ada_hoffmann | Entries tagged with autistic book party

Today’s Book: “The Many Half-Lived Lives of Sam Sylvester” by Maya MacGregor

The Plot: Sam, a nonbinary autistic teenager, moves to a new school in a more accepting city after an incident of queerphobic violence that almost killed them. They soon become haunted by the ghost of another teenager who may have been murdered, in their new home, a generation ago – and by a mysterious stalker who seems intent on stopping Sam from digging up the past.

Autistic Character(s): Sam, and the author!

I have a complicated relationship with the word “likable.” There’s a whole brand of discourse about whether characters should be likable, and likable to whom, and what that even means. But when I try to sum up this book and its protagonist, “likable” is the first word that comes to mind – and it’s not ironic, but very sincere. There’s a warmth and an irrepressible sweetness to this book despite its dark subject matter, or maybe, in a roundabout way, because.

Sam is an adorable autistic seventeen-year-old with a big heart, good fashion sense, and amazing hair, who lives with their adoptive father, Junius – more on him in a sec. But as you can see from the plot summary, Sam has a lot of trauma. One of the ways that they cope is through a special interest in dead queer teenagers – those who might have been murderered, or might have otherwise had their lives cut short before they could become the adults they were meant to be. Sam has a whole scrapbook where they keep details from news and the Internet about each of these people, documenting and memorializing each short life as best they can.

By sheer coincidence, this is the second book I read in a row that portrayed an autistic character with a dark or morbid special interest. (I haven’t reviewed the other one yet; I’m finding it unusually difficult to put my thoughts together about that one.) It’s easy for neurotypical people to be put off by these kinds of interests or to characterize them as unhealthy. MacGregor’s approach to the topic is a lot wiser and kinder. Sam is mindful of the way most people would react to their interest, and of its potential pitfalls – the danger of becoming disrespectful, for instance, or invading families’ privacy. But it’s also made very very clear through the narrative that this interest is something Sam needs, a way of processing not only what they’ve been through but how their own trauma connects to a broader history. Plus, it’s what helps them solve the mystery and save the day.

Secretly, like many trauma survivors, Sam doesn’t feel that they’re really alive. Before long, they’re going to turn nineteen, and they have a strong feeling that they’re not going to survive past that birthday. Fate, or awful happenstance, will somehow intervene.

All this trauma is offset by the fact that Sam’s support network is genuinely warm and wonderful. To begin with, there is Junius, the best and coolest adoptive dad I’ve ever seen in a story. He is also a Black single parent – although Sam is white. MacGregor doesn’t shy away from showing how frustrated Junius gets with the racism he encounters, but also the resilience with which he seeks out situations where he and Sam can thrive. Junius is steady, supportive, and playful with Sam in ways that fully take Sam’s needs as an autistic young person into account. Check out this quote, for instance:

“Come on,” he says. “We’re gonna unload the car. And then we’re going to set up our egg crates and sleeping bags, and then we are going to go for a walk to see . . .” He pauses to stare at me melodramatically. “The ocean.”

I can’t help the small bounce I do. Dad is good at this. Giving me direction, expectations. Especially because tomorrow will be stressy, and even he can’t tell me how it’ll go.

Dad notices the bounce and grins wider. He has learned to tune himself to my frequency.

The community Sam finds at their new school is also good like this. It’s not perfect – there is some bullying and other instances of garden variety high school drama, and MacGregor takes those episodes seriously. But for the most part, as soon as Sam joins Rainbow Island – a student group for LGBTQ+ and allies – they are immediately welcomed by a new friend group full of queer teenagers who are just as adorable, quirky and sweet as they are themself.

The sheer warmth and love in this story provides an effective counterweight to the heaviness of the violence it’s processing. This is a book that doesn’t bowlderize the aftermath of murderous, queerphobic violence – or the effects of stalking and death threats in the present. But it’s a book that holds and supports you while it shows you those things. At heart, it’s an affirming book, and it refuses to leave Sam in the darkness alone.

In case there was any doubt, they do turn nineteen – and they do survive.

The Verdict: Recommended-1

Andrew Joseph White, “The Constellations Are Unrecognizable Here” (Strange Horizons, November 2021)

[Autistic author] Two trans boys are casualties of an intergalactic war, living on a medical spaceship where the doctors are helping them heal – but also paternalistically deciding what medical procedures they do and don’t need, offering reconstructive surgery to erase their scars but withholding any gender affirming care. There is a lot of self-harm and a lot of trauma in this story but the bond between the two characters, and the desperation they are driven to by the one-two punch of wartime atrocities and transphobia, is memorable. [Recommended-2]

Kiya Nicoll, “A Dragon in Two Parts” (Escape Pod, December 30, 2021)

[Autistic author] A disabled woman undergoes a procedure that will transform her physical body, turning her into a dragon. Magical cure stories are a hard sell for obvious reasons, but I ended up liking this a lot. There’s a refreshing nuance both to the protagonist’s thoughts and reactions, and to the transformation itself, which doesn’t always cure disability – it brings people’s bodies into alignment with their ideal selves, whether or not that involves a cure. This is one of those stories that leaves me wondering wistfully what would happen if its fantastical technologies existed for real. [Recommended-2]

James L. Sutter, “And All Their Silent Roars” (Nightmare, Issue 116, May 2022)

This is a really interesting case of a horror story – so interesting that I’m going to need to review it at greater length. A family with three bratty children moves into a new home, and the youngest – an autistic boy named Denny, who is obsessed with small animal figurines – digs up something in the sandbox which may be vaguely, ominously magical. Danny is delighted by what he’s found. The narrator, his brother Jeremy, isn’t so sure.

There’s a lot of quite ableist language toward Denny, mostly in dialogue but also to some degree in the narration. I don’t get the sense that the narrative endorses the ableism – it’s too nuanced to feel that way for me. Some characters are just plain vicious to Denny; others are gentler while still cringing at him a little. Jeremy goes out of his way to spend time with Denny and protect him from bullies, and seems to have some moments of genuine affection and connection, but that doesn’t stop him from thinking about Denny in an ambivalent, othering way, and feeling relief when Denny isn’t around. It’s perfectly realistic for a character like Jeremy, even if it’s one of the tropes I hate to see, and Jeremy seems to be dimly aware that his ambivalence isn’t quite what’s fair to Denny or what Denny really needs.

The Author Spotlight says Denny is inspired, partly, by Sutter’s own younger brother. It says:

I also think a lot of the story’s energy comes from recognizing ourselves in the narrator’s internal conflict. He loves Denny, while also resenting the inconvenience he poses. I think we all have to wrestle sometimes with the knowledge that we’re not as selfless as our loved ones deserve, and that sense of guilt adds to the story’s tension.

So, like, sure. I get that part.

The story is not badly written on a craft level; there are some intriguing moments of tension and atmosphere. But it still hews pretty close to a set of tropes that don’t work for me most of the time. It’s the kind of story where there’s an autistic character, seen somewhat opaquely from the outside, who gets involved with something creepy; the neurotypical POV characters wring their hands, but we’re also invited to wonder if maybe the Land of Creepy Things is where autistic people belong after all.

It’s possible to redeem or subvert these tropes, and Sutter veers close to that in places. (I really wonder what the story would look like from Denny’s point of view, for instance.) But, between the story structure and the ambivalently ableist POV, it didn’t quite subvert anything hard enough to end up landing for me. [Not Recommended]

Sunyi Dean, “How to Cook and Eat the Rich” (Tor.com, January 18, 2023)

[Autistic author] In a dystopian future riddled with food shortages, a wealthy man is tempted into a secret society of cannibals. The big twist at the end is not really a twist since it’s telegraphed right in the title; but if you are autistically angry at the state of the world and would like to see a very bad, entitled person get his comeuppance, then you’ll like it just fine. [Recommended-2]

Louise Hughes, “Out of the Rain” (Kaleidotrope, Winter 2023)

[Autistic author] The narrator in this story is a woman who is reincarnated over and over again, destined to die for the sake of a man’s character arc. When she meets another woman who remembers many lives, they find a way – just maybe – to escape together. Lyrical and melancholy. [Recommended-2]

Jennifer Lee Rossman, “Don’t Look Down” (Kaleidotrope, Winter 2023)

[Autistic author] An autistic girl, who’s recently been moved out of an abusive situation and into a group home, begins to have visions of strange creatures in the sky. I like this one for its moving descriptions of how the narrator dissociates, how she can’t quite trust that anything better than her past will stay real – and for the nuance of how the group home can be quite imperfect while still convincingly enough of an improvement on the past to cause these feelings. Although the narrator is reluctant to trust humans, her impulse is to reach out, to touch, to connect, even in an inhuman way. There’s an environmentalist message which feels a bit tacked on, but the psychological arc alone is worth the price of admission. [Recommended-1]

Lesley L. Smith, “Let Sleeping Gators Lie” (Academy of the Heart and Mind, April 5, 2023)

[Autistic author] A sweet, sad piece of climate fiction, with an adorable dog who may or may not be a ghost. [Recommended-2]

Yoon Ha Lee, “Counting Casualties” (Tor.com, April 26, 2023)

[Autistic author] An intriguing story about a war in which, whenever the alien adversaries win, they make a culture’s greatest arts disappear. There’s some pretty strong social commentary in this one, especially once we reach the end and find out why exactly the aliens are doing this. It’s tense, ruthless, and surreal in the way that Yoon Ha Lee does best. [Recommended-2]

Mary E. Lowd, “Orange Sherbet Unlocks a Better Loot Box” (Deep Sky Anchor, June 2023)

[Autistic author] Mary E. Lowd is a very prolific author who I haven’t featured here as often as I should – as well as a tireless advocate for furry fiction, a genre that’s often misunderstood. But she’s at her best, in my opinion, when she writes about virtual realities. This is a short, sweet story that takes on some heavy topics, especially the effects of COVID-related isolation and heavy Internet use on children. But it takes them on gently, without shaming or monster-izing anyone – child or adult. [Recommended-2]

Today’s Book: “Tiger Honor” by Yoon Ha Lee

The Plot: A young tiger spirit named Sebin gets their acceptance letter from the Thousand Worlds Space Forces – on the same day that they learn that their beloved uncle Hwan has deserted forces and been disgraced. As Hwan’s presence haunts a disastrous first day of training, Sebin must decide between loyalty to their family and sacrifice for the greater good.

