ABSTRACT
This chapter utilises an Autocritical Discourse Analysis lens to consider two cultural stations of blindness from the extrapolative genre of science fiction. First, I examine the villagers from H. G. Wells’s ‘The Country of the Blind’ as a population that adapts and thrives in their isolated world until the sudden appearance of the sighted Nunez. Wells, I argue, subverts the sighted/unsighted binary and challenges the reader’s assumption that it is the villagers who are disabled by their ways of seeing. Second, I analyse Lieutenant Commander Geordi La Forge from Star Trek: The Next Generation and his high-tech VISOR that allows him to experience sight in ways that resist the notion that sight is monolith and there is only one way to see. In all, this chapter invites both literary and filmic audiences to challenge the state of blindness as lack or as in need of a cure.
