Yes, yes, yes yes yes! Read this brilliant collection now, it might just be the best thing you'll read this year.

3.5 but i'll talk on channel about it!

This is a wonderfully poignant SF anthology; on the strength of the first half of this alone, I'd already felt strongly enough about this to recc it to many of my GoodReads friends.The best, most-rewarding part of this reading experience is that all the stories in this anthology are excellent, well-crafted pieces of fiction in their own right, with fully developed and fleshed-out characters.While the central theme IS centered around disabilites, thankfully they are generally treated as merely on...

An important anthology, but so many of the stories just didn't work for me for various reasons, or were just okay. There were only a handful that I enjoyed, or at least admired. Just a heads up for how I personally interpret the star ratings:⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ = Excellent⭐⭐⭐⭐ = Good⭐⭐⭐ = Average⭐⭐ = Disliked⭐ = Hated#1: Pirate Songs, by Nicolette Barischoff.A very poor start to this anthology (aside from the excellent preface and introduction). There was just nothing, aside from the disability rep, that made...

THIS BOOK IS SO GOOD. SO GOOD!! Every single story and image (including detailed image descriptions for all visual images!) in this book is incredibly well-crafted and sent chills up my spine. I tried to read it really slowly so it wouldn't end so quickly, but it was just so good that I couldn't slow down! My heart nearly broke when I reached the end and there was no more book left. Hoping beyond hope for a volume two!!!

So so good. A brilliant anthology. The writing is top notch and themes are so on point. This book takes on disability by centering characters with disabilities as creators of their own narratives and subverts harmful sci-fi tropes such as "technology as cure." The stories avoid treating their characters as "inspirational" and instead create real, flawed people. The stories are subtle and complex in their handling of disability and the collection editors contextualize the stories within our ablei...

I thought this was really wonderful – though, like most short story anthologies, it varies in quality, it has a good proportion of 5 star stories – for these authors to create such wonderful characters, such original worlds, each in less than 20 pages, is really something.Beyond that, this book is just important – Accessing the future aims to present disability in a realistic way, where the disabled characters aren’t just sidekicks or villains and where they’re just real people. I need to read m...

Review originally written for my blogSo this was the third book I read for Sci-Fi month over on Twitter but I've decided to review it first just because it's so fantastic. I bought this a while ago on Amazon when I had some money left on a gift card then forgot about it for a while until this month. I've been trying to focus on reducing my physical TBR pile for Sci-Fi month (especially as then I can take a photo at the end of them all in a nice stack) but I just had to make an exception for this...

Absolutely wonderful anthology of disability-themed speculative fiction stories. It highlighted many areas of ignorance for me - like the fact that the large majority of speculative fiction that I've read imagines a future where disabled people are totally erased, their conditions "cured" or "corrected." I can't imagine how excluding that must feel for disabled people reading those stories, and I'm incredibly grateful to this book for imagining what some alternative futures might look like. The

This was interesting, entertaining, but most of all, thought-provoking. Each entry centers around a character (or characters) with a disability. I rather enjoyed seeing how they all played out, and would definitely recommend it to anyone who wishes to break the mold of the picture-perfect protagonist in a world of imperfection.

Accessing the Future: A Disability-Themed Anthology of Speculative Fiction is one of those anthologies that is thematically important, but uneven in execution. I usually read a couple of anthologies or short story collections per year, so I’m used to their mixed-bag nature.There are 15 stories in this volume, addressing a range of visible and invisible disabilities. There are protagonists that most readers aren’t used to seeing. (e.g. a young woman with spina bifida in “Pirate Songs”, a blind pi...

This is the best short story collection I’ve read in a long time. So many good stories. Every short story collection is likely going to have a few you like less than the others, but there were none that I hated here and I really liked an overwhelming majority. I especially loved “Pirate Song”, “A Sense All Its Own”, “Circling the Silent Sun”, and “In Open Air”. I also liked “Screens” and “Lyric”. There were a few that just didn’t take the time to explain the tech enough (or some other situation)...

Very disappointed. None of those stories explore in any meaningful way the topic, and not because of their length. There is just no depth or creativity to the examination of the way our world is built to be ableist (and racist and sexist and queerphobic), nor to the fictional integration of disability in any future society. And despite what the foreword and introduction say, the intersectionality is perfunctory at best.

I've liked it very much. It is so important that disabled people have representation and that is what we found here. This anthology is so good because they are not saying oh, poor person, s disabled... no. And that is what I always search for as a blind girl.

There were beautiful illustrations in between the stories, accompanied by image descriptions which was really great!Pirate Songs by Nicolette Barischoff - 4*Pay Attention by Sarah Pister - 2*Invisible People by Margaret Killjoy - 3*The Lessons of the Moon by Joyce Chng - 3*Screens by Samantha Rich - 4.5*A Sense All its Own by Sara Patterson - 3*Better to Have Loved by Kate O'Connor - 3.5*Morphic Resonance by Toby MacNutt - 2.5*Losing Touch by Louise Hughes - 4*into the waters i rode down by Jack...

This read made me realize how ideal SF is for exploring disability as a theme. The stories sometimes centered disability and sometimes didn't, but always included people with disability(ies). I enjoyed the exploration of what we might think of disability in the future, what accommodations might exist, and what complications those accommodations might bring. The introduction notes that this collection is partly a response to the fact that SF often implies, or states clearly, that disabilities hav...

As with any anthology, some stories in here spoke to me more than others. But it was a refreshing read — diverse in every way, from the authors to their characters to the writing styles. As opposed to almost every other media portrayal, the characters with dis/abilities in these stories are the heroes. And fittingly, the stories grapple with ideas about the role of technology in the lives of people with dis/abilities and even with the question of what makes something a “disability.” I truly enjo...

2⭐, Okay.Accessing the Future is an important anthology, but a number of the stories weren't my cup of tea, and I enjoyed the foreword, introduction and afterword the most.Stories that ticked the enjoy interest box for me were 'Pay Attention' by Sarah Pinsker, 'Better to Have Loved' by Kate O'Connor, 'Losing Touch' by Louise Hughes, 'Puppetry' by A.C. Buchanan.

My review is more of a minority report here, as I surmised while skimming the many reviewers who loved this collection of speculative fiction shorts featuring characters with disabilities. And although I loved the idea of this collection, the execution of a majority of the stories seemed to fall flat for me. There were a few standout pieces that I absolutely adored, but they seemed hit or miss.

This was an interesting idea for an anthology! Short stories that are all (a) science fiction and (b) focus on disability? It is good that this exists. Shout-out to several stories I especially appreciated:🚀 "A Sense All its Own" by Sara Patterson, about a pilot of animalistic robots trying to bypass rules about vision restrictions and adaptive tech. Super fun story to read!🚀 "Puppetry" by A.C. Buchanan, about a soldier with an ulterior purpose; really turns the technology-as-cure trope on its h...