Autistic Character(s): The author!

This book is a really interesting sequel to Dragon Pearl – in part because the tone is so different. Sebin is a very different narrator from to Min – serious, rulebound, and dutiful, not to mention their steadfast devotion to a family which, to an adult reader, looks fairly unloving and shifty from the very first scene.

Seeing the setting through Sebin’s eyes instead of Min’s means losing most of the caper-y tone that made Dragon Pearl so charming – but it also adds unexpected depth. Sebin feels the injustice when people betray each other, and the confusion when they’re getting mixed messages about who to trust, more strongly than Min, and they think through the ethics of their situation in a different way.

Min is in the story too, of course!. She arrives early on, intent on a mission of her own. After seeing through her eyes in the previous book it’s fascinating to see her through Sebin’s as they slowly puzzle out what’s going on with her. In Dragon Pearl, from Min’s perspective, the mind control capers felt fairly innocent, even when they went too far; there was almost a sense that foxes were viewed with suspicion because people were small-minded or something. In Tiger Honor, we get a much clearer sense of why people fear foxes, and of how distressing the mind control really is for those who realize they’ve been affected. It’s a sobering shift. Having read the previous book, we know that Min is ultimately on the side of good, but it makes total sense why Sebin views her as an enemy or even a monster. The way that they do reconcile with her, towards the end, is non-obvious and quite interesting.

Despite a more serious tone, there’s still a lot of fun to be had! Tiger Honor is still ultimately an adventure story about a quirky young group of space cadets who find creative ways to use their skills to foil an enemy. The character and setting details are as delightful as ever. Overall it’s a solid addition to the series that adds new dimensions to the previous book’s themes. The trilogy will conclude in October 2023, with a book called “Fox Snare.”

The Verdict: Recommended-2

For a list of past/future/possible Autistic Book Party books, click here.

Today’s Book: “Troubleshooting” by Selene dePackh

The Plot: In a viciously ableist, fascist, near-future North America, a troubled autistic teenager named Scope Archer must escape a corrupt backcountry “development center” called Thunderbird Mountain before finding her way in the world.

Autistic Character(s): Scope, plus the author.

I picked this book up, uneasily intrigued by the premise, but unsure exactly what to expect. The back cover copy makes it sound like autistic Stalag fiction, complete with puzzle piece tattoos. The actual book itself isn’t quite that, but it’s a brutal, challenging, rather uneven book that I’m still not sure what to do with, which is why I took so long to get to writing the review.

Thunderbird Mountain is awful and dehumanizing in ways that will be familiar to anyone who’s read about or experienced institutionalization. It is also corrupt, with guards who will ask for sexual favors in exchange for small comforts, and thuggish “trusties” who might not bother to ask. Scope, who is underage but has already done sex work, navigates this environment more cannily than most; but it’s a hellish environment no matter how it’s navigated. Fortunately, Scope escapes the camp less than a quarter of the way through the book, but she must then try to navigate an external world which in some ways is no less hostile.

DePackh writes Scope’s point of view with a sort of vicious matter-of-factness, a point-blank refusal to sugar-coat any aspect of what this life is like, married to an equally strong insistence on her own agency. The book is at its best when it uses this voice and this tone to call out aspects of the ableism in Scope’s life which are barely exaggerated versions of the ableism of the real world – or maybe, even more uncomfortably, not exaggerated at all.

Take this paragraph, for instance:

I kept hearing how autistics didn’t understand sexual boundaries. I decided to make it work for me. It wasn’t a new concept. I couldn’t exist around humans without being slathered in it. Some autistics like my cousin Archer identify as asexual, but plenty of us play the hands we’re dealt.

Like. Ouch. I’ve never been in a situation like Scope’s (thank goodness – although, based on dePackh’s bio, the sex work in the book is #ownvoices) but when I read this quote I think about some of my own history of toxic relationships with people who thought that the autism made me easy to play, and I wince a little in recognition.

Back when I reviewed Mirror Project I promised myself that I would let myself DNF books if I needed to and still write a review, if I wanted, of the parts that I’d read. I have to admit that’s what happened with “Troubleshooting.” It’s not because of the dark content, exactly. (I still firmly believe that marginalized authors can, perhaps should, write exactly as much dark content as they want to.) But when the content of a book starts to get difficult enough to slow me down, I have to be sufficiently motivated to keep going. The bar for how compelling and how empathetic the book needs to be, in order to motivate me that way, gets higher. Not because of some objective rule about what you “should” or “shouldn’t” do in dark books, but just because of how my own endurance levels work as a reader.

“Troubleshooting” starts to fall down for me on these grounds in the middle sections. After Scope escapes from the camp, the book starts to meander and to feel a little unfocused as Scope tries various strategies for surviving in the outside world, feels unsatisfied by them, and starts drifting back into exploitative sexual situations. I was still rooting for Scope in a sense, and it’s not like this kind of drifting unhappiness is unrealistic for someone in her situation; but I was no longer quite sure what I was rooting for her to do, or even what she wanted to do in the first place, and her moments of anguish started to feel like they weren’t supported as closely or as vividly by what we saw on the page. I eventually gave up and stopped reading around the one-third mark.

Anyway, I think I have readers who might like this book despite its unevenness (as well as readers who would run for the hills, or perhaps already started running at the first few paragraphs of this review.) When it hits, it hits hard. Even when it misses, it is absolutely unflinching. I’ve never seen another book quite like it.

The Verdict: YMMV, but I didn’t like it

For a list of past/future/possible Autistic Book Party books, click here.

Today’s Book: “Dragon Pearl” by Yoon Ha Lee

The Plot: Min, a thirteen-year-old fox shifter in a space opera universe based on Korean mythology, leaves home to try to track down her brother, who has disappeared in search of an artifact called the Dragon Pearl that can remake whole worlds.

Autistic Character(s): The author!

I’m a huge fan of Lee’s work, but I waited longer to pick up his middle grade series because middle grade hasn’t historically been my thing. This year, for various reasons, it’s a genre I’ve been getting more genuinely into, and “Dragon Pearl” is a great example of why, because it’s a delight from start to end.

Min is adorable – a character who cares a lot and works hard, but who also has the impulsive sense of mischief common to all foxes, and a range of abilities at shapeshifting and mind control that get her into very creative predicaments as well as back out of them again. I easily rooted for her throughout the story and was intrigued by the colorful secondary characters she befriends and the mystery that she begins to unravel.

There really isn’t a lot to say about autism here (although, as often happens in Lee’s work, there is some interesting subtext about gender, with Min spending a good portion of the book disguised as a male cadet). But I’m very glad I read it, and I’ll be heading as soon as I can to the sequel, “Tiger Honor.”

The Verdict: Recommended-2

For a list of past/future/possible Autistic Book Party books, click here.

