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267th out of 1,968 books
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The Speed of Dark
In the near future, disease will be a condition of the past. Most genetic defects will be removed at birth; the remaining during infancy. Unfortunately, there will be a generation left behind. For members of that missed generation, small advances will be made. Through various programs, they will be taught to get along in the world despite their differences. They will be ma...more
Mass Market Paperback, 369 pages
Published
June 28th 2005
by Del Rey
(first published 2002)
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I may need to review my top-ten shelf and see what can be bumped. "The Speed of Dark" book moved me like few books ever have. I cried, I laughed, I didn't want it to end. Elizabeth Moon does an absolutely amazing job of making a reader walk many miles in someone else's shoes. In this case, the reader becomes Lou Arrendale, an autistic man in an era when autism can be cured in childhood. Unfortunately, he was born too soon for the treatment. A new treatment is developed for adult ...more
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I was intrigued because this book was mentioned several times at WisCon’06 as an example of disability in science fiction and austism in general. Congoers had varying opinions—some touted it as the Best Writing About Autism Ever, while others said it was unrealistic. I have little experience with autism (besides being in fandom and reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time), so I can’t comment on how realistically Moon recreates an autistic experience. As a book, it’s quite good,...more
I was very impressed by The Speed of Dark. Lou Arrendale is autistic and employed by a large company that requires his special skill of recognizing patterns that can't be seen by other people or computers. Despite the fact that he is gainfully employed and a brilliant fencer, autistics have a different way of interacting socially and perceiving the world.
The author has written about autism with a lot of knowledge and sensitivity.
The author has written about autism with a lot of knowledge and sensitivity.
This book is outstanding. Moon's believable hero is a genius trapped in an autistic shell. The characterization was vivid and touching, I grew to love the man and feel very strongly about the things he dealt with. I even found myself getting angry with the bad things people were doing thinking, "they can't do that!" even though the book was just fiction. It was outrageous and yet believable. I loved how the author didn't relegate the autistic man to being stupid or unable to comprehend...more
It’s going to be a challenge to write a review without using a spoiler box but I will do it, as I have written all my other reviews without spoilers.
This is kind of a cross between The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time and Flowers for Algernon, both books I also really liked.
The writer is the mother of a son (adolescent at the time of this book’s publication) that has autism. The main character in this book has autism, but it takes place in the future where h...more
This is kind of a cross between The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time and Flowers for Algernon, both books I also really liked.
The writer is the mother of a son (adolescent at the time of this book’s publication) that has autism. The main character in this book has autism, but it takes place in the future where h...more
Keely
rated it
This book is about as 'sci fi' as an episode of CSI. Moon basically takes 'Flowers for Algernon' and hacks off the ending. The writing was alright, and there was some interesting characterization, but I suspect it only got the Nebula and Clarke because award committees love nothing as much as political correctness. This book is the equivalent of an actor making an Oscar bid by playing a mentally-challenged character.
I know Moon is known as a sci fi author, but it feels like she just ...more
I know Moon is known as a sci fi author, but it feels like she just ...more
This book loosely resembles The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time in that they both have narrators with autism, but there they diverge. The narrator of The Speed of Dark is Lou Arrendale, a man living in the near future when major developments have been made in treating individuals with autism. His work group consists entirely of people with autism. The group splinters when a new manager at the company learns of an experimental treatment that could cure autism, and demands that al...more
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I wouldn’t call this story science fiction even though it is set a little bit in the future. The timeframe is just far enough ahead to a time when scientiests have discovered how to correct the brain damage that causes autism. In The Speed of Dark, the protagonist was too old for the treatment by the time the breakthrough was made, but he was able to take advantage of some advanced treatment and training that helped him learn how to function in a more normal way than the autistic people of today...more
The Speed of Dark is an eloquently written examination of the internal life of an autistic man, as he considers whether or not to try an experimental cure for his condition. It is told from the first person point of view of Lou Arrendale, and his voice is so strong and unique that I found myself becoming personally involved in his dilemma. I didn't want to loose his voice, or any of his uniqueness. Through the window of Lou's experience, the novel examines the consequences of the medicalizatio...more
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"Sometimes I wonder how normal normal people are, and I wonder that the most in the grocery store."
