosphere, is the huge gap between the apparent intelligence of these characters who both embody aspects of my thinking. Miri is clearly supposed to be a genius, while Drew is just as clearly meant to be a little thick***.

*The major narrative framing the story is that of America drifting from its current social structure to a more rigid, "Gattaca"-esque hierarchy, with Sleepless at the very top, controlling the biggest, most lucrative business empires; non-Sleepless who still possess customized genes for heightened intelligence, driven personalities, good looks etc. running the media, politics, and much of the business world; and the vast non-genetically-modified majority existing on welfare, since they can't possibly compete for jobs with superhumans.

**I loved the fact that Kress used analogies as the test case for Miri's thinking leading to "wrong" answers. Analogies are notorious for having many unforeseen, alternate answers!

***Kress does, through this character, effectively demolish notions of a single, measurable thing called "intelligence," which I think is awesome. For all his illiteracy and repeated academic failures, Drew still manages to become a great artist and to have great insight into other characters' states of mind.

Metaphor at the Expense of Characterization: Autism in Margaret Atwood's "Oryx and Crake"

Full disclosure: I love Margaret Atwood's books. I have ten or eleven of them (of which two are being loaned out to a friend in Tennessee), which may give me a slightly different perspective for this review, as Atwood is the only author I've reviewed so far with whose body of work I am extensively familiar. I'll try to stick to just Oryx and Crake, but I'm not completely ruling out comparisons from elsewhere in the Atwood canon, either.

Like Atwood's other dystopia, Oryx and Crake creates a bizarre near-future society by extrapolating certain trends in contemporary society. While The Handmaid's Tale focused on the backlash against feminism and the growing influence of Dominionist Christianity over US politics, Oryx and Crake explores the catastrophic potential of runaway biotechnology, social fragmentation and class stratification. The world in which her protagonist, Jimmy, and his friend Glenn (who later names himself "Crake") grow up is a starkly divided one in which wealthy technocrats and their families live and work in bubble-like gated communities (called Compounds) run by their employers and everyone else lives in the urban no-man's land Jimmy and Crake know only from rumor ("the pleeblands"). Government seems to have withered away entirely, with corporations running the Compounds as their own miniature fiefdoms.

Against this background, Crake emerges as a star inventor/researcher within his Compound, entrusted with projects of progressively greater importance and secrecy. Always a detached, cynical character, Crake is not shocked when he discovers that the pharmaceutical company that employs him also produces genetically-engineered diseases (to which it then markets the cure). If anything, he is impressed with the elegance of their solution to the problem of avoiding obsolescence. This marks a turning point in the Crake-Jimmy relationship, as it begins to dawn on Jimmy how little he really knows Crake, and as Crake, inspired and emboldened by his discoveries about the extent of his company's research, begins to concoct an apocalyptic plan to kill off most of humanity with an artificial plague and start over with a fast-growing humanoid species designed to his specifications.

About midway through the book, Jimmy visits Crake at the latter's elite technical university. This episode, besides being the one place in the book where Crake is identified as autistic, also serves to place Crake in context. At "Asperger's U," Crake is not unique; he's only the brightest specimen of a type.

Watson-Crick was known to the students there as Asperger's U. because of the high percentage of brilliant weirdos that strolled and hopped and lurched through its corridors. Demi-autistic, genetically speaking, single-track tunnel-vision minds, a marked degree of social ineptitude --- these were not your sharp dressers --- and luckily for everyone there, a high tolerance for mildly deviant public behavior.
...
"Compared to this place, HelthWyzer [the Compound where Jimmy and Crake grew up; also the name of its parent company] was a pleebland," Crake replied. "It was wall-to-wall NTs."
"NTs?"
"Neurotypicals."
"Meaning?"
"Minus the genius gene."

There are several things worth pointing out about the portrayal of autism and Asperger syndrome in that passage, but first I'd like to look at a similar scenario in another book. In Elizabeth Moon's The Speed of Dark, the protagonist is part of a small group of autistic coders employed in a supportive environment by an IT company in exchange for their unique gift for pattern recognition. With the advances in gene therapy that have taken place in Moon's not-too-distant future, these autistic adults represent the last of their kind. Before their autism could simply be cured, they had been assimilated into society by means of a mixture of workplace accommodations and intensive skills training. In Moon's world, these autistic coders are somewhat embattled within their company: their role is not widely understood, and managers looking to cut costs eye their supportive work environment with suspicion.

By contrast, in Atwood's near-future technocracy, autism is almost a status symbol. The leading university is named for the variant of autism its students all possess, and those students' obsessive singlemindedness and lack of the normal human need for social interaction or R&R makes them immensely valuable to the biotech corporations queuing up to hire them fresh out of college. Just typing that really brings home to me how profoundly unrealistic a scenario it is, not only in terms of the kind of worker employers tend to value, but also in its crude understanding of autism itself. Atwood seems to conceive of us as emotionless automata, uninterested in anything except solving puzzles and designing widgets.