Elliott Dunstan, “Home Is Where The Ghosts Are” (self-published poetry chapbook, May 2017)

[Autistic author] This brief collection is tied together, as the author’s note explains, by an experience Dunstan had in real life – moving into a new apartment and finding eerie traces at every turn of the tenant who had lived there before. From this situation he spins out an overlapping set of perspectives on ghosts, time, change, trauma, and identity. Despite the short length, it feels thoughfully reflective rather than hurried. [Recommended-2]

Andrew Joseph White, “Chokechain” (Medium, 2018)

[Autistic author] A trans man comes home to his transphobic parents only to discover that they’ve bought a robot designed to look and act like his idealized, pre-transition self. This is a difficult but compelling story, and its most memorable aspect to me is the way the protagonist gets to be messy and angry, seething on the inside even though his anger isn’t tolerated by those around him. There’s something very thought-provoking in how he associates anger with violence, violence with gender, gender with many of the justified reasons he’s angry; yet, despite planning violence against the new robot, he ends up finding empathy for it in an unexpected way. [Recommended-2]

Lucas Sekiguichi, “Your Great Journey” (Daily Science Fiction, August 17, 2018)

[Autistic author] This starts out looking like one of those stories about what the afterlife is like and turns into something much weirder, as the narrator, who still physically exists and seems to be very much alive, watches everyone in their life mourn for them and move on. I am reminded of Jim Sinclair’s famous essay “Don’t Mourn For Us”; there is a lot of painful resonance here for autistic readers, queer and trans readers, and others who have been treated as dead or lost by a family or community that really just doesn’t want to face what it means for them to be alive. [Recommended-2]

Jennifer Lee Rossman, “Gay Jaws” (self-published on Rossman’s blog, June 11, 2021)

[Autistic author] Both bloodthirsty and cute, this is a love story between a human and a hybrid human-shark who band together against the evil scientist who’s been turning people into hybrid human-sharks against their will. The whole thing is fun, but what I like best is the way the narrator calms her human-shark love interest down out of a potentially violent meltdown. She is genuinely dangerous due to her shark nature – yet the danger is contained not through force, but through explicit recognition of her humanity. [Recommended-2]

Andi C. Buchanan, “If We Do Not Fly at Sunset” (Lightspeed, Issue 144, May 2022)

[Autistic author] A quiet, poignant story about a character descended partly from fae, perhaps a changeling, who’s just trying to navigate life and work and queer relationships in a New Zealand slowly disintegrating from climate change. The sense of helplessness and the yearning for acceptance in this story – but also the ability to find it, in small, hesitant encounters – rings very true to me. [Recommended-2]

Today’s Book: “Geometries of Belonging,” a short story collection by R.B. Lemberg

Autistic Character(s): The author – and more!

R.B. Lemberg’s Birdverse will be familiar to longtime readers of this blog. It’s an intricate fictional world that Lemberg has developed over many years with autistic fervor. Now there’s a whole collection focused solely on Birdverse short stories, novelettes, and poetry. I’ve given Recommended ratings to quite a few Birdverse stories before, all of which appear in this collection, as follows:

Short stories and Novelettes: The titular short story “Geometries of Belonging”; “The Book of How to Live”; “The Desert Glassmaker and the Jeweler of Berevyar;” “A Splendid Goat Adventure”

Poetry: “I will show you a single treasure” [the title of this poem has been slightly altered as it appears in the collection]

(I have also reviewed the Birdverse novellas The Four Profound Weaves and A Portrait of the Desert in Personages of Power, and the novel The Unbalancing, which do not appear in the “Geometries” collection; although one poem, “Ranra’s Unabalancing,” describes many of The Unbalancing’s events.)

There are also many more stories and poems which are excellent, but which I simply did not review here. (Many autistic authors are quite prolific and, as a reviewer, my goal is not to comprehensively review all of their short work, even if I like it, but to sample a range of authors and review the short work I have something to say about.)

So it almost goes without saying that I also recommend this collection, which is full of the best Birdverse stories you may already know and a few obscure gems that you probably don’t.

There’s always been a sense of care and empathy in Lemberg’s stories, in which characters (often queer and/or disabled) are exquisitely human, flawed and worth loving; social power dynamics are thoughtfully examined; magic itself is entangled with the need to consider the individuality and consent of all beings. But there’s an aliveness that emerges from the placement of all of these works together which is greater than the sum of its parts. Birdverse isn’t the home of one set of protagonist characters, or one important country whose history progresses through the ages. It’s a rich tapestry in which all sorts of wildly different characters, in wildly different circumstances, interconnect. A magical tapestry is woven, passes through many hands as it makes its way to the greedy ruler who will buy it, and those hands in turn have their own stories, which are less about the tapestry and more about family, gender, and belonging. A nation of refugees flee a disaster, find a new home, make and break magical agreements with the land, and a thousand years later a new set of refugees comes to them on uneasy terms. Magical characters have absurd, light-hearted adventures in the pursuit of their research; magical characters struggle greatly and seriously with the weight of their responsibilities, and save the land from disaster, and have PTSD from their attempts to save the land; meanwhile non-magical characters face discrimination, in the face of one country’s magical snobbery, and agitate for institutional change. There is no one story and that’s the point. Everyone is alive, everyone is connected, and everyone is human.

There are autistic characters in several stories, although it’s not the focus of the collection. The title story in particular is a lovely tale of autism, consent, and healing without curing; you can read more of my thoughts about it at the link above.

Anyway I quite like this book; Birdverse fans would do well to pick it up and complete their collections.

The Verdict: Recommended-1

Today’s Book: “The Luminous Dead” by Caitlin Starling

The Plot: Gyre is a cave explorer on an alien planet, where cavers have to go to extreme lengths and wear specially modified suits to hide the signs of their biological presence from a monster called the Tunneller. They’re guided by controllers at the surface who can remotely communicate with them and modify the suit’s workings from a distance if necessary. But as Gyre gets deeper and deeper into the cave, her controller, Em, is beginning to seem increasingly untrustworthy…

Autistic Character(s): The author!

When I first read this book a few years ago, Starling wasn’t publicly out as autistic, but she has since begun to discuss it publicly while promoting her second novel, The Death of Jane Lawrence. That’s a book I’m looking forward to reading but haven’t gotten to yet – so in the meantime, I thought I’d tell you all about how I loved The Luminous Dead instead.

This is a very creepy book!! Caving is creepy!! The level of physical control Em has over Gyre, as well as emotional control thanks to Gyre’s sheer isolation – alone in the darkness for weeks on end with only Em to talk to – is also creepy! It’s a sci-fi horror and Starling knows how to milk the creep factor for all it’s worth. You can expect underwater scenes, malfunctioning and missing equipment, injuries sustained when there’s no one to come fix them, involuntary drugging, betrayal, manipulation, and growing uncertainty about what is and isn’t even real down here. As well as the Tunneller itself, a constant ominous lurking presence. I found myself turning the pages compulsively out of a sheer dread-fueled need to see what happened next, finishing the book almost faster than I could help myself.

The heart of the book, though, is the dynamic between Gyre and Em – a sort of constantly shifting, mutually mistrusting trauma-bond that never quite settles into easily digestible shape. It’s also queer. (I remember Starling quipping on social media, somewhere, that this was a book for people who had a crush on GLaDoS.) Em manipulates Gyre in ways that can’t be met with something as simple as forgiveness – especially when Gyre is still down there in the cave, under her control. As her secrets begin to come out, they serve both to humanize her and to underscore the monstrousness of the things she’s done before and is willing to do again. Yet it could just be that, if Gyre wants to survive and Em wants what she’s looking for down in the caves, they might just have to treat themselves as being on the same side – and to find some scrap of empathy for each other, somewhere.

Anyway, if you like creepy books and caves then you should check this one out. That’s all I have to say.

The Verdict: Recommended-2

Today’s Book: “The Timematician: A Gen M Novel” by Steven Bereznai

The Plot: Doctor BetterThan, a genius supervillain who can manipulate time, uses his powers to wipe out all life on earth. Then he has to deal with the consequences – including a mysterious robot woman who seems determined to undo his work.

Autistic Character(s): Doctor BetterThan himself – and the author.

I find that I struggle to review comedies. I’ve done it before (see, for example, “The Damned Busters“) but it always throws me off my game. Normally we don’t want autistic traits to be exaggerated and played for laughs. So what happens in a genre where everything is exaggerated and played for laughs? You have to just suspend your disbelief and go with it.

“The Timematician” is not only a comedy about an autistic person – it’s about an autistic villain, who’s not only played for laughs but is also manifestly a terrible person. Obviously I don’t mind autistic villains or unlikeable characters – I’ve written them myself – but as a reviewer it introduces an additional level of wow-I-don’t-know-what-to-do-with-this-book.

What I’m saying is that I picked up “The Timematician” feeling curious, but very dubious and unsure if it would ever win me over.

To my surprise, it mostly did.

It helps that Bereznai’s narrative voice is really engaging. Picture the most gleefully cheesy supervillain monologue you’ve ever heard, and that’s your narrator. Everything feels brightly-colored, vivid and quick-moving in the best comic book tradition.

Doctor BetterThan’s autism informs his character deeply (he also has a physical disability). It influences the devices he’s created, including a “social-ometer” that helps him to decode neurotypical characters’ intentions. It also, even more interestingly, affects his style of villainy:

Growing up, I thought that throwing in bits of fancy talk would give me a rougish quality my classmates would ooh and aah over. As with the application of many skills in the spheres of adolescent sociability, I miscalculated. No one understood me or even tried – which prepared me well for adulthood.

“The fools of this world had no use for me,” I say aloud, “well, the feeling is mutual.”

Genetrix bleeps in a womp-womp way.

“Genetrix,” I chide, “sarcasm is the refuge of the inferior.”

I know she’s being sarcastic – a deplorable and cruel form of irony that’s somehow crept into her code – because an inverted question mark pluses on her face. Genetrix bleeps in response.

“Well, people should like know-it-alls,” I answer, “because we know it all.”

