Category: Uncategorized

Bogi Takács asked me to blurb eir poetry collection, “Algorithmic Shapeshifting,” which is out this month from Aqueduct Press. Here’s what I wrote:

Bogi Takács’s poetry is gleefully and unabashedly itself, pulling the reader through surreal worlds of visceral magic, body modification, political wit, and interpersonal devotion. Whether looking back into Talmudic history, forward into a science fictional psychic war, or sinking into the earth and growing flowers from its own eye sockets, “Algorithmic Shapeshifting” presents a voice that is consistently fresh, startling, and sincere.

When I blurbed “Nantais,” I expanded the blurb into a full review: I had other things to say about the book that didn’t fit into a blurb space and that included some criticisms. With “Algorithmic Shapeshifting,” though, I think my 1-paragraph blurb encapsulates my thoughts perfectly. I have nothing else substantive to add.

Rather than trying to stretch it out into a longer review, I’m just putting up this blurb as a bonus post which doesn’t take a full review’s time slot in my schedule, and indexing it as though it was full-length.

The verdict on “Algorithmic Shapeshifting,” as you might guess, is Recommended-2.

Today’s Book: “The Prince and Her Dreamer” by Ennis Bashe.

The Plot: A retelling of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “The Nutcracker,” in which the Nutcracker Prince is a nonbinary lesbian and Clara, her love interest, is autistic.

Autistic Character(s): Clara.

Most of us know the story of The Nutcracker, so I won’t spend a lot of time explaining the plot or characters. Bashe adheres fairly closely to the source material, but they do go deeper into some of its implications than many versions. Particularly into what it’s like for the Nutcracker character, Mathilde – also called the Red Prince – to lead a war at a young age and be frozen in doll form while the war continues without her.

Clara is a seventeen-year-old girl who has fallen in love with Mathilde through the stories her Uncle Drosselmeyer tells, not realizing that Mathilde is a real person. Clara is caring and gentle, fascinated by books and stories and determined to do good in the world; she reads as very feminine to me, despite her unwillingness to marry and her discomfort with some other gendered expectations. She wants to devote her life to charity, an unusual but respectable life path for women in her society:

Except now her mother kept talking about how perhaps she’d meet some nice boy at the party. She stroked Clara’s hair, which was just as long and blonde as her own. “I can’t understand this not wanting to marry. Won’t you be lonely, sweetheart?” 

She means well, Clara reminded herself. She just wants me to be happy. “I want to be a district visitor. I’ll go around asking if the poor people need anything, and then raise funds so they can have proper food and medicine, and write to different tradesmen to help them find work. Or I’ll make sure all the women in the Royal Society for the Protection of Ladies’ houses have warm petticoats while they’re in training—or organize amusements at the children’s hospitals, so they have something cheery to motivate them to take their medicine. Or I’d love to be a baby superintendent at the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children.” She beamed at her own reflection, cornflower blue eyes meeting their match.

Clara’s incredibly sweet personality is balanced by her awkwardness around other people and by her consuming interest in books, which only Uncle Drosselmeyer takes seriously. She has trouble putting her favorite book down to attend a party. Like many fans, she not only reads the book over and over, but excitedly analyzes and identifies where it draws influence from other stories:

“Yes. You see, the Red Prince is like Joan of Arc, if God had been sensible and made her English. But she’s also like Britomart from the Faerie Queen, except with a motivation other than courtly love. And she’s a metaphor for how Jesus fought Satan during the Harrowing of Hell, because in the Middle Ages the unicorn represents Jesus,” Clara said eagerly, twisting her hands in excitement as she spoke.

“Oh, Clara, I’m sure he doesn’t want a lecture,” her mother began, but Uncle Drosselmeyer shook his head.

“No, go on, this is all quite fascinating.”

Clara beamed at his encouragement. “Besides that, the fact she’s dressed all in one color means that she’s like the Green Knight from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, who asked Gawain to chop off his head on Christmas Eve and then walks away without a scratch on him. Furthermore, the fact that she was slain in battle, but was spirited away by a wizard to lie in a deathless sleep and will one day return to free her county? That’s just like the legend of King Arthur, and how Merlin—or was it the Lady of the Lake?—spirited him away to Avalon, which in turn references the resurrection of Christ.” She sat back, breathless and proud.