Started the book thinking it was simply a novel about a man with autism. After I few incidents I had to shift my thinking to that of it being an almost science fiction novel. Then I could read it more easily, and the black and whiteness of the characters made more sense to me. A fiction based on imagined, or hoped for, future science (which is actually not so very future anym...more
Started the book thinking it was simply a novel about a man with autism. After I few incidents I had to shift my thinking to that of it being an almost science fiction novel. Then I could read it more easily, and the black and whiteness of the characters made more sense to me. A fiction based on imagined, or hoped for, future science (which is actually not so very future anym...more
There is a bird called the Ivory Billed Woodpecker. By the beginning of the last century, the bird had been nearly hunted to extinction. But a few years back, it's distinctive call just may have been heard in the backwoods of Arkansas. It was said to be so beautiful that when people saw it, they said, “Lord God! What a bird!” The name stuck. And now, I find myself saying, "Lord God! What a book!"
The Speed of Dark takes place in the not so distant future. The world is no...more
The Speed of Dark takes place in the not so distant future. The world is no...more
Lisa
rated it
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review of another edition
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review of another edition
Recommends it for:
Everyone. Think about how you deal with people who are different from you.
Recommended to Lisa by:
Jennifer
Shelves:
2008
What a special and beautifully written book. It presents autism from the autistic person's point of view, and he is someone you can really relate to and begin to understand. Through Lou, readers also see ourselves and our social group interactions--"normals"--from an outside perspective, which has caused me to think about some things in my life differently.
The book has a great plot, all while asking profound questions. It challenges readers to think about what makes them w...more
The book has a great plot, all while asking profound questions. It challenges readers to think about what makes them w...more
Really interesting premise -- a future world where autism has been genetically removed from the population. Except our protagonist, Lou, is old enough to have missed the genetic modifications. He and some fellow autists work for a drug company, doing unspecified top-secret pattern recognition. The story is told from his point of view, which reminds me of Flowers for Algernon not only in its tone but also because an experimental treatment for autism becomes available and Lou has to decide whet...more
Really, really liked this book. Told (for the most part) from the perspective of a high functioning autistic adult, it was a look into the different thought process of someone who "normals" think of as disabled. The thing I loved was the Lou is so normal! The things that he does that normal people would see as affected (seeing patterns in colors of the cars in the parking lot, counting things, focusing on music) don't seem all that odd when you know the thoughts and the decisions that ...more
A group of autistic staff are "elite" pattern-recognition analysts at a major corporation, sometime in the future. Lou, the protagonist, is a high-functioning autistic & the reader is forced to consider the line between "normal" and "autistic" views of the world. Eventually Lou must choose whether to have experimental surgery that will cure his autism & change his life forever -- or continue on his present course. I felt this book described how autistic people e...more
Dlora Dalton recommended this book and it was a winner. The book takes place in a future time when medical advances have cured most mental problems either befor birth or shortly after. This book is the story of a high-functioning autistic who was born before the cures were available and thus part of the last generation of autistic people.
It is a real opportunity to go inside of an autistic person's mind and life to better understand what life is like for them and to see how their mi...more
It is a real opportunity to go inside of an autistic person's mind and life to better understand what life is like for them and to see how their mi...more
I loved everything about this book except for the last chapter or two. I hated, hated, hated the ending, not because it was poorly written but because it seemed to betray the spirit of the novel.
Otherwise, I found this an enjoyable read that was hard to put down. Moon does a great job in assuming the voice and perspective of someone with unusually high functioning autism (due to futuristic advances in treatment). I do wish she'd done a better job of bringing in tidbits about the futu...more
Otherwise, I found this an enjoyable read that was hard to put down. Moon does a great job in assuming the voice and perspective of someone with unusually high functioning autism (due to futuristic advances in treatment). I do wish she'd done a better job of bringing in tidbits about the futu...more
I liked this a lot, maybe for the same reason that other people didn't so much. This isn't a book about autism so much as book about one particular autistic character. Whatever larger themes it addresses they are always addressed from within the voice and the choices of this particular man. I admire the authorial discipline required to make that choice and to stick with it and I think it pays off. I don't feel like I was subjected to a polemic or educated about a disease, I feel like I met a ...more
Lou Arrendale, an autistic man living in the future, is pressured by his boss to reverse his autism with a new treatment. His symptoms already somewhat controlled by medication, he lives independently and holds a full-time job where his different way of looking at things has, until now, been appreciated. Lou struggles to decide what to do. Would becoming “normal” outweigh the risk of losing what makes him unique? Is autism a disease or just an alternate way of life? A provocative and touchi...more
This book was a nice surprise. This is a book narrated form the perspective of an autistic character. The deft device of learning everything about the story and characters via an autistic narrator was daring enough, but to be able to make you care deeply about the main character and others in the story makes the feat more amazing. After looking at the other titles from the same author, it seems this was a departure in the type of sci-fi she usually writes. I often wonder what caused her to think...more
Thilardiel
added it
Moon's book about an adult who lives with Autism, Lou Arrandale, qualifies as science fiction because it's set in a future where operations can be performed on Autistic children in order to reverse many of the symptoms (such as social isolation, repetitive or redundant behaviors, sensitivity to sensory input etc.) but Speed of Dark is so much more than a science fiction novel. Lou and his colleagues are all Autistic (varying in types of symptoms and severity) and work together for a company usin...more
Inevitable this is going to be compared with Flowers for Algernon. Equally inevitable it will suffer in that comparison. Judged by humbler standards though it does very well. [return][return]Lou is a high functioning autisic man who thanks to support and special education holds down a job and even has a social life. Autism is Rapidly disapearin though prebirth intervention means autistic babies are cured before birth.[return][return]Now his company is pressuribg him to try an experimental tre...more
Dark is faster then light because dark got there first and departs at least as fast as light arrives. Ignorance is similar; it was there before learning arrived but it can resist learning and sometimes totally prevent it. Death is a singularity, as is a black hole where light gets trapped within a gravity well, but a black hole is full of light trying to escape as well as of information that doesn't get destroyed.
