In 1989, I wrote a story (titled \u201cAbsences\u201d) about a kid and her brother who had survived an alien invasion. Part of the core idea of the story was that the invading aliens were super sensitive to sound; humans who made too much noise got killed, and the protagonist\u2019s brother was deaf, so the protagonist knew ASL and could therefore communicate silently, and that had helped her survive.<\/p>\r\n
I was pretty pleased with that story, and it was published in our sf club\u2019s magazine, and it helped me get into Clarion West. But then Bhadrika, who actually knew some ASL and had interacted with real live deaf people (unlike me at the time), pointed out to me that there\u2019s no reason that a deaf kid would be unusually quiet.<\/p>\r\n
I was chagrined. That seemed incredibly obvious after she pointed it out, but it hadn\u2019t occurred to me at all until she pointed it out. (In my notes for myself that I wrote while writing the story, I had written \u201cBen has learned not to do things that make noise, even if he can't hear them.\u201d)<\/p>\r\n
I thought of my story when A Quiet Place<\/cite> came out, and again when The Silence<\/cite> came out. I haven\u2019t seen either movie, and don\u2019t plan to (despite the Hugo nomination for the former); too horrory for me. But I see that, according to this review of The Silence<\/cite><\/a>, both movies made the same mistake I did.<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[110,44,27,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17790","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-disability","category-movies","category-speculative-fiction","category-writing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17790","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17790"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17790\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17797,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17790\/revisions\/17797"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}