Ivan's weblog

This book, as well as the one from my previous review, came from random browsing in an actual brick-and-mortar bookstore. I had never heard of it, and I was certainly not looking for something like it. It was the title which grabbed my attention (note to prospective book authors: choose a good title!) The back cover said that it was a novel about an autistic man, written in the first person. That grabbed my attention even more, since one of my friends once told me that I must be autistic. ;-) I started reading, and after a few dozen pages I decided to buy the book.

The basic story is: Lou is a roughly 40-year-old autistic man in the near future (I estimate the 2040s). Thanks to modern treatments, he can (barely) function in society and works in a special bioinformatics division in a pharmaceutical company “looking for patterns". Autistics who were born a few years after him were cured before or shortly after birth thanks to a newer genetic treatment, so he belongs to the last generation of autistics. When a new experimental treatment promises to cure autism in adults, Lou must decide whether to take it or not, while his company is trying to pressure him into taking it.

The story is relatively simple, many of the characters (other than Lou) may seem shallow, and the ending is a matter of debate, but I liked the book overall and I think it is worth reading just because of the way it portrays the autistic viewpoint of the main character. The lack of detail about most of the other characters may be excused because Lou (being the main narrator) doesn’t understand them in detail or doesn’t talk much about them; he just talks about what he thinks, in a very logical and detached way.

Lou’s handicap is that he has to think actively about what people mean with certain expressions, gestures, and intonations–things that most people tend to understand intuitively. And sometimes he just can’t understand people; he takes everything literally and has trouble with sarcasm and humor (he has feelings, but he doesn’t know what to do with them). He prefers to be alone in his routine, and can’t avoid computing probabilities or calculating the volume of the room, or looking at the patterns on the floor tiles.

It was easy to identify with Lou, as I have had many of those problems, although to a lesser degree. Who hasn’t? There was certain irony when other characters in the novel had relationship problems and Lou couldn’t believe it, thinking along the lines of “they are ‘normal’; unlike me, they have the power of reading other people’s minds. Why do they fight?". The book is good for thinking about “what is normal?” and for putting one’s life into perspective.

Elizabeth Moon - The Speed of Dark

I was in a maze or underground complex, full of German soldiers from WWII. I was walking or running from one end to the other aimlessly, or on errands that I no longer remember. I noticed that there were classrooms full of sitting children, but no teachers. Suddenly I remembered my mission: to weigh a dollar bill. Luckily I had one in my pocket, and I remembered I had previously seen a balance in a very small room (more like a closet) somewhere in the complex. Fabiola was with me. After a while we found the room; the soldiers didn’t do anything; they never saw us. The balance was digital, with 0.01 g precision, but it had to be taken outside for it to work. After another while we found an exit. There was a snow and wind outside; to make sure the bill didn’t fly away I weighted it with a bunch of snow. The net weight was 0.28 g.