Ada Hoffmann's Blog, page 8

Autistic Book Stats

A mutual on Twitter recently shared an experience they’d had in real life: in a discussion of neurodiversity in SFF, when asked to think of autistic characters who weren’t cis white men, none of the hosts could think of any.

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THE OUTSIDE’s query letter

Since I’ve handed in the copy edits to THE INFINITE – and since there’s been talk about the querying process going around on Twitter – I thought I’d share with you a copy of the query letter that got me an agent, and eventually a midsize publisher, for the first book in the series.

(Read the full post on Substack)

Healthy Connections

As you go through your life you will meet people. There will be people and groups who drain your energy to be around, who you grit your teeth and force yourself to be nice to because that’s how Social Interaction is supposed to work. And there will be people and groups who genuinely fill you back up. You’ll sit with them and experience their presence and you’ll glow. You’ll feel better afterwards than you did before. You’ll feel included. You’ll feel seen. You’ll feel fulfilled.

This is true for everyone, but as autistic people we can forget that it is true for us.

(See the full post on Substack)

Autistic Book Party, Episode 73: The Timematician

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

There Is No Single Story That Will Do The Work

Sometimes when writer social media starts going back and forth about what kind of stories are best – dark edgy ones, or hopeful gentle ones; stories that sound the alarm about a social problem, stories that offer a solution, or stories that help us to forget our problems entirely – I start wondering if we’ve forgotten Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s classic talk, “The Danger of a Single Story.”

(Read the full post on Substack)

Autistic Book Party, Episode 72: Submergence

Today’s Book: “Submergence,” a novella by Arula Ratnakar, available in Clarkesworld

The Plot: When a marine biologist named Noor dies suddenly under mysterious circumstances, a woman named Nithya volunteers to play back and experience her memories. What Nithya uncovers will not only illuminate the circumstances of Noor’s death, but a revelation about the bizarre organisms Noor was studying and a much larger conspiracy.

Autistic Character(s): The author!

“Submergence” is a work I can’t say too much about, since so much depends on watching events unfold and unravelling the mystery, but it’s a fascinating work of near-future hard science fiction that combines cutting-edge biology, neuroscience, alternative communication, and a sweetly odd queer romance – or possibly two.

At the heart of the mystery is an unusual species of sponge, P. meyeri, that can be used to create tailor-made cures to a variety of diseases – but that also reacts strongly and negatively to any intrusion. P. meyeri is even more special than it appears, and the most memorable part of the novella is the sheer sense of detail and wonder as Noor explores it in its natural habitat:

An intricate, coordinated display of flashing light is taking place throughout the chamber, in a beautiful recursive pattern revolving around one of the sponges, far more complex than any temple carving, any rose window, any generative design she’s seen. The sponge releases its larvae, and then a different beautiful light display centering on another sponge begins as that sponge starts to release its larvae. Using the scanner, Noor finds more of those microscopic shrimp fused to the exteriors of the sponges, somehow being controlled. She steels her churning stomach and holds back her revulsion regarding what she’s about to do.

 

The neuroscience of what Nithya is doing is explored in as much detail as the marine biology. Immersively experiencing someone else’s memories has an effect on her sense of identity, as she begins to absorb Noor’s beliefs, attachments, and feelings and integrate them into her own. Nithya and other characters do a lot of introspection about what this means, whether it’s okay, but Nithya is a protagonist who’s refreshingly excited and curious about the process; horror at losing herself isn’t a primary emotion for her.

“Submergence” also does intriguing things with the nameless youth movement that Noor’s daughter belongs to. Reminiscent of today’s youth protests against climate change, but more extreme, children who have joined the movement refuse to speak or show facial expressions until their climate demands have been met. They still go to school, go about their days, and communicate using text, but it is all done silently and expressionlessly.

From an autistic author, a youth movement like this feels like an especially clever invention. You can turn over any rock and find autism parents talking in tones of horror about how awful it is to have a child who won’t speak or won’t smile at them. Why not weaponize that horror for the greater good? (Ratnakar shows a range of parent responses to this movement, but she doesn’t show any children being very badly mistreated, and Noor is supportive of her daughter’s choices despite some misgivings.)

The ending feels a little bit rushed to me, with all sorts of grave difficulties and complex dilemmas just suddenly working out in the protagonists’ favor. But it’s a happy ending; and “Submergence” is worth the price of admission even just for its beginning and middle, where we slowly explore the intricate scientific puzzle that Ratnakar has laid out, and the beautiful, intriguing mystery of P. meyeri.

The Verdict: Recommended-2

Chekhov’s 21-Gun Salute, Part 3: Do It Yourself

Today we’re closing out our Chekhov’s 21-Gun Salute series by walking you through the process of designing your own battle with your own set of guns, and talking (spoiler-free!) about how I went through this process for THE INFINITE.

(Read the full post on Substack)

The Battle of Yavin

Here’s how the Battle of Yavin (from “Star Wars: A New Hope”) breaks down when it’s analyzed using Chekhov’s 21-Gun Salute. You can read an introduction to the 21-Gun Salute method in last week’s post – the key to this method is that every character brings a gun to the battle, in the form of some ability to use or some character arc to wrap up, and every gun must be fired in an effective way.

(Read the full post on Substack)

Chekhov’s 21-Gun Salute: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Battle Scenes

I’ll tell you a secret: I’ve always had trouble focusing on battle scenes, either in movies and shows or in prose novels. There are so many moving parts, things whizzing by in so many directions that I forget what the point of it is – or else so many pages of tedious descriptions of troop movements that I forget what the point is of that, either. I like introspection, dramatic character interactions, and weird supernatural happenings. I can get spooky as hell, but I’m not much of a fighter.

But for THE INFINITE – Book 3 in the Outside series – I found myself in a jam. I’d written the story to a point where of course it needed to be solved with a big, final battle. I wanted to see the battle, the flashing lights and big sounds and drama of it all. But I didn’t know how to put one together in a way that made sense. It was a kind of scene that I knew wouldn’t come naturally.

So I set my mind to figuring out how battle scenes work. I pored over some of my favorite big battles from existing media – battles where even my battle-challenged mind stayed invested the whole way through. I broke them down into their component parts and I figured out what purpose each part served. In the process I came up with a system that allowed even me to write a final battle scene that my editors loved.

I’m going to share that system with you now.

(Read the full post on Substack)

The Autistic Community Is Actually Many Communities

All the talk of “community” last week has reminded me of something I don’t think we talk about often enough. We often talk about “the autistic community,” or similar things like “the queer community,” almost as a euphemism. We talk about “the community” as simply the set of all people in the world who are autistic. But if we define a community as a group of people who are actually in contact with each other in some meaningful way, then it becomes obvious very quickly that there isn’t one autistic community. There are a whole lot of small ones.

(Read the full post on Substack)