The value of human life.

That sounds like a pretty intense topic, and at first glance, it might not seem like something that’s often discussed in fiction. Look a little deeper, though, and many conflicts come back to this point, particularly in dystopian YA.

Consider Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games. Children are made to fight for the death for the entertainment of the rich. Poor, malnourished children are used as cannon fodder, while the few from rich districts have a chance to either reduce their odds or train for a shot at glory.

If the Capitol valued the poor like they do the rich, this wouldn’t be an issue.

Think of the factionless in Veronica Roth’s Divergent: discarded, left by the side of the road. They have no use in this strictly sorted society, and must survive on their own smarts and the kindness of those in Abnegation.

These dystopian governments claim to have logical, fair reasons for their actions. This makes it easy for civilians not targeted to support these systems.

“It’s not ideal,” they might say, “but it’s the best way.”

I wish this phenomenon existed only in fiction.

In real life, marginalized people are often valued less. This includes disabled people, who are seen as flawed by default, resulting in all kinds of damaging attitudes and policies. For example, it may be legal to pay disabled people below minimum wage, sometimes only pennies an hour. Disabled people may even be barred from receiving organ transplants or other life-saving medical care. In hundreds of ways, disabled people are told their lives have less value. Worse, they’re told it’s purely out of pragmatism: “We have to do what’s best for society as a whole.”

These ideas are so pervasive it’s no wonder they appear in fiction. Sometimes, they’re criticized; sometimes, they’re replicated.

Let’s switch from dystopia, which often deals with abuse of power, to (post-) apocalypse, which often deals with the fight for survival. Disabled characters rarely appear in these settings, with troubling implications. Are we to assume that there are fewer disabled people born? That they couldn’t hack it and died? That they were abandoned?

Apparently so. I’ve often seen disabled readers or viewers ask about the potential for disabled characters in their favorite genre or series, only to be disparagingly told that it wouldn’t be realistic for them to survive.

In 2014, a popular zombie apocalypse video game featured a Latina 15-year-old who many suspected had anxiety or autism. The reaction to her character was horrifying: many gamers said she was useless and a liability, and demanded the opportunity to kill her off. After the character was indeed killed, the game’s writers joked around in an interview about how much they hated her and loved seeing her get torn apart.

Living while disabled is seen as an act of luxury.

And when the situation gets tough, luxuries are the first to go.

People argue that fiction acknowledging this moral dilemma simply outlines a harsh reality: there’s no room for political correctness in matters of survival. Supporting —even tolerating — disabled people is thought to be an example of modern generosity, so it makes sense to assume that, once society breaks down, we’ll revert to treating disabled people with the same brutality and pragmatism as in the past.

That’s not uniformly true, though. From prehistory to modern day, plenty of disabled people were supported by their communities and had a place in society. Heck, some animal species do the same.

We might think our conclusions are shaped by logic or nature, but they’re often shaped by our surroundings.

I like to think we can improve these surroundings.

When I outlined On the Edge of Gone, which starts minutes before a massive comet impact and chronicles the immediate aftermath, I went in with the same doom-and-gloom ideas about the apocalypse. It’s the end of the world; society will collapse; people will care about survival alone; my autistic protagonist will have to fight to prove her worth.

As I started to write it, though, I realised… I didn’t want to write about people bludgeoning each other for food. I didn’t want to write about disabled people like me being left to die. I didn’t want to write about the downfall of society.

I wanted to write about survival, and survival isn’t solely about living through horrors. It’s about what you choose to do afterward.

Awful things do take place, but I left a lot to the imagination. Those tropes have been covered well in pop culture; I trust readers to fill in the blanks. For On the Edge of Gone, I decided to focus on a single community’s struggles instead, and those of a single autistic girl in particular.

And the way she can, does, and should survive.

The wonderful thing about sci-fi is that we get to create our own worlds, our own futures. What we think of as necessary might not always be so.

We decide.

If we want to write about the horrors of the apocalypse, we can. And if we want to write about tiny kindnesses, about what and who we value, about sacrifices, about hope, about family, about how we cope, about the end of one world and the ways we choose to start a new world …

Well.

We can do that, too.

You can buy Corinne Duyvis’s latest book On The Edge of Gone from the Guardian bookshop. Also see OtherBound.

Schools’ autism awareness week runs from 14-18 March, find out more here.