The book explores the thoughts of an autistic man, Lou Arrendale. But L...more
The book explores the thoughts of an autistic man, Lou Arrendale. But L...more
I love it when I unexpectedly find a treasure like this. I picked this one up because it is a Hugo award winner (best sci-fi of the year). This story centers around Lou, an autistic man who lives in a world where most autism has been eliminated. After his birth, a treatment was discovered for autism, therefore most people younger than 35 have been cured of the disease. Although Lou lives, works and functions in the community, there is still a lot of discrimination against him by those who feel h...more
I'd heard that The Speed of Dark, by Elizabeth Moon, was a rewrite of Flowers of Algernon by Daniel Keyes, only with an autistic man rather than a mentally handicapped one. In one respect this is true. At the beginning of the novel the protagonist of The Speed of Dark is pressured by his company to be a subject testing a drug ostensibly designed to get rid of autism. But the novel itself is about so much more, to the point that the fear of having to participate in this medical procedure almost t...more
I read this book very quickly during a weekend away and I felt drawn into the story very early on. The story is set in the near future, a time when neurological interventions are available so that people who are born with neurological deficits, or even criminals with a tendency to violence, can have a microchip inserted into the brain to change the behaviours that are seen as a disability or unsocial.
The main character in the book is Lou Arrendale, an intelligent man who happens to be ...more
The main character in the book is Lou Arrendale, an intelligent man who happens to be ...more
Leah
rated it
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it,
click here.
Speed of Dark is the story of Lou Arrendale, an autistic man working for a pharmaceutical company. Lou is part of a division staffed by autistic people, who were employed because they are also remarkably skilled in spotting patterns (Lou’s division works with data, but exactly what they do is neither explored much nor, for that matter, particularly relevant to the novel). Pattern is perhaps the greatest source of pleasure in Lou’s life, as his two main interests are also pattern-based: classical...more
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Elizabeth Moon was born March 7, 1945, and grew up in McAllen, Texas, graduating from McAllen High School in 1963. She has a B.A. in History from Rice University (1968) and another in Biology from the University of Texas at Austin (1975) with graduate work in Biology at the University of Texas, San Antonio.
She served in the USMC from 1968 to 1971, first at MCB Quantico and then at HQMC...more
More about Elizabeth Moon...
She served in the USMC from 1968 to 1971, first at MCB Quantico and then at HQMC...more
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“Sometimes I wonder how normal normal people are, and I wonder that most in the grocery store.”
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11 people liked it
“I do not think God makes bad things happen just so that people can grow spiritually. Bad parents do that, my mother said. Bad parents make things hard and painful for their children and then say it was to help them grow. Growing and living are hard enough already; children do not need things to be harder. I think this is true even for normal children. I have watched little children learning to walk; they all struggle and fall down many times. Their faces show that it is not easy. It would be stupid to tie bricks on them to make it harder. If that is true for learning to walk, then I think it is true for other growing and learning as well.
God is suppose to be the good parent, the Father. So I think God would not make things harder than they are. I do not think I am autistic because God thought my parents needed a challenge or I needed a challenge. I think it is like if I were a baby and a rock fell on me and broke my leg. Whatever caused it was an accident. God did not prevent the accident, but He did not cause it, either.... I think my autism is an accident, but what I do with it is me.”
—
10 people liked it
More quotes…
God is suppose to be the good parent, the Father. So I think God would not make things harder than they are. I do not think I am autistic because God thought my parents needed a challenge or I needed a challenge. I think it is like if I were a baby and a rock fell on me and broke my leg. Whatever caused it was an accident. God did not prevent the accident, but He did not cause it, either.... I think my autism is an accident, but what I do with it is me.”
