Impressed by Toby MacNutt

[jesse_the_k]

Toby is a multi-media artist. They dance, they make exquisite textiles, and they write. I loved their story in Accessing the Future.¹, print and ebook

Their SF story “Morphic Resonance” has busy public transit, lovely assistive tech, found family, and dreamy meditations on body modification.

That’s what had happened: in a too-crowded train, on a too-fast section of track, the resonator gripping his g-skip had cut out. Vasily went sailing off into the bodies around him. He tried to tug his arms into position fast enough to grab a rail, but his fingers slipped off and past. They caught on the arm of a fellow passenger, instead—or should have. His hand hit the man’s coat-sleeve, and slowed, but did not stop. The fabric provided no more resistance than water, and Vasily’s fingers sank into it, and below, into what ought to have been the flesh of the man’s arm. It wasn’t till his grasping hand wrapped around a little metal post, there in place of bone, that Vasily made sense of it: a hard-light hologram, in place of a prosthetic.

Although I trend SF, I also enjoyed Toby’s fantasy story, “The Way You Say Goodnight,” which I read in Transcendent 2, The Year’s Best Transgender Speculative Fiction² or via Kindle.

I moved in with the goddess in spring, after a month and a half of cautious emailing and coffee shop conversations. She had placed an ad in the classifieds: “Seeking housemate: 2br bungalow, countryside, owner occupied. Artists, writers, LGBTQ, introverts welcome. Quiet hours & amiable presence a must; mutual support preferred.” The rent was reasonable, utilities were included, and the explicit mention of queers and introversion intrigued me. Mutual support sounded nice, but I had my reservations.

Lucky for you it’s currently hosted on their own site: http://www.tobymacnutt.com/2018/03/16/the-way-you-say-good-night/

Toby also writes non-fiction, and I loved their gentle and deep interrogation of the questions visibly disabled people too often field

“Unpacking Questions”

Today the grocery cashier, gesturing to my crutches, says: “What did you do to yourself to get stuck with those awful things?”

[… snip goes seven pages of great prose …]

In conclusion: the question I was posed tonight was problematic in every particular, and enough so to be nearly impossible to handle in the moment, but in essential, important ways. Negative ways, yes, but that is what we are dealing with, what we are (it feels like) daily up against – that is ableism. Her question shines a light on subtler attitudes and assumptions about dis/ability and the people who are dis/abled. It shows how much is not known, or wrongly known, or known but not understood. It is an important question. I just wish I weren’t asked it like this.

Read it all on their site: http://tobymacnutt.com/unpackingquestions–24oct2011.pdf

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1. http://press.futurefire.net/p/accessing-future.html ↩︎

2. https://www.lethepressbooks.com/store/p465/Transcendent_2.html ↩︎

Comments

[sonia]

Thanks for the links! I liked "The Way You Say Goodnight" for its depictions of variable disability and building relationships. And I have some serious hesitations about the fact that it hurt the main character (do we get a name anywhere?) to touch his housemate.

Is there a metaphor for disability there that I'm missing? Depression maybe? Because it seems a clear metaphor for abusive relationships to go into the night and be frozen by her touch. Love shouldn't hurt.