Lucy Schmeidler

I just grabbed myself some "vacation time" to read The Speed of Dark, a science fiction novel by Elizabeth Moon, about an autistic man living in the near future, who has had all the best therapies growing up and has a job with a bunch of autistic colleagues, his own apartment and car, and a weekly evening of fencing with normal people he regards as friends. Suddenly his work group is offered a chance to volunteer for an experimental procedure to cure their autism, and a new manager tries to pressure them into "volunteering," with a suggestion that the company will be cutting its work force but anyone who volunteers for the experiment will be immune to the cutbacks. The ending may be a little too optimistic to believe, but many of the hero's observations about the difference between the social behavior he has been taught in order to fit in among normals and typical normals' behavior in similar situations are both horrifying and very funny. I know a family with an autistic 11-year-old, and I hope he can have at least some of the success that the hero of this book has a highly intelligent autist.

Mrs, Dalloway leaves me cold, and Michael Cunningham's appreciation leaves me even colder, presumably because I have yet to discover literature. I read, as I write, for story, not technique, and I find this story very thin, almost nonexistent. I do admire some aspects of Woolf's style; while most writers give some measure of their characters' thoughts about whatever is happening at the moment, or even flashbacks to relevant occurrences in the past, Woolf adds in digressions that seem to have nothing to do with the matter at hand, but just arise spontaneously by personal association. When this involves a major character I enjoy the extra depth it provides, but when a minor character has stray thoughts, especially if they are not admirable, I feel almost like a voyeur, looking in on things that are none of my business.

1. Development of ToM. When 6 year old Nafi is asked what he wants for a snack, and he ignores the question, and 4 year old Yitzy pipes up, "Nafi wants such and such," it's clear that Yitzy understands that Nafi has opinions and desires. What isn't clear is whether Yitzy really thinks that Nafi wants what he said, and if so, whether he knows his brother well enough to have given a valid answer, or whether he really means that Nafi ought to want such and such, because Yitzy knows that it's a nice snack and one he wants for himself.

2. "[O]nce [information] is established to a sufficient degree of certainty, source...tags are lost...." (p.51, quoting Cosmides & Tooby). After hearing an enthusiastic recommendation of The Speed of Dark and buying the book, I forgot who recommended it, other than that it was a woman friend within my local community, and the book had been mentioned within a more general discussion of recommended SF books by well-known authors.

3. Is there such a thing as an "unreliable author?" Several times I have read SF novels in which alien (either non-human or members of unfamiliar, made-up cultures) characters' thoughts and behavior felt psychologically "false" to me, so that I could either ignore the books altogether, or pretend that they were intended as satire: parodies of our own species and culture, even though I did not really think the authors had any such intention. And I suspect that this reaction could happen even to a piece of "mimetic" fiction.

Both Jimmie G., Sack's "Lost Mariner," and Franco Magnani, the "Memory Artist," live in the past, for almost opposite reasons. Magnani relives the village life of his childhood because it is more beautiful and meaningful to him than the life surrounding him now, while Jimmie lives in the past because he has no memory of time since. Sacks presents each of these men warmly and sympathetically, so the reader can empathize with the nostalgia of the one and tremble at the plight of the other, imagining the horror of losing his or her immediate past, for all that Jimmie cannot know his own problem.

Shortly after this term started, I did a mental review of all I need to accomplish within the next year (ideally by the end of next June) to get my MA on time, and, if possible, get some non-required writing in as well. Seeing how overwhelming it seemed, I decided to forget about detailed planning and just treat myself as an invalid, with a whole lot of possible target tasks each day but none essential, and without allowing any pressure, so anything accomplished would count to the good, but no penalties would be exacted. And this worked at first: I was keeping up with this class, and I even made some progress toward planning my thesis. But I lost my pocket calendar and started a list on my computer as a substitute. Perfect. Nothing permanent, just a few suggestions. And then I added some details. And fell behind. And panicked. Today I goofed off, reading interesting stuff (the other case studies in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat), but not making any real progress toward getting what I want done in this very short and overcrowded year. Now it's late enough to go to bed, and I still haven't done any serious writing since my thesis prospectus last Thursday. So maybe, I should read over the piece of work I had been hoping to get to last Friday, or yesterday, or today, without writing anything, and go to bed excited about what I want to put down as soon as I can get back to it.