The genius villain who feels that no one appreciates their genius is not a new trope; it’s a staple of superhero fiction, and it’s probably always autistic-coded (or at least non-neurotypical-coded) to a degree. But Bereznai brings that connection to the foreground and, by doing so, arguably makes it more interesting. There were a lot of points in the book where I had to stop and think – not because autism changes any of the ethical considerations of being a supervillain, but simply because I recognized the type of person Doctor BetterThan is. We’ve all known autistic people, men in particular, who respond to the pain of ableist social ostracization by retreating into a fragile, narcissistic self-concept – into the idea that because of their intelligence alone, they’re superior to the people who have hurt them.

By foregrounding autism and slotting it into the familiar structure of a supervillain’s grandiosity, Bereznai accomplishes several things. He shows how absurd and unhelpful this kind of superiority complex really is, how instantly familiar it feels even in the absurd, exaggerated setting of a supervillain comedy, how fragile it is and how it’s always on the verge of falling apart – but also how real and visceral and familiar the pain is that lurks underneath it.

In men, this type of complex often comes with a helping of misogyny and a feeling of entitlement to female attention – and that’s a part of Doctor BetterThan’s character, too. I’m not always quite sure what I think of the dynamic between him and his rival supervillain, Mairī Lin. There’s a trope of misogynist man gets redeemed because a cute girl paid attention to him which I’m not super-fond of, and “The Timematician” sometimes veers a little too close to that for my liking. But there’s also an ambiguity about whether that’s what’s really going on, even at the end; and the super-powered back-and-forth between the characters – full of flirting one moment and double-crossing the next, quick-growing crystals, and armies of color-coded, squabbling robots – was enjoyable enough to keep me engaged.

(Admittedly, I’m more willing to have patience with tropes like these from an author who, like Bereznai, is openly queer. And there’s a queer undertone to Doctor BetterThan despite the m/f romance; his most treasured childhood memory, for instance, is an opera aria that he once performed in drag.)

Anyway, this whole book is really goofy and also a surprisingly fun ride. If you have dreamed of grandiose autistic villainy in a brightly colored comic book world, then you should check it out.

The Verdict: YMMV, but I liked it

Today’s Book: “Sanctuary” by Andi C. Buchanan

The Plot: A group of queer neurodivergent people live together in a haunted house. They are distressed and must get to the bottom of what’s going on when something starts to hurt the ghosts who live with them.

Autistic Character(s): Pretty much all of them! Plus the author.

I’ve written about planets of autistic people before, but I don’t think I’ve ever read a book like “Sanctuary,” which presents a situation very much on this current planet – one that could be happening right now, except maybe for the ghosts – where a group of autistic people are doing relatively well in a communal living space they’ve created for themselves. There are a lot of things to like about “Sanctuary,” but my absolute favorite is its depiction of Casswell Park – the large, old, moldering mansion where the main characters live – and what life there is like. The book almost feels like a thought experiment in neurodivergent community, and on that front it roundly succeeds.

Which is not to say that life in Casswell Park is perfect. The place is big and run-down and needs a lot of repairs. The inhabitants are underemployed or intermittently employed, and no one ever quite has enough money. They scrimp and save for small luxuries – like the holiday dinner they’re having in the first scene, or the programmable lights that help soothe the protagonist Morgan’s nerves; but fully repairing the house is a task so large that it might never be completed. The residents are also frequently annoyed by ghost hunters, who see the ghosts of the house as a novelty to investigate and who aren’t very respectful of the residents’ (or the ghosts’!) boundaries. And that’s before they receive the mysterious delivery that starts to harm the ghosts, through some unknown means, and to threaten the living residents’ whole life there.

Buchanan’s characters – as is realistic, for certain kinds of autistic people – are intensely concerned with ethics. They’ve thought long and hard about how to be respectful both to each other and to the ghosts. The latter is refreshing – most depictions of ghosts in fiction don’t really treat them as people, in the sense of having human-like boundaries, needs, and preferences. Some ghosts are better able to interact with the physical world than others. They don’t speak, but the residents of Casswell Park have worked out a way of communicating with them – much as one might communicate with a non-speaking autistic person, offering tools such as letter boards to point to.

Like some authors I’ve reviewed before, Buchanan is careful to explain why their characters think or behave in the ways they do. There’s a real desire to lay out the steps of the logic so that a reader who doesn’t think like Morgan, or like one of their housemates, will be able to understand their motives. This goes for matters as simple as having lights that flash a certain color, or as high-stakes as how the characters respond to a break-in. This isn’t only a narrative technique, but also a character trait for Morgan, who ruminates and thinks about their reasons for doing something throughout any hour of the day. I appreciate how nuanced Buchanan’s explanations are, often illuminating a realistic subtlety of autistic experience, or a difference between two or more different autistic people, that you wouldn’t find in 101 materials:

Saeed and I sit on the bench outside the laundry room, waiting for the load to finish. On a bad day, noise like this is overloading, but today its repetition is comforting. It’s easier, too, to talk when I can’t hear myself.

This level of detail and explanation is also used for the characters’ paranormal experiences. Morgan has heightened perception, while Denny, an older resident, experiences occasional psychokinesis. Rather than being treated as super-powers, these descriptions match perfectly with accounts I’ve heard from people who are interested in the paranormal in real life:

If there’s a name for my ability, I don’t know it. I didn’t even know it was unusual until my teens. Simply put, I can detect lingering sensations attached mostly to places, sometimes to objects. Most of the time, it’s nothing more than that. I can walk into a house and know with utter certainty that something bad has happened there. I can be buoyed by the remnants of a celebration weeks later, one I never even knew happened. Ironically, given what people say about autistic people like me, it’s probably a form of hyper-empathy, but sometimes there’s a bit more to it. Perhaps a dozen times over my life, I’ve caught flashes of someone else’s memory, a brief image lost as suddenly as it’s seen, just slipping from my understanding like a half-remembered dream.

I don’t talk or think about it much. It’s not strong enough to have a significant effect on my life, and outside of this house – where I’m not the only one with an ability not yet explained by science – not that many people would believe me anyway.

There are occasional places where this focus on careful explanation gets in the way of the story. There’s a final fight scene, for instance, where the narrator takes such care to explain how they feel about fighting and what the fight means to them that I found it difficult to focus on what was physically happening. But for the vast majority of the book the explanations are lovely and thoughtful, painting a rich picture of what the characters’ lives are like, what they value, and how they think.

I don’t know what a neurotypical reader would think of it, but to me the life the characters in “Sanctuary” have built together feels peaceful and affirming. In a world where it’s hard for autistic people to get along with others – where there’s often high conflict for us, even within the community – “Sanctuary” shows autistic characters banding together and supporting each other in a way that doesn’t abstract away all those sources of conflict and difference, but instead shows how bridges can be built across them. It feels like a vision of what could be. It’s a balm to my soul. Also, there are ghosts.

Read this if you want a thoughtful, gently paced urban fantasy unlike any other I know of – and a diverse found family of autistic people who are there for each other no matter what.

The Verdict: Recommended-1

Today’s Book: “Love/Hate” by L.C. Mawson

The Plot: An autistic teenager is recruited to a superhero team where everyone’s powers are based on emotion. Her power is Love – but she has a serious crush on another superhero her age, whose power is Hate. Since they are opposites, if they get together, they risk cancelling each other’s powers out. Can they make it work? And can they defend their city from monsters?

Autistic Character(s): Claire, the main character; as well as several minor characters, and the author.

This is just an adorable book. Maybe that is a condescending adjective? But it is the most accurate one for my feelings about what I just read. It’s fluffy and frothy and sweet, in spite of the level of violence and danger that can be expected in a superhero story. Love and Hate are both adorable. Their teammates are adorable. I don’t know what to say.

In terms of autism representation, Claire is a well-drawn character; her autistic traits inform the story through many little details – from her stimming and sensory reactions, to her attitude to schoolwork that doesn’t tie in to her interests, to her small worries about how her words are being interpreted in a conversation, to the way she responds mentally and verbally when overwhelmed. These details are constantly present without ever overwhelming the narrative.

One of the most interesting character details in the story has to do with the relationship between a superhero’s personality and their powers. A hero has to actually feel the appropriate emotion in order for their powers to work, and for some of them, this proves a challenge. Claire is selected for the role of Love through a process that she doesn’t control, and she struggles to believe she is the right person for the job. This might become tiresome quickly if her reason for struggling was her autism, but Mawson takes a different tack. Claire is an orphan, with no memories of her family and no other particularly close relationships, and she doesn’t think of herself as being especially good at giving or receiving love. It takes time for her to get a sense of how suited she really is for the role.

Although Claire’s romantic tension with Hate is a big part of the book, her discovery of her powers doesn’t revolve only around the romance arc. Instead her moments of greatest power come when she is trying to protect people she cares about, including Hate but also many other friends and people on her team. Claire’s capacity for fierce protectiveness, and for empathy in unexpected directions – even towards some of the monsters she’s fighting! – really comes through on the page. It’s a lot of fun to watch an autistic character discover these capacities within herself, and it’s even more fun because autism isn’t explicitly presented as a major obstacle to this process. It’s simply another part of Claire, and another one of many reasons why her way of embracing Love’s role won’t necessarily look the way she expects it to.

