We Belong Dead
Mad science has never been kind to its creations.
From the moment Mary Shelley’s “hideously deformed” Creature first lumbered into the written world, bleeding-edge scientists and their experimental offspring have found themselves in the long and lonesome shadow of Victor Frankenstein and his stitched-together giant. A country clouded by clear-cut notions of good and evil, of right and wrong, opinions orbiting around antiquated interpretations of God’s law. In the centuries since, literature—and the greater sphere of pop culture—have done little to excise themselves from this darkness.
From Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter” in 1844 to David Cronenberg’s body-horror reimagining of The Fly, all the way through to this year’s Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3, there is a single, common thread running throughout the subgenre: a primal disdain for science and her achievements. Every one of these stories, and countless others, argue that scientific advancements should only be approached with hesitancy, that the natural order is infallible, and anyone or anything who dares broach these limits is a degenerative monster, prone to violence and deserving of death.
Now, there are, admittedly, various levels of sympathy interwoven into these stories. Frankenstein certainly gives the Creature more depth than the doctor, while Hawthorne paints Beatrice Rappaccini’s death as an unforgiveable tragedy. And James Gunn makes it explicit that Rocket Raccoon and his family of cybernetically-enhanced animals are the victims of torture, that they are blameless and therefore worthy of pity and love.
But, touches of mercy aside, all of these stories still end the same way.
The doctor and his inhuman creations must die.
In Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Hyde is so unrepentantly evil and full of vice that Jekyll commits suicide to keep him from existing. 1960’s The Amazing Transparent Man, 1962’s The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, and scores of their B-movie siblings not only kill the mad scientist and his creations, but burn down his laboratory, too, just in case. Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park ends with the island being bombed into oblivion. That the dinosaurs were just being dinosaurs is no matter. Cloning them was an affront to the way things were, and these innocent animals must pay in blood and fire. Even Rocket needs to die, just a little, before he can escape his past. (It’s probably worth noting, too, that the animals he saves at the end of the movie are all un-experimented on, and thusly allowed to live.)
But this sentiment is perhaps best epitomized by the climax of James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein. The Monster, having narrowly escaped death, spends the movie wandering around, helping people and just trying to exist. He is, naturally, shot at and chased away for his troubles—and because he’s a godless freak lumbering through the Hays Code-heavy year of 1935, he also kills plenty of innocent people, too, in case the audience was tempted to feel sorry for him.
Eventually, the Monster stumbles upon Doctor Pretorius and the two hatch a scheme to strongarm Henry Frankenstein into creating a mate for the monster. Against his better judgement, Henry does, and, amidst flashing lightning and walls of sci-fi machinery, the Bride of Frankenstein is born.
The Bride, built specifically for the Monster (which is its own can of misogynistic worms) screams upon seeing his stitched-up visage. She refuses to hold his hand. The Monster is once again rejected, this time by the one being that should have understood his plight—the one soul(less corpse-person) that should have understood him.
Depressed and dejected, broken-down by a world that refuses to make space for him—that refuses to see him as anything other than an atrocity—the Monster declares “we belong dead” and pulls a lever to instigate a very dramatic murder/suicide, killing himself, the Bride, and Doctor Pretorius. Henry Frankenstein, however, having seen the error of his ways, gets to escape to his happily ever after.
Because even when the monster isn’t an actual monster, he must still pay.
Because there is a natural order to life: only what is and what should never be.
Because playing God—because science—is immoral and abhorrent.
So what does that say about those of us who are experiments?
This is not a disabled anthology.
Certainly, I am disabled and chronically ill—and with a towering height, a bum knee, a veritable allergy to the sun, and a dead man’s lungs inside of me, I do share more than a few attributes with Frankenstein’s Monster—and numerous authors included within the pages of this anthology are disabled and chronically ill. And, yes, several stories touch on disability and illness directly, others indirectly, and, when submissions were open, I made an effort to include disabled and chronically-ill voices.
But this is not a disabled anthology.
Most conspicuously, not every writer included in the pages of Greater Than His Nature identifies as disabled. Some might even go so far as to believe themselves to be able-bodied. This was an intentional act on my part, for reasons that, conveniently, I will now explain.
