The heroine of#Aliens being in a wheelchair is more realistic than the entire plot of Aliens.
They are on a spaceship, using weird guns, terraforming and being kept in stasis. So much imaginary technology! There’s nothing particularly difficult about imagining a wheelchair that can roll over Alien guts and around a spaceship which, in a future where disabled people do stuff, would just be accessible to wheels from the initial design process. There currently exists an all-terrain wheelchair based on the Segway which you move by shifting your weight. A heroine fighting aliens would have her hands free to save a child *and* wield a gun. That’s already real.
I watch old episodes of Star Trek from time to time and marvel at how much of that technology is in our hands now. Those tablets they use to update the Captain in his ready room? We have those tablets now! Just lying around like no big deal. The innovations that send us to space and allow us to live there now exist because someone dreamed it up. Imagination is that powerful. So why not dream ourselves into the roles we want to play instead of the ones projected onto us. Let the technology of the future be built out of our wildest visions.
By Jenna Miller. Illustrated by Noviar Rahmat
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