Cirrus@Austlit

This work reverses the expectation of sighted people being the norm, casting them instead as irregularities. Thurii, the only slighted character in an underground city of the blind, is embarrassing to his compatriots: his tendency to leave things lying around is frustrating and his 'trick' of touching things at a distance seen as a distasteful aberration. 

In this series, only characters born with physical disabilities can channel the power of the Heart of the City, a technologies magic source. However, the machine turns them into ghostly servitors, so their control of it is always at a remove and in service to the former royal family.

The series comprises three books:

• Fire & Ice
• Dust & Rain
• Blood & Tears

Courtier's novel turns on a wholesale loss of hearing across the world, upending the sense of hearing as normative and deafness as the exception. Courtier suffered a stroke in 1967, which devastated his speech and affected his movement, and devised a series of speech exercises to re-teach himself (Denham Groves, Victims and Villains, Ramble House, 2009, p.29). Four of his novels, including Into the Silence, feature sensory loss or limitation in some form: movement in No Obelisk for Emily, memory in Dead If I Remember, and sanity in The Smiling Trip.

This work features lycanthropy as a metaphor for disability.

As Roslyn Weaver writes in 'Metaphors of Monstrosity : The Werewolf as Disability and Illness in Harry Potter and Jatta', the novel explores a social model of disability, with the author's explicit intention being to 'write a story about a princess with a disability'.

In this work, a character whose height is considered a disability in 'our' world finds himself in a world where normative adult stature matches his. In this sense, the novel is descended from works such as The Wizard of Oz, where the child protagonist finds themselves adult-sized in a fantasy world. With child protagonists, however, small stature lacks the stigma that Taylor's protagonist faces.

As Troy Potter points out (see Critical Reading), these novels position magic as inherently disabling: its damaging effects are such that to use it is to die young and to ignore it is to go mad. Interestingly, Larbalestier also builds the concept of metaphor into her world building: as magic users understand magic metaphorically (seeing it as number sequences or geometric shapes) rather than directly, they must also understand how metaphor works to wield their magic.

Mira Grant is blind, but she can see images of the past. Not only is she disadvantaged once objects move in the present, and therefore into the space of her blindness, but she is also institutionalised, patronised, and mistreated.

The series comprises three books:

• Diamond Eyes
• Hindsight
• Leopard Dreaming

While this novel seriously explores anorexia and the dangers of eating disorders, it does so through the motif of a starving and malicious spirit, generated from a famine and latching onto a modern girl's sense of uncertainty about her own body.

In this work, magic exacts a cost for its use, meaning it is primarily in the hands of people with physical disabilities, mental illnesses, or chronic health conditions. In an interview, author K.J. Taylor outlines his own teenage diagnosis of Asperger's, his determination to avoid 'disability as inspiration' tropes, and the ways in which the wizards of his world still isolate and fail some types of disabilities, particularly mental illness.

In this series, a blind character can only see through other people's eyes, leaving her completely blind when alone. Zeroes was something of a divisive text when it was published, with Kirkus Review noting that Riley's magic vision was 'overdone and too-obvious'.

The series comprises three books:

• Zeroes
• Swarm
• Nexus

In this work and its prequel, the main character's psychic abilities counteract her speech impediment (but cause additional concerns).

In this work and its sequel, the main character's psychic abilities counteract her speech impediment (but cause additional concerns).

Here the disability is less metaphorical and more illusory: the paralysis does not extend beyond the dream state, but enables the dreamer to experience his own death and funeral in an agony of isolation. The work draws on a long tradition of 'buried alive' narratives that exploit fears of paralysis and of comatose states.

This work (a short story published as a standalone ebook) features a magical plague that leads to physical deformity and social revulsion similar to the historic status of leprosy. The protagonist's quest centres on the fantasy trope of a 'magical cure' that heals both affliction and social isolation.

In this work, a character has a strange magnetic imbalance that poses significant difficulties to his daily life.

In this work, a character is purposefully kept in complete darkness and raised to be blind in order to control their attached 'shadow monster'. Published in 2012, this story shares some of the concerns of more recent works such as Josh Malerman's Bird Box (2014), where characters live in imposed blindness to avoid a supernatural threat, and the film A Quiet Place (2018), in which silence and deafness become survival traits after an alien invasion.