I have a story for someone to write. It's a realistic story, but I don't do realism, and if I did, I wouldn't have any idea where to submit it. And if you want to know what it's doing here, let's just say it's about growing up (like Slater's) and about memory.

I was in my cardiologist's waiting room, where there's a TV, which was tuned, as usual, to a program about serious social and interpersonal problems. This episode was about an alcoholic whose wife worked long hours, causing their teenage daughters to be the ones who most often saw him staggering home drunk and then staggering out again to buy himself more wine or beer or whatever. The older daughter finally had enough and took herself out of the picture, but the 14-year-old phoned in to the TV program, where Dr. Phil interviewed the man, the wife, the daughter, and had the man driven off to a new rehab program--he had already been through six--to be followed by some months or years in a halfway house, while his wife got counseling, after which they could try to function again as a family. Dr. Phil spoke to the daughter separately, telling her to become a child again, have a social life, go to school, have fun, etc.

Review, if current, would have been for either The New York Review of Science Fiction or sfrevue.com.

Hominids
by Robert J. Sawyer
Tor, New York, 2002

Hominids is a science-fictional romance, in both meanings of the word: a tale of adventure and a love story. The main premise of the book is that there exists an alternate universe in which our kind of human became extinct, and Neanderthal man developed a technological civilization, though with different values and a very different culture. An accident involving a quantum computer sends a physicist from their world into ours, where it looks as if he will have to build a new life for himself among people not even of his own species. And here the love story develops, between Ponter, the Neanderthal physicist, and Mary, a homo sapiens geneticist who had been called in to verify his alien DNA. But his partner in his old life repeats the experiment, to re-establish contact with our world, and Ponter is able to return home.

I really enjoyed reading Lying, by Lauren Slater. (Laurence Later? Ouch! What a horrible auditory ambiguity.) What bothered me was not the question of whether the reported events were real or imaginary, but the author's refusal to make a consistent tale of it. Did the (possibly imaginary) character suffer from epilepsy or not? Was her mother totally unsupportive? Did she have an affair with her workshop instructor? Did she join AA? I hardly care whether Slater is the actual protagonist of this narrative, but I would like more narrative cohesion.

I have no moral problem regarding lying--the Jewish view is that lies told to protect someone's feelings are permitted, and that God set some precedents in this--and I accept the practice when used for self-protection (as long as it doesn't involve hurting someone else as a consequence), and lying in the service of fiction, e.g. "I am a changeling, substituted for a human baby in the maternity ward of Beth Israel Hospital, in the midnight hours of...," where there is no serious attempt to mislead anyone. But if I am presented with a narrative account, a story, I want to know what the story says, regardless of its "truth value."

I have had a serious problem for close to 50 years, so I don't think I'm going to look for a medical type cure at this point. It's that I tend to doze off under tension, such tension often the result of trying hard to follow the words of a lecture of some sort, so I look bored when I am really involved.

I have a similar problem when praying in shul. There has been a push in recent years to encourage those engaged in Jewish prayers--most especially those praying in Hebrew who are less than fluent in that language--to concentrate on a basic concept embodied in that prayer, or psalm, such as God's power, or mercy. I find this totally self-defeating, because concentration on a generality leads me to think about specifics or related subjects and my mind wanders and drifts off. What works for me is concentrating on the words, the grammar, the fine details of the text before my eyes, to the exclusion of everything external. I haven't yet tried to see if this can be carried over to a lecture situation, by, perhaps, trying to count--not remember-- the number of points raised, etc. I may try this during Oliver Sacks's talk at Queens College.

I don't know what to lie about. The obvious would be to make up a success story, but I wouldn't be comfortable with it: if I was doing so well, why was I here? If I had been writing successfully? Or writing software and suddenly inspired to write poetry? novels? Maybe. But I'm in the literature program, not creative writing. A tempestuous love affair that set my writing career back by 20 years? The 20-year setback's OK, but not a lie, and I'm not the tempestuous love affair type. Maybe 20 years lost during an alien abduction. Or under a fairy hill. I like that one. Writing and writing on scraps of birch bark, no way to really save it let alone get it out into the world. Of course, if it had to be a believable lie, the love affair might possibly be better. But I'm more the otherworld type....

The first response I got was enormously supportive; the second, amusing. I think on results I should go rejoin my fairy lover under the hill for another 20 years.