Dora M. Raymaker's Blog, page 4

Science in the Fiction: Quantum Computers, Encryption, and Synaesthetic Code Landscapes

At the height of my hacker years, I attended a Damien Conway talk on his Perl module quantum-superpositions. He described how quantum computers work, and exactly what the capacity to perform virtually infinite simultaneous calculations at once could mean for encryption. Nutshell: the best encryption we’ve got = LOL

Around this time, I was talking with a bunch of fellow hackers, and we were bitching about how we hate management interrupting us while coding.

“Yeah, the worst is when I have all...

Backstory: Operators and Civil Rights

When I first started building the world of Hoshi and the Red City Circuit around 2000, I was mostly interested in why our world shits on its artists, scientists, and creatives. Autism and computer science were behind the core concept of the Operators, but autism was less relevant to the civil rights themes I wanted to explore. I wasn’t yet thinking in disability rights terms.

I was radicalized (woke) in the gay rights movement (LGBTQ+) of the 1980’s. I drew chalk bodies on the steps of city h...

Science in the Fiction: Autism, Neurodivergence, and Idioglossias

No, my characters are not explicitly Autistic. Yes, they are implicitly based on how some of us (myself included) experience autism, the intense world theory, and findings related to the associative nature of autistic intelligence (yes, I know “intelligence” is a troubling concept, but I’m not getting into it here). I invented K-syndrome, to be transparent, because I didn’t want to get into discussions about what autism is or isn’t, or how what I’ve written is not like so-and-so’s experience...

Disability Literature Consortium Reading 3/28

I’ll be reading from Hoshi and the Red City Circuit at AWP with the Disability Literature Consortium Reading on Thursday March 28th 6pm – 9pm.

Authors will be: Susanne Antonetta, Kay Ulanday Barrett, Jennifer Bartlett, Jeannine Hall Hailey, Cade Leebron, Raymond Luczak, Dora Raymaker.  Read poems from all at wordgathering!

ASL-Interpreted!

Backstory: Invisible Aliens in the EM

The élan vitals–the invisible aliens that inhabit the slow waves of the electromagnetic spectrum and some part of physics we’ve yet to understand–were my invention to play with the notion of: what if ideas were sentient and we could talk to them?

They were then sourced from a jumble of ideas, both scientific and fantastic, plus hands-on play with circuit boards and an Arduino, to work out practical things like, “how could something with fine-tuned control of EM but no corporeality talk out lo...

Trust & what it takes to get there

Someone recently asked me what it would take for me to feel good about Autism Speaks, a large, wealthy organization that has done repeated and significant damage to autistic people and has claimed a desire to change. My first reaction was, not my fucking weight to carry. They have to figure it out. I’ve already had enough burden from them, between fighting their stigmatizing media and hate messages directly, and dealing with the discrimination and misinformation aftermath indirectly. It’s not...

Science in the Fiction: Nonlinear Dynamics and Memes

My doctorate is in systems science. I study general ways to make sense of things that are too complex for the usual analytical approach of “let’s take it apart and see what makes it tick.” And by “complex” I mean non-linear. And by “nonlinear” I mean many things affect each other simultaneously, so instead of getting a behavior that makes a straight line–like if you made a graph of how much you turn the faucet on vs. how much water comes out–you get behavior that makes curves–like the progres...

Review of Hoshi by Wordgathering

I learned of a lovely review of my novel yesterday. This is my favorite part. This is exactly the sort of conversation I think we need to be having about disability in literature, and what I hope to trouble for mainstream readers:

“By telling the story from an autist’s point of view, Raymaker is able to invert the usual situation in which the main stream point of view is in the driver’s seat. Merely by identifying herself – the story teller – as the Operator, and those who do not share a simi...

Authentic Inclusion in Autism Research

My essay on “Authentic Inclusion in Autism Research” is up on the Organization for Autism Research’s (OAR) newsletter. Many thanks to OAR for inviting me to write about some my favorite things.

Authentic Inclusion in Autism Research

A Walk through Red City

Red City, in my novel Hoshi and the Red City Circuit (among other tales), takes its diversity and streetwise from New York, its green-space-urban-planning from left-coast Portland, and its waterfront docks from “the Other Portland.” Five-hundred-ish years from now (assuming we make it that long), I figure we’ve learned a few things about how to make a giant city livable, especially if environmental and social concerns serve as a check on greed–albeit as the price the corporations feel they mu...