It’s very common in real life for autistic people to have a strong need for justice and fairness, and to become involved in charity or activism as a result. But it’s a trait I don’t often see represented in fiction, perhaps because it conflicts with NT ideas about all autistic people having low empathy. I don’t see many autistic characters with sweet, gentle personalities like Clara’s, so that’s nice to read. To a lesser extent, even a special interest in fiction – one of the most common special interests for autistic women – is less represented in fiction than in reality. Clara displays all these traits very well and is likable for them.

There are a few aspects of Clara’s characterization that didn’t work for me quite as well, mainly because they feel like unsupported statements. Mathilde gushes in the second half of the story over Clara’s courage, after Clara turns the tide of battle by throwing a shoe at the Rat King. But the actual dramatic shoe-throwing is the sole courageous act in a scene that Clara mostly spends cowering at the sidelines. It is realistic for a person with Clara’s personality and background to freeze up in a battle, and it does take real courage to overcome that response and throw a shoe. But overall, I’m not convinced that Clara is any braver than Mathilde or the other soldiers in that battle scene, so the repeated glowing references to her courage feel oversold.

Similarly, we’re told that only “an act of pure unselfishness” can revive Mathilde from her doll form; Clara unknowingly performs this act by caring for the doll after an upsetting event. She creates a sling for the doll’s broken arm, carefully brushes its hair, and knits it a tiny scarf. Certainly, Clara is a sweet and unselfish person. But actions like brushing the doll’s hair and knitting have two purposes. They’re acts of kindness, but they also are soothing, repetitive sensory acts, exactly the type of thing Clara would realistically need to do to calm herself down, especially since the doll of Mathilde also ties in to her special interest. Selling these actions as uniquely, purely unselfish doesn’t quite sit right with me, because it erases the sensory benefit that they have for Clara and the very real usefulness that such activities have for many autistic people’s self-regulation in real life.

This may be partly a matter of differing definitions of unselfishness, though. I’ve encountered people who say that nothing is ever actually unselfish and I don’t actually want to have that philosophical argument right now. I just wish that the sensory benefits of brushing and knitting were addressed a bit more in the text.

In addition to using the original story as source material, “The Prince and Her Dreamer” also draws heavily from Tchaikovsky’s ballet. The second half of that ballet contains a lot of short dances by different candy-themed characters and not a lot of plot. Bashe nods to the structure of this section while using it in a more interesting way – showing the psychological effect that it has on Mathilde to come home to her kingdom after so much time away, and the ambivalent responses from some of her subjects after such a long period of absence and war.

I was not super fond of another interlude near the end, in which Drosselmeyer – previously an ally to Clara – tries to convince her that what she saw in Mathilde’s kingdom was not real. He does it as a test to see if she is worthy of Mathilde. I’m not sure how I feel about vulnerability to gaslighting as a sign of worthiness or lack thereof, especially when Clara already convinced everyone of her selflessness and courage (and especially when autistic people ARE more vulnerable to this form of abuse than others, since we’ll take statements by a trusted person at their literal face value). But Clara passes the test, and Mathilde rightly is angry with Drosselmeyer when she finds out what happened.

Overall, I wasn’t as thoroughly won over by “The Prince and Her Dreamer” as I was by “Graveyard Sparrow,” the other book of Bashe’s that I’ve reviewed here. But it’s a sweet-natured queer romance with a very soft, gentle autistic heroine of a type that we don’t see often enough in fiction, and I think many of my readers will enjoy the result.

The Verdict: YMMV, but I liked it

Disclosure: Ennis Bashe and I are friends on Twitter. I reviewed their book because they offered me a review copy.

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Today’s Book: “The Place Inside the Storm” by Bradley W. Wright.

The Plot: A fourteen-year-old autistic girl named Tara runs away from home, in a corporate-controlled near-future Los Angeles, after her parents’ employers blackmail them into agreeing to “cure” her.

Autistic Character(s): Tara herself, plus a boy named Loki who she meets on the run, and eventually, a whole neurodiversity-affirming community of autistic people. Also the author.

Tara is a teenager who passes as neurotypical, although she has many of the problems that often go with teenage passing: moodiness, exhaustion, overload, and loneliness. She’s skilled at computer programming, but has difficulty keeping up with school. She’s teased and bullied and has few friends, except for one best friend from her old home in PacNW, with whom she keeps in touch online.