First and foremost, disability is not a monolith. There are over forty million disabled people in America alone, dealing with at least ten thousand diseases. And all those different people will handle all those different diseases, well, differently. Some disabilities are more readily apparent; some illnesses are invisible. Some of us have no problem asking for help; some of us refuse to even ask for the salt shaker. (And some of us can’t have salt, anyway.) Some folks are reclaiming the word cripple; some folks are adamantly against it; some push back against descriptors of any kind. Some of us crack jokes as a reflex; some of us don’t find anything funny about any of this at all. And some of us do all of the above, depending on the day of the week.
Second, disabled folks—and disabled writers, especially—shouldn’t need to carve out our own spaces in order to be seen. This isn’t to say, of course, that creating common communities is bad, or that there’s anything wrong with books featuring disabled writers solely—I, personally, am a huge fan of those anthologies and special issues, and I’ve been published (or tried to get published) in a few of them—see also: we are not a monolith, above—but simply that the disabled and chronically ill shouldn’t be shunted only to those communities and books.
There is often an expectation implicit in “disabled fiction” that disability will be prominently featured. That our “struggles” need to be explicit and central to the story. As if entire swaths of our day aren’t spent the same way as healthies—those temporarily non-disabled who walk among us—watching television and playing video games and taking care of our dogs and fighting and fucking and working and daydreaming about worlds of reverse mermaids and murder-spiders and bloated flesh-monsters tearing down the Golden Gate Bridge.
It’s similarly not uncommon for readers who aren’t disabled to come at such a book with preconceived notions sharpened and at the ready. Some shade of pity, usually, or fascination, or disgust, or maybe just puffed-up self-posturing about how advanced and accepting they are. I’ve read reviews where a reader docked a book a star because the characters weren’t explicitly disabled enough. They came here for the disabled experience, damn it, and how dare those cripples live their lives like they actually live their lives.
Because, to them, if we’re not fighting and struggling and nobly suffering—it’s always fucking noble, isn’t it?—then what are we even doing here?
Because, to them, we need to earn our right to exist.
While you and I may know the myriad intricacies of chronic illness—the ups and downs, the good days and the bad days and the ones lost entirely to pain—tack the word “disabled” onto an anthology, and suddenly the stories therein are subsumed. Readers can’t seem to see the forest for the trees, the soul beneath the stitches.
So, no, this is not a disabled anthology. Not today, anyway. And not because those readers and reviewers are in any way right, but specifically for the reasons they’re wrong.
We are not the limitations placed on us by the healthies out there.
We are not only our disabilities.
We should get to live alongside the rest of the world.
“We belong dead.”
These words are not uttered in Frankenstein, the 1818 novel, but they may as well have been. Like his later Hollywood counterpart—and every monster and medical marvel after and in between—Shelley’s Creature searches for happiness and companionship, for a home, and comes to the realization that he deserves no such thing. The world goes out of its way to make clear that the only place for a freak like him—like us—is alone on an ice floe, or burned alive, or buried beneath the rubble of a tower laboratory.
Whichever version of Frankenstein you choose, the Creature’s death is a tragedy, either a cold-blooded murder or an act of pitiable self-destruction from a soul unable to face the sneering scowls of society. A sad event, certainly, but, as is so common in the pantheon of sci-fi and horror fiction, a misfit of science must always be defeated by the able-bodied and the normal.
Greater Than His Nature is, I hope, an antidote to that outdated way of thinking. I’m not going to promise you that every experiment meets a happy ending, that every lab-cradled creature is good at heart, or that every scientist is well-intentioned, but I will tell you that normal has very little place here. The shunned do not slink off in surrender, and even the most lonely aren’t truly alone. If anyone suffers, it sure as shit isn’t noble. The dead come back, organs grow where you least expect them, corporate greed is corrected with calamity, and “healthy” is shown to be a disease all its own, the most damning by a long mile.
The disabled and chronically ill are not a monolith.
We are not the monsters “mad science” makes us out to be.
But that doesn’t mean we’re going to go quietly.
Eirik Gumeny
September 26, 2023