Nor is Claire the only one whose way of fitting her role is unexpected. The previous Love on the team, who died shortly before Claire arrived, was an abuse survivor who took a long time to accept that there was anything good or loving about her. Serenity is still grieving the loss of the previous Love, and has to constantly fight to access the calm that usually powers her. Loneliness, most amusingly, is an incredibly hot girl, and Claire struggles to understand how she could ever feel lonely – until Loneliness explains that she is autistic, too.

Mawson also has a fun, breezy way of dealing with the people whose powers involve a more difficult emotion, without demonizing them for having it:

Hate let out a bark of laughter. “I swear, I don’t brood that much. Just enough to keep my power level up.”

“Your power level?”

“Yeah. I am the literal embodiment of Hate, so my power works better when I hate stuff.”

“Like what?”

She shrugged. “When I was younger, I used myself as a target a lot. Then Empathy practically pleaded with me to stop a couple of years ago. Now I just fixate on small annoyances. Currently, I hate the local burger place for not selling mozzarella sticks all of the time.”

Did I mention Hate is adorable? Hate is adorable. She is Korean and has ADHD and paints and wears a leather jacket. I would love to see more autistic-ADHD relationships in fiction and I really did root for her and Claire the whole way through.

Anyway, this book is very non-neurotypical and this book is really fun. If you want some cute, sweet, sapphic YA superheroes in your life, you should check it out.

The Verdict: Recommended-1

For a list of past/future/possible Autistic Book Party books, click here.

Today’s review is a guest post by Richard Ford Burley!

Richard Ford Burley (he/they) is a queer neurodivergent writer and recovering academic. They’re the author of two novels and a handful of stories, most of which incorporate queerness and/or neurodivergence in one way or another. They blog (infrequently) at richardfordburley.com and tweet (incessantly) at schadenford.

Today’s Book: “A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe” by Alex White.

The Plot: A magical F1 driver and a magic-less washed-up soldier-turned-grifter join a rag-tag group of salvagers in a search for the titular “big ship,” while some very dangerous people pretty much constantly try to murder them all.

Autistic Character(s): The author, plus while none of the characters are explicitly autistic, many of them seem to exhibit familiar neurodivergent traits.

The book begins in two places. First, we have Nilah Brio, a brilliant (wealthy, privileged) magical race-car driver who’s carving up the track and on her way to secure the galactic championship when someone with very powerful magic kills one of her competitors—leaving her as a witness and therefore in need of elimination. Second, we have Elizabeth “Boots” Elsworth, washed-up former treasure-hunting reality tv star, former-former washed up soldier from a now-dead planet, being chased by some folks who she sold a fake treasure map to (and one of whom who happens to be her old war-time captain, one Cordell Lamarr). Nilah meets Boots, both end up kidnapped (and later crew) on Cordell’s ship, and they’re all forced into a shared mission by the fact that the people who wanted Nilah dead now want all of them dead. At that point, it’s a race to try to find out the truth behind the people trying to murder them all before their pursuers succeed.

Before I get into it, let’s get this out of the way: this book is a magical space opera. It is a lot of things—a lot of things I like, I hasten to add—but “subtle,” “pensive,” and “meditative” are not words that are going to show up in this review. But then, if you’re looking for a quiet meditation on magic as a disability analogue, maybe a book called “A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe” isn’t the first place you’re going to look for that. It is, as the saying goes, exactly what it says on the tin.

That said, there’s a lot to love about this book. One of my favourite things is its diverse and endearing cast of characters. The author, Alex White, is autistic (which is, truth be told, why I picked the book up in the first place), and while there aren’t any explicitly autistic characters, most, if not all of them had character elements that felt welcoming to an autistic reader. Boots, for example (who I was completely unable to imagine as anyone other than Tig Notaro for some reason), has a condition referred to as “arcana dystocia”: unlike most of the people in the universe, her brain lacks the plumbing necessary to use magic. There are some…let’s say familiar…moments where other characters say they can’t imagine how she functions, and all she can do is respond with tired, dry wit and a shrug, as if to say she always has managed to function, so clearly their imagination isn’t required.

And there are plenty of others: Armin Vandevere, a socially-brusque datamancer, clearly has bouts of almost self-destructive hyperfocus; Orna Sokol has a delightfully-complete vacuum where any sense of guile would normally be found; and even the brilliant and popular Nilah mentally berates herself multiple times for misreading other characters’ emotional cues. There is a sad moment where [a certain character who shall remain nameless for spoiler reasons] is killed to basically put Boots further through the wringer and to up the ante, but when all of your most important characters are either disability analogues or queer, and you need to kill off an important character for narrative reasons, you’re going to end up killing somebody’s favourite.

And that’s another thing White doesn’t shy away from—the sheer number of terrible things that happen to these poor characters leaves the reader with the ongoing feeling that, in this universe, the consequences are very real. Anyone could die at any moment, even a character you love—and you are going to love some of these characters.

Fans of standalone works of fiction may be a little disappointed by what is clearly designed to be the first part of a much larger story, with threads left dangling both small and large. They range from tiny, gnawing questions like “what’s up with the uniforms on the soldiers they found on Alpha?” to broader concerns, like “well that’s an upsetting number of murdery, god-level villains left unaccounted for.” But one reader’s flaw is another’s feature, and fans of multi-book series will undoubtedly want to continue reading in order to find the answers.

Overall: “A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe” is a cinematic, fast-paced, compelling magical space opera with a great cast of characters and a real sense of consequences. If that sounds like your kind of book then it is definitely your kind of book.

The Verdict: Recommended-2

***

Notable side-note: Even though it’s in reference to the racing world, it’s still incredibly brave for an author to name the very first chapter “D.N.F.” Reader, as you can tell, I did in fact finish it.

***

For a list of past/future/possible Autistic Book Party books, click here.

Merc Fenn Wolfmoor, “Mr. Try Again” (Nightmare, March 2018)

[Autistic author] When Merc does straight-up horror, they do NOT fuck around. This story will make your skin crawl. It involves a gruesome monster who eats boys and imprisons girls, a girl who got away from him, how she lives as an adult with her trauma and the things she has been made to do – and how she responds when things come full circle and she returns to confront the monster again. It’s really effectively done, and the imprisoned girls get their revenge in the end. [Recommended-2]

Bogi Takács, “Continuity Imperative” (The Cascadia Subduction Zone, Vol 7. No. 1, 2017)

[Autistic author] A short poem about the attempt of an engineer to fix an injured biological spaceship. Visceral and urgent, easily capturing the engineer’s desperation. [Recommended-2]

Brendan Williams-Childs, “Schwaberow, Ohio” (Meanwhile, Elsewhere, 2017; I read it reprinted on Medium)

Walt, a trans autistic teen in the rural Midwest, deals with dysfunctional, ableist caregivers and with the political spectre of invasive neurological treatments which are becoming increasingly common as “cures” both for autism and for gender dysphoria. This type of story and setting are a hard sell for me but Walt is a kind of autistic protagonist we need to see more of – not only for his transness but for his cultural position (he’s a confused, working-class boy in the country, not any kind of STEM genius) and for his difficulties with expressive speech. The narration is matter-of-fact and shows the atypical patterns of Walt’s thinking and the wrongness of the dismissive ways he’s treated, along with an alertness and thoughtfulness beyond what is apparent to the other characters.

The story is of course anti-cure, but I am slightly uneasy with how the cure theme is handled. Walt’s unwillingness to be cured is based mainly in a knee-jerk horror of the idea of brain implants coupled with strong dehumanization of public figures who do have them. He’s right to be horrified by non-consensual neurological treatment, but the dehumanization angle bothers me, especially when it lumps in other forms of assistive cyborg technologies along with the brain implants. I don’t think that this is a story that would come off well for readers with prosthetic limbs, for instance. [YMMV]

Richard Ford Burley, “A Study in Pink and Gold” (Abyss & Apex, June 2019)[Autistic author] This is the story of a painter and a group of aliens, called “Drifters,” which have mysteriously appeared on Earth and are unaggressive but difficult to communicate with. The painter’s patient, careful observation of them on their own terms leads to a strange, lifelong cross-species friendship. There’s no overt autism in this story, but the wordless and peaceful interactions between human and alien in the story will ring true to many autistic people’s experiences, either with each other or with other kinds of people and creatures; or, for some, it is a kind of interaction we long to have. [Recommended-2]

Yoon Ha Lee, “The Mermaid Astronaut” (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, February 27, 2020)

[Autistic author] A delightfully gentle retelling of The Little Mermaid in which a mermaid grows up longing to explore the stars, and a team of aliens arrives willing to grant her wish. I like the way Esserala’s family supports her in her dreams and the way she isn’t pushed into any artificial conflict between her home culture and the spacefaring culture she joins, nor into any need to change or silence herself for a love interest. The inherent difficulties of space travel, even when everyone involved is kind and helpful, provide enough conflict to carry the story by themselves. [Recommended-2]

Rita Chen, “Strangleknot” (Liminality, Spring 2020)

[Autistic author] An affecting and vivid poem about ongoing trauma, pain, and the way words and memories get stuck in the body. Many autistic readers will be able to relate to the feeling of not being able to let one’s hurts go, no matter how one tries. [Recommended-2]

Today’s Book: “The Deep” by Rivers Solomon

The Plot: The wajinru, a group of mermaid-like creatures in the deep sea, are the descendants of pregnant African women thrown overboard from slave ships. Only one “historian” among them is chosen to remember their traumatic past, while the others blissfully forget – but this history is a burden that can’t be borne alone.