Tara doesn’t know what autism is, but she knows that her parents are acting strange and distracted, and that they’ve sent her to a bewildering and uncomfortable medical appointment without an explanation. Left alone in the examination room, she eavesdrops, which is how she finds out that she’s been diagnosed with something and that her parents have already agreed to a surgical cure without her consent. The company they work for not only wants to put an implant in Tara’s brain to encourage “pro-social behavior,” but they’re so insistent about this that they’ve blackmailed her parents into agreeing. The robot cat Tara’s family received as a gift is an unauthorized model, and her father could be prosecuted for keeping it.

(I like the robot cat, by the way, who stays with Tara throughout the book as a helpful companion and guide. I want a robot cat.)

The corporation’s motives feel a bit contrived to me. It’s not that I can’t believe someone would create evil brain implants, either to cure autism or for some other purpose. In history, questionable medical tech has often been tested on the most vulnerable populations – high-support disabled people, racial minorities, etc. – because that’s where it’s easiest to get away with it. Tara isn’t one of these populations, despite technically being disabled. It’s never clear why the corporation is so keen on targeting her specifically – enough to perform complicated blackmail on her parents, and to pay for an expensive manhunt to try to retrieve her – when there are so many easier ways for them to test their technology and take advantage of people.

Although she’ll learn better later in the story, Tara’s early thoughts about the cure technology are realistic for a panicked, passing teenager who’s never heard of autism before. Which means there’s a hefty dose of internalized and intra-disability ableism:

They wanted to control my brain, change how I thought. Reset Xel so he wouldn’t even recognize me. Make me into a zombie with a computer implanted in my head. They wanted me to become a different person. Yes, I had always had trouble socializing. I had trouble caring about the stuff regular kids were into. I liked computer programming and old science fiction books. But my friend Rosie back home was proof that I wasn’t a total loser, wasn’t she? I just needed to meet people who were on my wavelength. I didn’t want to be like the regular kids. I liked who I was, even if I was a little weird.

In any case, Tara runs away and begins a difficult trek through Los Angeles and the wilderness around it, helped by her robot cat, and hoping to find safety, either at her grandmother’s house in PacNW or elsewhere.

The logistics of Tara’s journey – where to go, how to get there, how to properly hide and avoid danger – take up much of the narration of the middle parts of the book, and they’re some of the book’s most interesting passages to me, where the narrative feels most assured. The book wavers a little bit more when describing the human interactions that go into the journey. For instance, animals or strangers unaffiliated with corporations will sometimes chase Tara aggressively for reasons that don’t seem clear.

While Tara struggles at school, she turns out to excel at trekking through unknown territory without the distractions of her everyday Internet tech. Despite high stress and physical exhaustion, she rarely melts down or has sensory/cognitive difficulties that affect her actions. She frequently reflects on how much better she’s doing outside the strictures of the lifestyle that she took for granted before.

Tara also meets a boy named Loki, who is a survivor of the kind of cure surgery she has avoided. Something went wrong during Loki’s surgery: in addition to being made docile and people-pleasing by his implant, he also has frequent, dangerous seizures.

I had a bit of an issue with how Loki is written throughout the story and how little agency he is given, especially since he is depicted as being more disabled than Tara. He joins Tara on her quest, not because he wants to, but because his caretaker thinks it’s the best chance for him to get better. He has good survival skills thanks to living on the margins for so long, but he uses them either in emergencies that clearly require them or when someone else asks him to. He doesn’t really seem to start anything or form any goals of his own, and I often didn’t feel I was getting a good sense of him as a person. All this is realistic for someone who has a brain implant specifically making them docile and compliant, but I didn’t really see it problematized with Loki as much as I would have liked. Other characters spend time thinking and talking about how awful it is that this was done to Loki against his will, but they don’t seem to think much about how it affects their interactions with him in the present. They don’t think very hard about whether they’re unwittingly taking advantage of him, and it doesn’t seem to be any impediment to him and Tara starting a romantic relationship.

When Tara, Loki, and Xel do make it to the end of their journey, it’s in a form they didn’t expect at first: a secret commune developed by and for autistic people, where the people in charge are aware of the forcible brain implant problem, and are covertly trying to lead anyone targeted to safety. The people at the commune explain how things got to be this way:

The children at his school were educated to understand why he and other kids like him were different. They were taught to accept difference. But then the country took a turn. New people came to power who did not believe in education and accommodation and diversity. They took away the funding. They put bureaucrats in charge. They turned power over to the corporations, and corporations don’t like difference. They wanted to stamp it out. Good workers and good consumers were predictable. Corporations put a lot of emphasis on culture. Everybody had to fit into the corporate culture, had to be a team player.

