Lucy Schmeidler

Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro, is a powerful and disturbing science fiction novel about the social and emotional development of a group of clones being raised as a source of spare vital organs. There, I've used the "s" term, and those of you who never read science fiction because you know how much you dislike it--And how do you know that if you never read it?--can go on questioning whether science fiction can actually be literature or literature be science fiction. Of course you know what science fiction is, while hardly two of us who take the stuff seriously--as fans, readers, and writers--can agree on a definition.

Besides the basic situation, and the way the clones are raised to accept their fate simply as what they were created for, the book contains discussions of individual and group memory, memories retained and suppressed, and the simultaneous knowing and ignoring of social facts. So reading it I was at once horrified by the underlying situation, admiring the author's craft, and caught up in the narrative of the characters' lives.

When my then 4-year-old grandson had finished a year of nursery school with less than satisfactory results--the most serious behavior reported being that he would pick up one of the nursery chairs and hold it upside down over his head, which the teacher saw as a threat to hit someone with it; when we asked him about it at home, he said he was pretending it was a hat--his parents were called to a conference at which an outside "expert" recommended that he be sent to a specific school for "autistic" children, the majority of whom could be mainstreamed after a year. Aside from the stigma that would be ever after attached to the child, I could only think that, if the majority of these "autistic" children could be mainstreamed after a year in a special school, the majority were probably misdiagnosed. His parents refused, and found a more helpful preschool, and he is now in first grade in a yeshiva that provides various forms of therapy, including psychological and occupational, and will probably be ready for a mainstream yeshiva by third grade. His obvious problem is having trouble focusing and listening to instructions; an outside evaluation said he might be developing ADHD.

I think the next topic I would like to read up on is the development of language. I know this has been studied extensively, from both the perspective of speech therapy and that of the function of the brain's speech centers, but I don't know whether it has been examined as an indication of the development of consciousness.

I thought of this while listening to my 3 1/2 year old grandson chattering on about what "Yossi" wants and what "Yossi" is doing. It's not that he's lost the ability to use pronouns; he also chatters about what "I want" and what "I do." I think that when he refers to himself in the third person he is asserting his role as an actor in the world, that his "I" is not only a point of view from which he considers the rest of the world but is, simultaneously, a boy called Yossi who eats and plays and takes part in the community.

My story, "To Be an Emulator," is now over 9000 words long, and has been emailed to the other members of my group, and also submitted to the online Critters workshop. And it is still almost 48 hours before the end of the last class session. For someone used to finishing at the last minute, if not later, this is triumph!
My other feeling of achievement comes from the fact that, even as the class is ending, I have incorporated much of my course reading into my sense of self as a writer and as a person. And I have started reading Roger Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind, a book I discovered through the class book review assignment and which I expect to use in my culminating essay.
It has been a great class, with a great group of classmates, and I look forward to running into you in writing if not in person.
Goodbye, and success! (If you really know what you're doing, luck still helps but it's less necessary.)