Autistic Character(s): Yetu, the young historian whose point of view carries most of the book; and Oori, a human she befriends when she escapes to the surface.

I’ve been really excited to read this Nebula-nominated novella by Solomon, who previously wrote “An Unkindness of Ghosts.” Like the other book, this one is a meditation on individual and community trauma which centers the perspectives of Black queer and non-neurotypical characters.

Yetu is a wonderful, complex character who has been carrying her community’s memories since she was fourteen. More sensitive than other historians due to her neurotype, she struggles intensely, often getting so lost in her remembrances that she forgets to eat or care for herself – or so distressed by them that she self-harms. The rest of her community cares about her but can’t understand how to help, since they themselves have no concept of what trauma is. Once a year, there’s a religious ceremony where the memories are temporarily given back to the community. During this ceremony, Yetu escapes, fearing that if she takes the memories for herself again, she won’t survive.

I found Yetu’s struggles to be extremely realistic for a traumatized autistic person without much support. (I say this as an autistic person with my own set of secret teenage traumas, though I can’t speak from experience about the race-related aspects of the book.) She struggles not only with the direct effects of carrying traumatic memories, but also with guilt, ambivalence, and worry for her community when she escapes them. Solomon’s narration also contains some of the most intriguing descriptions I’ve ever seen about how fantasy psychic abilities and autistic hypersensitivities might combine:

Most of the time, Yetu kept her senses dulled. as a child, she’d learned to shut out what she could of the world, lest it overwhelm her into fits. But now she had to open herself back up, to make her body a wound again so Amaha’s words would ring against her skin more clearly.

Yetu closed her eyes and honed in on the vibrations of the deep, purposefully resensitizing her scaled skin to the onslaught of the circus that is the sea. It was a matter of reconnecting her brain to her body and lowering the shields she’d put in place in her mind to protect herself. As she focused, the world came in. The water grew colder, the pressure more intense, the salt denser. She could parse each granule. Individual crystals of the flaky white mineral scraped against her.

All of this may make “The Deep” sound like a very grim, depressing book. Despite the subject matter I actually did not have a grim or depressing experience reading. Maybe it’s the ocean setting, or maybe it’s the way the book focuses on the people carrying the memories and on their simple, direct relationships, rather than the details of the atrocities that caused the memories to happen in the first place. I found many parts of “The Deep” very moving, but I also found them more easily emotionally approachable than “An Unkindness of Ghosts.” I was able to devour “The Deep” at an enthusiastic pace and enjoy it fully.

(To be clear: emotionally difficult, dark, wrenching books are necessary things, and marginalized authors should be allowed to write them. I can’t believe this needs to be said, but in the light of recent furores over dark content in queer books and fanfic I feel it does. “An Unkindness of Ghosts” is an excellent book and I was glad I read that, too. I am not making a moral value judgment. I am simply describing how my subjective emotional experience of both books differed.)

Maybe it’s also the way “The Deep” ends with hope and reconciliation, as Yetu and her community work on alternative ways to hold the rememberings and care for each other. I found it especially meaningful that, although Yetu is in many ways the archetypal young protagonist who’s different and burdened, it’s her loved ones in the community who help her to find the eventual solution, and who insist to her that her safety and happiness are worthwhile. These are intergenerational, community traumas, and only the whole community working together can hold them.

Autism isn’t central to this story, but it’s unmistakable and deeply layered into the characters, both for Yetu and for Oori. Yetu is deeply affected by her sensory and emotional sensitivities, which were always present, but which are exacerbated by the memories she is chosen to carry, and which isolate her in deeper and crueller ways than the historians before her. Oori is not a POV character, and her autism is marked more by external traits: blunt speech, unfriendliness, lack of eye contact, and the puzzled reactions of other humans. Delightfully, Oori’s difficulty getting along with other humans is the very thing that draws Yetu to her:

“I just mean that she’s different, you know? Not like us. She’s not so good with, hm, how do you say, human interaction and any trappings of decorum or rules. I suppose that’s why she prefers animals to people. Most animals don’t exchange hellos and ask how the other is. They just exist next to one another.”

Yetu’s ears and skin perked at the sound of that. Oori preferred animals, did she?

“Perfect, then. I’m not human,” said Yetu.

Oori is not only Yetu’s friend and possible love interest, but she’s also the last survivor of her own human culture, and she has a perspective on the importance of memory which both challenges and helps Yetu to hear.

Queer and intersex themes are unmistakably layered in, too. For instance, there’s the odd, awkward, somewhat adorable scene in which Yetu and Oori discuss how sex works for their respective species and whether they’d like to try it with each other. The way this conversation plays out is a way that would only ever work for a pair of queer autistic characters, and that alone makes it fun to read.

There’s a lovely afterword which describes “The Deep”‘s origins: before it was a book by Rivers Solomon it was a song by the rap group clipping. and clipping.’s song is in turn based on the work of other artists. The concept of the wajinru in the sea has been told and retold from multiple perspectives, gaining something each time. In clipping.’s song, there’s a war between the wajinru and the humans because of the terrible way the humans treat the sea. In “The Deep,” this war exists as backstory; it’s another thing for both Yetu’s and Oori’s sides to remember and learn from. I love this kind of intertextuality and I hope the concept continues to inspire even more successive groups of artists.

In short, this is an excellent book, well worthy of its Nebula nomination, and you all should read it.

The Verdict: Highly Recommended

Disclosure: Rivers Solomon and I are acquainted online and have talked to each other sometimes. I read their book by buying a copy from Amazon. All opinions expressed in this review are my own.

For a list of past/future/possible Autistic Book Party books, click here.

Today’s Book: “Tone of Voice” by Kaia Sønderby, a sequel to “Failure to Communicate”

The Plot: The Hands and Voices, a species of symbiotic whale- and squid-like beings, want to join the Starsystems Alliance. The only person they’ll negotiate with is Xandri Corelel, an autistic woman who interprets alien behavior for a living. But Xandri’s enemies are about to disrupt the negotiations in a spectacular way.

Autistic Character(s): Xandri.

Yay! Xandri Corelel is back! You might recall from my “Failure to Communicate” review that she is one of my favorite autistic characters ever, and one of the most relatable characters for me personally. Plus now there are WHALES! You really can’t go wrong with this setup, and Sønderby does not, in fact, go wrong with it.

I really like the Hands and Voices. Partly because SPACE WHALES, SPACE SQUID, it is not difficult to appease me with these topics. But they are also just a really nice, sweet-natured bunch of aliens with some very cool underwater technology. I especially love the way they approach the idea of group identity. Each Voice (whale) is paired with a small group of symbiotic Hands (squid) and their language appears to have no singular pronouns, using words that are translated as “we” whether they’re talking about an individual organism, a Voice with their attendant Hands, a whole pod of Hands and Voices, or even larger groups.

Because the Hands and Voices are so nice and cooperative, and because they already trust Xandri, the actual diplomacy in this book is much simpler than in “Failure to Communicate.” We get much less of Xandri’s efforts to puzzle through difficult social situations, because apart from a deliciously tense standoff near the end, most of this book’s social situations are pretty straightforward. A good chunk of the story is positively idyllic, with Xandri and her co-workers enjoying the pleasant beachside environment and swimming around in the ocean while they figure out how they would meet the Hands and Voices’ needs in space. Until, of course, some anti-alien militia show up…

But just because the diplomacy is simple this time, that doesn’t mean we don’t get good, nuanced Autism Content. Xandri has grown as a person since the first book, but much of that growth has been difficult; the ending of that book had her temporarily exiled after taking the fall for a diplomatic upset. She’s become more aware of the awful things doctors used to say about autistic people – and, without an autistic community around her, she spends a lot of time worrying that these things might be true. Even when her actions on the page are clearly selfless and her emotions in the narration are deeply caring – and when other characters make a point to recognize how much she cares – Xandri still worries that maybe she’s heartless because that’s what she’s read about herself. As usual for Xandri, this is very relatable to me!

Xandri is practicing assertiveness, a skill that she first tried at a pivotal moment in “Failure to Communicate.” Thanks to her long study of human behavior, she’s startlingly good at it, able to stare down scary military officers and come out ahead. But it’s an immensely draining skill for her to use, and it leaves her feeling uncomfortable and guilty.