This part of the story doesn’t quite sit right with me. It feels oversimplified, with “corporations” and “bureaucrats” being blamed for a state of things that in my experience is more pervasive and complicated. It bothers me slightly on a story-logic level that the corporations seem to be equally invested in curing autism and denying that it exists. In real life, dangerous and harmful autism “treatments” already exist – from ABA, which is scientifically grounded but involves an abusive dynamic, to ridiculous quack cures like bleach. Parents opt for these treatments, not because they’re being blackmailed and don’t know what autism is, but because they do know the word “autism” and are taught to be deathly afraid of it. Erasing all awareness of autism seems puzzling and unnecessary in this light, even counterproductive to the corporations’ goals. It feels like a storytelling choice that was made mostly so that beginning-of-the-story Tara could learn everything dramatically all at once.

The commune of autistic people and their families feels oversimplified to me as well. It consists of people at varying places on the spectrum, including some non-speaking people who are briefly introduced, as well as some of their neurotypical parents. All of them grew up in the novel’s wider society, in which ableism exists at levels similar to real life or worse, but once they reach the commune, they don’t seem to have any lingering internalized ableism to unlearn before they can live well with each other. There are some sensory accommodations made, including a quiet room, but by and large, everything just… works, to a utopian degree, without any conflicting access needs or other intracommunity issues.

This is related to the way Tara’s sensory and cognitive issues suddenly get better when she’s no longer at school. There’s a strong anti-corporate and anti-screen-time bent underlying the themes of this book. I’m all for critiques of capitalism, but the critique that the commune in this book offers is a strange and simplistic one, in which, when people’s lives are no longer controlled by corporations and they’re no longer on the Internet all the time, everything else becomes magically fine forever. I feel like this way of resolving things does a disservice to the more nuanced relationships many autistic people have to technology and online community, and is uncomfortably close to some ableist narratives that I’m tired of (“ADHD only exists because computers!,” etc.)

For that matter, I’m not really sure how other disabilities fit into the utopian autistic commune, either. Are other non-neurotypical people not targeted and endangered by the corporations in this book the way autists are? Do they have a whole other set of communes? What about overlapping non-neurotypicalities? I don’t know.

Overall, “The Place Inside the Storm” is a well-intentioned #ownvoices effort that didn’t work for me on a craft or a worldbuilding level. If you really love the idea of a teen running away from home to an autistic commune, and if the elements I’ve described here sound more interesting than annoying to you, then you might enjoy the read more than I did.

The Verdict: YMMV

Disclosure: The only interaction I have had with Bradley W. Wright is when he sent me a review copy of his book, which is how I ended up reading it.

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Today’s Book: “Hoshi and the Red City Circuit” by Dora M. Raymaker.

The Plot: Hoshi Archer, a private detective with a developmental disability called K-Syndrome, investigates a series of ritual murders that appear to be targeted at people just like her.

Autistic Character(s): …It’s complicated.

Dora M. Raymaker is an autistic author, and the goings-on in her novel revolve around a fictional disability quite a lot like autism. The similarity is so strong that I am hesitating over whether to call the Operators (as people with K-Syndrome are officially called) autistic characters or not. Before I go into that, I need to zoom out and give you a better idea of what is happening in Raymaker’s fantastically detailed science fictional world.

Hoshi Archer lives in Red City, a metropolis whose infrastructure is supported by a cyberpunk virtual world called the Mem. Anyone can access the Mem with the right technology, but only Operators can program the quantum computers that underlie it, or fully experience the Mem with all of their senses.

Operators also have marked impairments in sensory processing, language, and motor sequencing – so much so that, without the assistive technology implanted in their brains, most of them would be unable to speak or to care for themselves. In fact, having “verbal-sequential IQ at least three standard deviations below visual-associative IQ” is a defining diagnostic trait of K-Syndrome.