I believe Atwood concocted this version of "autism" to stand as a personification of everything she is trying to criticize about biotechnology, agribusiness and consumer culture. The "tunnel vision" she locates in the unusual wiring of her elite bioengineering students' brains is endemic to our profit-driven society. I also see in her writing here a devoted fan of the liberal arts railing against the ascendancy of the job-training model of university education, with Crake obviously representing the kind of person such an education is meant to produce. (He's one of what C.S. Lewis called the "men without chests" in his The Abolition of Man --- people whose intellects have been educated far beyond their moral development. There is a long literary tradition of bemoaning this type of pedagogical asymmetry).

I think, for those reasons, that Crake is better read as an allegorical figure than a flesh-and-blood character. His portrayal in the story lends itself to that interpretation, too: though we meet Crake as a child, he does not change or mature at all over the course of the story, and his parents seem to have been written into the narrative as an afterthought, and then promptly dispensed with. Crake's role in his relationship with Jimmy is also decidedly one-dimensional: Crake is the critic, always making fun of Jimmy's stupidity and exhorting him to "use [his] neurons," and dismissing or belittling any effort of Jimmy's to argue with him on anything but purely practical terms. Crake's death is also fitting for a character who is little more than a dramatic device: once Crake has loosed his apocalyptic plague upon the world, he promptly commits suicide. He's fulfilled his purpose in the story, now he can go away and stop bothering Margaret Atwood and her editor.

Indeed, as a purely allegorical creation, Crake would not require any flimsy psychiatric diagnosis to explain his inhuman nature. He would already be inhuman, no slandering of large groups of people required.

A postscript: this is a fairly dramatic reassessment of Crake. The first time I read the book, I liked him and identified with him, seeing both myself and my boyfriend in him. (Crake demonstrated my rationality and intellectualism, my boyfriend's misanthropy and our shared tendency to ask a lot of "why" questions about human misery and try to come up with inventive, radical solutions).

Autism in the Not-Too-Distant Future: Thoughts on Elizabeth Moon's The Speed of Dark

Honestly, The Speed of Dark turned out to be a very different book than I expected it to be. It was shelved as science fiction, and Elizabeth Moon is a fairly well-known writer of sci-fi, so I expected The Speed of Dark to be jammed with all sorts of fantastic technologies, spacegoing explorations and vastly different kinds of societies than exist now. Instead, I got a story set in a society nearly identical to ours, with only a few subtle differences.

That unexpected resemblance to today's society made me pay unusual attention to those few things she did choose to change in her story, though. There were obvious, necessary-for-the-story changes like greater societal awareness of autism and advances in treatment and integration of autistic people into society (the protagonist, Lou, works as an encryption specialist at a large pharmaceutical company, where his autistic skills enable him to decode and create complex patterns), but some changes were more counterintuitive. Specifically, in the near-future society Moon has created for this work, there's a very narrow, rigid definition of normal. Lou keeps it a secret from his therapist, for example, that he enjoys fencing, for fear that the therapist will deem such a pastime antisocial. Similarly, Lou's love of classical music is presented by Moon as something deeply unusual; everyone else is depicted listening to homogenized radio pop music, and Lou's listening to classical music is always an intensely private activity. There are shades of Bradbury's The Pedestrian (nifty animated short film here) in this slightly sinister, overbearing mass culture, but she never brings it to the foreground. At most, it provides context for the central drama, which is Lou's internal conflict over whether to take the experimental cure for autism that his employer is pushing on him.

Apart from the thought-provoking tweaks in the setting, I'd say this book's strengths are the true-to-life descriptions of what it's like to be autistic (Moon really emphasizes the sensory hypersensitivities) and its humane treatment of the problem of a cure. The choice to take or to refuse the experimental treatment their employer offers is not easy for any character, and their final decisions range from a resounding "Yes" to an equally definitive "No," with all the flavors of ambivalence in between. For his part, Lou equates getting cured to being given a chance to live his life over again, to pursue the career in space exploration he'd always dreamed of. That's the understanding all of the autistic characters have of the cure: it would make them new people, cause them to start their lives all over. This has a powerful allure to those characters, like Lou, who have missed certain opportunities and are always asking "What if?"

An idea that I'm currently incubating, and will probably post more on later, is the question of whether autism has a special place in the thematic canon of science fiction. Much of science fiction, particularly cyberpunk, deals with cognitive frontiers the way earlier science fiction dealt with space. Cyberpunk especially mines the brain-computer interface for its stories, and autistic brains are sometimes compared to computers by NT writers and journalists seeking to describe our (sometimes) more logical, rules-oriented way of interpreting the world. Also, cyberpunk deals with testing the limits of human potential, often by artificial means. Autistic savants, with their astonishing ability in isolated areas, seem a natural kind of character with which to explore those narratives.