Captain Chui – Xandri’s longtime boss – encourages her at this. She is startled when Xandri also uses her newfound assertiveness to question her own orders. I appreciate the nuance in how this is handled – especially the way Captain Chui does listen to Xandri’s concerns, even if she doesn’t ultimately agree. A worse person might easily have shut her down and told her assertiveness wasn’t appropriate here, but Captain Chui recognizes that assertiveness isn’t real unless a person can use it when they choose to, even against you.

Xandri draws insight from her own autistic experience in softer moments as well:

“Sometimes I wonder,” I said, as we started down the dock.

“Hmm?”

“If we’re doing the right thing, I mean. Bringing them into the Alliance. They seem so innocent…”

That caught her attention. She swiveled to look at me, her brows furrowed. “Because they see the world in a different way than you do? Because they interact with it differently? Because they don’t have the exact same-“

“Whoa!” I held up my hands in surrender. “Easy, fireball. Didn’t mean it as an insult, I swear. It’s just… well, look at ’em.”

“I know.” Xandri sighed and ran her fingers through her hair, mussing her ponytail. “It’s not like the thought never crossed my mind, but… it’s wrong to judge them as too innocent, simply because their expression appears innocent to us. They’re a sapient species, shown to be shrewd in negotiations, as seen by their nebula pearl trade. They’re smart, technological, and they know to be cautious about other sapients; in fact, they learned that lesson quicker than most. This is their choice to make and-and it would be wrong to try to take their choices from them.”

She stared straight ahead as she spoke and, not for the first time, I got the feeling her words weren’t just about the Hands and Voices. She spoke like that sometimes, like she was seeing a problem from the inside, like she’d experienced it herself.

She also gets to do one of my new favorite tropes, namely, overly literal autistic banter in an action scene:

“Maybe we should test your theory,” Santino said, raising the gun and pointing it at me.

“Hypothesis.”

“What?”

“I’m enough of a scientist to confess that I don’t have enough evidence to call it a theory just yet.”

I mentioned in my review of “Failure to Communicate” that there was some setup I hoped would lead to a queer romance. Surprise, it does! Kinda. In the first book, Xandri was attracted to Diver and Kiri, two of her closest friends on the Carpathia. The attraction seemed mutual but nothing quite happened. In this book, there’s a clear romantic slow burn between Xandri and Diver, and they do get into a relationship, though it’s still new and tentative when the book ends. Xandri has past trauma that makes it difficult for her to navigate a relationship’s early stages. Sønderby handles this with a light touch, showing Xandri’s hesitance and discomfort and Diver’s efforts to make space for her, but without getting bogged down in trauma details.

Xandri is still attracted to Kiri as well. The book goes out of its way to remind us that Kiri is polyamorous, and even has a scene of the three of them tiredly cuddling, but Xandri is already overwhelmed by dealing with romantic feelings for one person, let alone two, so the poly aspect of the story doesn’t get very developed here.

In other “Xandri is the most relatable character” news, some of her exchanges with Diver feel like they could have been taken word for word from me and my nesting partner:

“Don’t be acting like this is your fault, fireball.”

I lifted my head in surprise.

“Four and a half years,” Diver said, tapping the tip of my nose with a finger. “Long time to know a person, even one who hides as much of herself as you do. But you can’t hide from me, Xan. You try, but I see you. Right now I see a woman who’s too exhausted to be placing blame anywhere.”

“I can’t help it,” I whispered.

“I know. And you know I’m right.”

“Also, insufferable.”

Overall, “Tone of Voice” didn’t grab me in the feels as hard as “Failure to Communicate” but it’s still a lovely book that I really enjoyed. Xandri Corelel is one of my favorite autistic characters out of anything ever, and I sincerely hope to see many more books of her adventures.

The Verdict: Recommended

Disclosure: I have briefly interacted with Kaia Sønderby on Twitter. I read her book by buying an e-copy on Amazon. All opinions expressed here are my own.

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Today’s Book: “The Trans Space Octopus Congregation,” a short story collection by Bogi Takács.

Autistic Character(s): The author, among others!

This is a generally excellent collection. As is often the case with a single-author collection from an author I know, many of the stories were not new to me, and they won’t be new to long-time Autistic Book Party readers either (see the Reviews Index). Much of the joy of such a collection is in seeing the stories arranged next to each other, seeing more strongly how themes recur and patterns emerge.

“The Trans Space Octopus Congregation” ranges from historical fantasy to modern-day political allegories to far-future space opera, but there is a remarkable unity to the themes throughout. The writing is accessible and clear, but there is a very strong Bogi Takács aesthetic, which is hard to describe until you’ve seen it. It’s to do with powerful magic-users at risk from those who want to abuse them as weapons; matter-of-fact acceptance of states which in another author’s hands would be body horror; sensory seeking; Jewish mysticism; and non-sexual BDSM. Eir worlds are diverse and complex, with multiple cultures mingling and clashing, even within very short works. When political and other large organizations enter the stories, it’s with a wry awareness of those organizations’ flaws, ranging from the well-meaning but inefficient to the horrific; but it’s never without a sense of hope, if only in the sense of ordinary people making the effort to help each other. Those octopi from the title also appear here and there (though, sadly, not in the exact manner the title implies; there is no literal religious congregation of transgender space octopi).

The word “autism” is never used, but non-neurotypical characters abound in this book. The Ereni – citizens of a magical planet of autistic people – appear in several stories, though their universe is large, and they are mainly seen in minor roles here, through the eyes of other sorts of people. In works set elsewhere, characters stim, perseverate, have motor coordination issues, and generally behave in such a way that it’s easy to read autism in if you want to. Queer and trans characters also abound, as the title implies, often in the form of casual but clearly spelled-out nonbinary rep.

I’m not sure I have much else to say about Bogi’s writing that I haven’t already said in prior reviews, but “The Trans Space Octopus Congregation” showcases the author at eir best. If you’re a fan of the writing of eirs that you’ve seen online, you should definitely check this one out.

The Verdict: Recommended

Disclosure: Bogi Takács is someone I consider a personal friend. I received a free electronic review copy of this book.

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Today’s Book: “Conservation of Shadows,” a short story collection by Yoon Ha Lee

People who have read my reviews of Ninefox Gambit, Raven Strategem, and Revenant Gun will not be surprised that I am a big fan of Yoon Ha Lee’s writing, or that this fandom extends to his short stories as well.

“Conservation of Shadows” is an excellent collection which shows off Lee’s strengths as a writer while also displaying surprising breadth.

Lee is most famous for war-torn space operas full of wildly imaginative, magic-like technology, and these types of stories are certainly on display throughout the collection. Folded, origami-like papers come to life as battle drones (Ghostweight); a group of exiles compose music in honor of ships that have flown into a black hole (Swanwatch); a gun exists that will leave the person shot unharmed but erase all their ancestors from existence (Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain); a book contains the souls of the dead and can be opened to draw on those souls’ abilities (The Book of Locked Doors).

But Lee also strays skillfully out of that genre, from stories of pure high fantasy in which necromancers or demons battle, to the urban sci-fi fantasy of the story “Blue Ink,” in which an ordinary modern-day child is summoned to the end of the world.

My personal favorite stories include “Iseul’s Lexicon,” a longer tale involving strange, cruel, fey-like aliens, in which linguistics are applied defensively to a magical language; and the title story, closing out the collection, in which the myth of the Descent of Inanna is repeated again and again by artificial, far-future entities.

Fans of Shuos Jedao (and, let’s face it, who isn’t a fan of Jedao?) will also enjoy “The Battle of Candle Arc,” his first published appearance, in which we watch him win a space battle using clever tactics against ridiculous odds, and get a hint of the motivation that drives him all through the Machineries of Empire trilogy.

There is a hint of non-neurotypicality in some stories, including “The Shadow Postulates,” in which the protagonist briefly mentions wanting to stim by unraveling the tassels of a carpet, but refrains so as not to disturb her roommate.

But for the most part, non-neurotypicality isn’t highlighted in this collection. It’s simply a very good group of stories by a very good autistic author, and that should be reason enough to go check it out.

The Verdict: Recommended-2

Disclosure: I have interacted very occasionally with Yoon Ha Lee online.

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These past two months marked the release of Uncanny Magazine’s Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction! special issue, and many autistic authors appeared in this issue at the top of their game – both existing favorite authors of mine and at least one voice which is new to me.