This is a definition that excludes many real-life autistic people (including me, as it happens; my own verbal-sequential IQ is markedly higher than my visual-associative one), and that might fit a number of other real-life disabled people who aren’t autistic, but it’s a profile that many other real-life autistic people do match. And by focusing on developmentally disabled people with lower verbal ability and higher support needs, “Hoshi and the Red City Circuit” fills a gap that has sometimes arisen in existing #ownvoices autistic books, even though the novel’s technology mitigates some of those needs.

The idea that Operators are needed for their specialized abilities echoes many fictional tropes and real-world issues, including magical disabilities, sheltered workshops, and the current trend of software companies looking specifically for autistic people in their most repetitive, detail-oriented jobs. “Hoshi and the Red City Circuit” deals strongly with the potential abuses in that scenario, intensifying them to the point of dystopia.

The world of Red City doesn’t revolve only around Operators, of course, and the way Raymaker writes the city is one of the pleasures of this book. Hoshi adores Red City, considering it a personal friend, tracing the skyline from her apartment window every morning and keeping a mental list of her 200 favorite buildings. Throughout the book, specific places in the city are named and described with such life and precision that I couldn’t help but suspect that Raymaker herself feels the same way. I’m curious if there is a full map of Red City in her notes somewhere, although none appears in the physical book. Not only places and buildings, but social forces within the city such as its various crime families, political movements, and religions also appear with their own crystal-clear characters.

Hoshi Archer works as a private detective, using her pattern-matching and associative abilities to help the Red City Police Department solve crimes. She’s one of the few Operators who has an independent job. Until recently in Red City, most Operators were institutionalized and owned by the state; their programming duties, or whatever else they were assigned to, were literally slave labor. Many Operators continue to live under these conditions. Under Integration Law, an Operator has to prove they can live independently before being granted autonomy over their life. Those who are freed are monitored, and their autonomy can be taken away again if they don’t seem to be caring for themselves correctly.

Integration Law has parallels to institutionalization in the real world, and the threat of having her freedom revoked is one of many threats that keep Hoshi’s narrative in a constant state of tension. Many autistic readers will be able to relate, for example, to Hoshi’s meetings with her social worker, a blandly friendly woman much more interested in testing if Hoshi’s life meets correct parameters than in helping her thrive.

“No problem. You’re doing great. Just remember, I want you to succeed; I work for you. If something’s bothering you, if something bad has happened, you tell me and we’ll work it out. You and I – we’re a team.” Her precisely-painted lips twitched in maybe a smile or maybe a nervous tic.

Yeah. Right. Like I’d ask anyone at the IO for anything. One of the tenets of Integration Law was… don’t show any weakness or it will become a reason to land a body back into slavery. I saw it happen to Ghe Garver in my own first cohort, six months after we were emancipated. He’d confessed to having trouble keeping his apartment tidy and asked his Integration Officer for help. She’d run an inspection and flagged his quarters unsanitary. “Some of you won’t be able to make the transition, that’s just the nature of your disabilities,” she’d told him as she took away half his rights… Of course no one had offered him a housekeeper.

Aside from the social oppression surrounding Operators, the direct experience of Operators is also portrayed in a way that I found very autistically accurate and relatable. The technology in Operators’ heads helps them pass in a neurotypical world, generating spoken language out of the thoughts that they wish to express, modulating their motor impulses into useful motion, displaying facial expressions that neurotypicals can understand, and filtering out excessive sensory stimuli. But, like real technology, this assistive tech is by no means perfect. It has glitches, and does realistic things like slowing down when too much is being processed at once. At one point, there is a wonderful and harrowing chase scene in which Hoshi turns off some of her sensory filters so as to overhear a whispered conversation, is discovered, and forgets to turn them on again before rushing outside – resulting in intense disorientation and burnout just when she needs her abilities most.

“Hoshi and the Red City Circuit” is a great ride, with a mystery that builds and thickens constantly before bringing all its threads together in a conclusion for which the city’s treatment of Operators is central. I really enjoyed its worldbuilding and the varied characters who inhabit its darkest corners, as well as its commentary on neurodiversity and human rights, and I’ll be looking out for much more from this author.

The Verdict: Recommended-1

Disclosure: I have never interacted with Dora M. Raymaker. I got her book as an ARC from the publisher and reviewed it before other ARCs because it won a poll among my Patreon backers.

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At last! Proofs are in, and print ARCs of THE OUTSIDE are printed. Look at these beautiful book babies!

If you like to review books, you can request one for yourself on NetGalley right here: https://www.netgalley.com/catalog/book/157282