I also think an autistic character can stand in metaphorically for the inhuman, or the posthuman. That is certainly the role that the Asperger-syndrome biotechnologist Crake plays in Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, which I will write on as soon as I get my copy of Oryx and Crake back; I'm lending it out at the moment.

Superheroes and Disability in Soon I Will Be Invincible

While there are a lot of potential topics for an essay on Austin Grossman's Soon I Will Be Invincible, the one that fits the best with the theme of this blog is the novel's extended analogy between superpowers and disability. It sounds contradictory, but very few of Grossman's characters are simply superhuman. Their powers camouflage the extent to which they can't function in the everyday world. We get the impression that many of them fight crime (or mastermind it) because the wider world has no other use for them.

An ongoing theme of the novel, voiced at different times by its heroine, Fatale, and its villain, Doctor Impossible, is that superheroes (and -villains) pay a physical price for their power:

[Doctor Impossible] learned ... to spot the telltales of power: the stutter-step of a bad nerve operation, and the alien hybrids, Altairian eyes and Enderri hands. How to look at the way superheroes walk ... and see what happened to their bodies, once upon a time. Most of them had paid a price for their power, and for most of them it was too high.

That holds true not only for the bottom-tier freaks and strongmen that Doctor Impossible meets during his early career, but also for elite superheroes like Fatale's group, the Champions. Fatale herself is a cyborg, having had her body rebuilt after a car accident that destroyed half of her real body. She has no memory of her former life, she needs to be constantly on immune-suppressing drugs to tolerate her implanted circuitry, her added height and weight make her somewhat awkward and graceless, and she is infertile. The leader of the Champions, Damsel, is an invulnerable flying powerhouse whose bizarre alien-hybrid metabolism has her constantly throwing up (Fatale initially believes she has bulimia), and a teenage sidekick, Rainbow Triumph, is on an extensive drug regimen, both to keep her, too, from rejecting her cyborg implants and to hold off the degenerative bone disease that's slowly killing her. The level of sheer physical dysfunction that the Champions have to deal with every day is brought home when Fatale describes her teammates' nightly routines, spying on them with her x-ray vision:

[Rainbow Triumph] opens a metal briefcase and begins opening pill bottles and boxes, until fourteen pills, capsules, and dietary chews are lined up on the edge of the marble sink in front of her. She does it every twelve hours. She's probably been doing it since she was seven; maybe it's to fix whatever was wrong with her in the first place. ...

Underneath my feet, Blackwolf [a Batmanlike martial artist/detective]washes his hands for a full five minutes before popping three or four painkillers, which explains a lot. Then he pushes the little room's furniture to the side and puts himself through a series of calisthenic exercises ...

Feral [a huge cat-person, super-strong and a fierce fighter] drops to all fours when he's alone, and sleeps curled in a ball. I think he has back problems from trying to stand on two legs all the time.

Besides the physical (and, often, psychological) complications of the kind of altered physiology a superhero would have, Grossman's characters also have to deal with a larger society that marginalizes them. The personality quirks that lead characters to choose heroism or villainy over civilian existence are labeled disordered on both sides: Doctor Impossible is said to have "Malign Hypercognition Disorder," literally evil genius syndrome, while Fatale, quitting her job as a mercenary to fight crime, is accused of having "an adjustment disorder." Fatale is regarded with extreme suspicion by her landlord, who requires her to put in a thick carpet at her own expense, and to sign a series of waivers before he will rent to her. Doctor Impossible and another villain, Laserator, are both brilliant scientists who nevertheless are unable to succeed in academia; Laserator languishes in an obscure professorship while Doctor Impossible quits "legitimate" science as a postdoc, after watching himself grow older and older than his classmates while failing to do any serious work.

In the passage containing the description of the Champions' pill-popping bedtime rituals, Fatale articulates what might well be the novel's guiding thesis on what it's like to live as a superhero:

For everyone else, it's a momentary fantasy. They don't have to take them into the kitchen, the bathroom, and the bedroom. Or wake up in the night in flames, or sweep up shattered glass in their apartment, or show up late for work with a black eye. No one else knows where they itch or bruise you, or has tried the things you've tried with them when you were bored or desperate. No one else falls asleep with them and finds them still there in the morning, a dream that won't disperse upon waking.

This litany of domestic details strikes me as particularly relevant from a disability-rights perspective: no one but us knows what it's really like to live with whatever it is we live with. No one but us knows our real "quality of life," the constellation of small, intimate details that define our condition. The passage was meant to de-romanticize the superpowered life, as experienced by our ambivalent and somewhat cynical narrator, but just as she wants to dispel the "momentary fantasy" of how wonderful it is to be a superpowered crimefighter, a similar passage would also work to dispel the equally one-dimensional vision of horror most nondisabled people imagine when contemplating disability.