Rita Chen, “Ctenophore Soul”

[Autistic author] A poem about the central role of damage and injury in… well, all of life, and of choosing to live with the damage instead of trying to erase it. I love the sea imagery in this – I am a sucker for anything involving weird sea creatures and a ctenophore is a real thing. [Recommended-2]

Rose Lemberg, “core/debris/core”

[Autistic author] This is a poem about skin disease, but also about aesthetics and shame, about the desire to write a future in which everything is clean and perfect, even though this denies and erases the reality of human bodies – particularly disabled human bodies, but also all of them. Angry and compelling. [Recommended-2]

A. Merc Rustad, “The Frequency of Compassion”

[Autistic author] Ok so this story just happens to push, like, SEVENTEEN of my personal story buttons at once and I love it. “The Frequency of Compassion” is a first contact story in which Kaityn, a hyperempathic autistic astronaut, encounters a wounded member of an alien hive mind. I love the hive mind – a friendly entity/ies in which individuals remain distinct and valued parts of the whole – so much. I love Kaityn’s helpful AI friend Horatio. I love the way everyone respects each other’s pronouns and needs, how the alien makes mistakes with Kaityn’s mental boundaries and then apologizes and fixes them, how both the AI and the aliens respect and make adjustments for Kaityn’s needs, including the need for a few days of downtime after a stressful experience and for forms of sensory stimulation that aren’t overloading. I love how Kaityn is kind-hearted and interested in art, despite their need to withdraw from other people. I love how they are hyperempathic on a sensory level, but are also shown as deeply caring even when they don’t sense emotions directly – respecting the imagined boundaries of the moon they land on, for instance, with a characteristically (but un-stereotypically) autistic sense of animism. I just. I love almost everything about this. GO READ IT. [Recommended-1]

Bogi Takács, “Spatiotemporal Discontinuity”

[Autistic author] This poem shares some traits in common with Toward the Luminous Towers and other work of Bogi’s – depicting, not a real-life disability, but the experiences of a person in some other world who is modified for some sort of incredible journey through physical or conceptual space, and who has difficulty with ordinary embodied existence afterwards. Bogi’s writing about this type of techno-magic and its complex personal and social effects is always fascinating, and this one is no exception. [Recommended-2]

Finally, while I do not review essays, there are interesting essays in this issue by Bogi, A.C. Buchanan – two by A.C. Buchanan, in fact – Ira Gladkova, and me.

Today’s Book: “Changeling” by Delia Sherman

The Plot: Neef, a mortal changeling (i.e. a mortal who was swapped with a fairy and brought to the fairy realms as a child) accidentally breaks a geas. To be allowed to return to her home in a fairy version of Central Park, she must undergo a dangerous quest.

Autistic Character(s): Neef’s fairy changeling counterpart (i.e. the fairy who was swapped with Neef and brought up by mortals). Both Neef and Changeling share a legal, human name, but since true names are dangerous in the fairy world, Neef’s counterpart is referred to mostly as “Changeling”.

Changeling folklore is my problematic fave. The idea of fairies switching their babies with human babies – resulting in human parents having to take care of a disabled, or otherwise defective, fairy child – goes back deep in Western culture. There’s something compelling to many disabled people about the idea that we are not broken or defective humans, however we might appear – we are simply magical creatures who don’t fit into a human’s world. But of course, there’s also something compelling to many ableist parents about the idea that they were owed a normal child, and someone stole it – and that their real, disabled child isn’t quite theirs.

While we no longer believe in fairies, it’s not difficult to see echoes of the changeling myth in modern parents who complain of regressive autism “stealing” their child, or who speak with victory about “getting their child back” when various issues improve. Nor is it difficult to trace a lineage from the parents of changeling folklore, who often threatened the disabled child with harm in hopes of scaring it away and getting the original one back, to various dangerous quack treatments for autism today.

Some disabled people, including myself at times, find something empowering in the idea of being magical creatures. Others find it literally dehumanizing, and will fight tooth and nail to be recognized as always and only and entirely human. (Elsa Sjunneson-Henry’s essay on “The Shape of Water” gives an example of this latter perspective.)

Anyway, Delia Sherman’s “Changeling” is a middle-grade fantasy adventure that doesn’t get even a little bit into any of this complexity, which might explain some of my issues with it.

Or maybe that’s not fair. I don’t expect middle-grade books to be super intellectually complex, or to grapple with all the emotional issues that concern me as an adult. I may be barking up the wrong reviewing tree.

Changeling’s role in the story is a very familiar one for autistic sidekicks. Neef discovers her early in the quest, in a dangerous situation, and impulsively promises to keep her safe even though Changeling annoys her. From that point on, Changeling tags along on the rest of the quest: mostly a burden, mostly annoying to Neef, occasionally very useful, always overtly displaying one stereotypical autistic trait or another, and mostly too busy melting down (or shutting down, or engaging in desparate stimming as she tries to cope with all these new experiences) to give her perspective on anything in particular.

Neef is a cutely bratty tween, and she has no training in how to deal with autistic people, so I don’t exactly expect her to be good at dealing with Changeling, but her consistently annoyed cluelessness didn’t exactly make me enjoy the book.

Changeling stumped up behind me, her face stony. “You took me by surprise,” she said. “I do not like surprises.”

I was in no mood to deal with fairy nerves. “Well, you’re just going to have to get used to them.”

“Why?”

“We’re on a quest, that’s why. There’s going to be surprises, and things jumping out of bushes, and all kinds of things you don’t like. If you melt down every time that happens, we’re dead. And I mean that literally.”

Her mouth set in a grim line. “I am afraid. I want to go home.”

“Me, too. Remember what I told you back at the Museum? We have to finish the quest first.”

Changeling hummed. I tapped my foot. “Very well,” she said at last. “I will do my best to expect the unexpected, and I will try not to have a meltdown. It is only fair to warn you that I am not always in control of them.”

She sounded so like the Pooka promising to try and behave that my irritation vanished. “And I’ll do my best to explain things when I can.”

We do get one interesting bit of world-building about changelings early on. Not only is Changeling an autistic child, as the folklore would suggest, but Neef recognizes many of her autistic traits as fairy traits. She counts items to soothe herself, because many fairies also have a counting compulsion; she cannot stand to be touched, because neither can many fairies; her meltdowns are “fairy fits,” and at least one actual fairy has one of those during the story as well.

Neef does make accommodations for a few of these traits, such as holding on to Changeling by her clothes, when hanging on to each other is necessary, instead of holding her hand. But if Changeling’s traits are fairy traits, and Neef has spent her entire life learning how to get along among fairies, then something doesn’t quite add up. Her knowledge of mythological fairies is extensive and she has been deliberately taught and tested on it often – but her knowledge of how to deal with Changeling is really quite small.

I find myself wishing that the book was told from both perspectives and not just Neef’s, because I really want to know what Changeling thinks of many of the developments in the book. She has just discovered that fairies are real and that she, technically, is one. How does she feel about that? Does she want to learn more about fairies in order to better understand herself, or to cling to her adoptive family? How does she feel about Neef, who is essentially a non-autistic version of herself, and who doesn’t seem to like her much? In the latter half of the story, she spends a lot of time looking into a magic handheld mirror that gives her information; what is she watching and learning in there, apart from the quest-relevant things that Neef asks for? Changeling doesn’t say anything about any of these things, and Neef is profoundly uncurious about them.

Changeling also, as I mentioned, does very useful and clever things for Neef a few times, in between shutting/melting down. It’s very unclear whether, and in what way, this changes Neef’s opinion about her; Neef is self-centered like many tweens, and is more concerned with charging ahead to the next part of the quest.

At the end of the book, there are signs that Neef and Changeling have begun to like each other a bit more. Changeling asks Neef to come visit her in the future, and Neef seems moved by the request. But like many friendships and romances in adventure stories, this felt a bit tacked on. I had very little sense of when in the book this sense of friendship had emerged or why.

Overall, I really did enjoy this book more than I’m letting on. Sherman’s fairy New York is a lively and charming place that I enjoyed exploring with Neef. But from a representation standpoint, “Changeling” was a lot like reading a middle-grade version of “Silence” or “Hawk.” Another story where an NT protagonist drags around an autistic character, who is sometimes plot-useful but mostly an annoying burden. I am tired of reading this story. Given the rich emotional significance of changeling folklore is to many autistic people, Changeling’s arc feels like a missed opportunity.

The Verdict: Not Recommended

Disclosure: I have never interacted with Delia Sherman.

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(First published Feb 18, 2014)

Today’s Book: “Dragon” by Steven Brust.

The Plot: Vlad Taltos, an assassin / witch / general-purpose organized criminal, gets drawn unwillingly into a war between Dragonlords following the theft of a mysterious weapon.

(FYI, this is the eighth book in a series that will eventually have 17.)

Autistic Character(s): Daymar, a Hawklord and powerful psychic.

Daymar isn’t described as having any particular condition, but I am not the only reader to interpret him as being on the spectrum. He is responsible, efficient, and very good at his job, but is at the same time confused by many social expectations and reactions that the other characters take for granted.

While this in itself is a familiar autistic archetype, the details of how Brust writes Daymar go pleasantly against stereotype. Instead of showing his confusion through rude and arrogant behaviour, as many fictional Aspies do, Daymar’s response when he doesn’t understand something is to ask polite questions. I find this rather adorable. Vlad finds it annoying; but Vlad is something of an ornery antihero anyway and I do not think that his opinions reflect those of the author.

Unfortunately, as Rose Lemberg warned me, Daymar doesn’t get much screen time. I happen to quite enjoy Vlad and the Dragaera series in general, though I have been reading the books piecemeal and shamefully out of order. But if you aren’t already a fan, it’s probably not worth reading the whole book just for Daymar; plus, there are aspects of the story which won’t make as much sense to readers who are unused to this storyworld.

Daymar may or may not have more to do in “Hawk”, another installment of the series, which may or may not come out this year.

The Verdict: Marginal

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