Imaginary Worlds - Neurodivergent Futures

Episode Date: April 14, 2022

One of the most common requests I've gotten over the years has been to do an episode about why so many autistic people are drawn towards science fiction, and these suggestions have come from listeners who are autistic or have autistic children. Fiction writer Ada Hoffmann, writer and professor Dora Raymaker, YouTube presenter Quinn Dexter, and author and professor Nick Walker, who co-runs the publishing company Autonomous Press, have each given this subject a lot of thought. Their experiences and perspectives as autistic sci-fi fans and creators overlapped in many ways, from the joy of complex worldbuilding, to identifying with fictional characters like Data or Spock, to wanting to imagine a future where aliens, humans and A.I. can coexist without a hierarchy of neurotypical perspectives. Featuring actress Shannon Tyo reading passages from Ada and Dora’s novels. Dora Raymaker’s new novel Resonance has just been published through Autonomous Press. Dora and Ada have also contributed short stories to Autonomous’ anthology series Spoon Knife. Quinn Dexter’s YouTube channel is Autistamtic. This episode is sponsored by Backblaze, Echoes of History: Ragnarök and Squarespace. Our ad partner is Multitude. If you’re interested in advertising on Imaginary Worlds, you can contact them here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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It's time for Tim's. You participating Tim's restaurants in Canada for a limited time. It's time for Tim's. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. When I first began working on my podcast many years ago, a friend suggested that I do an episode about why autistic people are drawn towards science fiction. And she suggested this because her son is autistic and he was very into sci-fi. At the time, I couldn't find very much written about this, so I put the idea aside. But over the years, more and more people have suggested this topic.

And many of the suggestions have come from listeners who are autistic. So I began to wonder, is there something to this? I interviewed four people for this episode. They're each autistic. They'd each given the subject a lot of thought already, and they pointed me towards articles and books about the connection between sci-fi fandom and autism. They also had fairly similar answers as to why speculative fiction appealed to them personally. The novelist Ada Hoffman told me, There are a lot of outsider characters in science fiction and fantasy. There are a lot of characters who aren't humans, whether they're aliens or magical creatures or robots. And I think it's sadly very common that autistic people feel a bit funny about being human.

We feel that we don't quite fit in with other humans and we can identify with someone else who's like encountering humans and doesn't quite know what to make of them or doesn't quite fit in as one of the humans, you know? Like here I am in the cantina with all the weird aliens. I can be a weird alien too. That's fine. Dora Raymaker is a novelist and a professor at Portland State University. And Dora also finds alien characters to be pretty relatable sometimes,

like on the sitcom Third Rock from the Sun. In a way, almost all of those alien characters were autistic in that you're looking at this society and just the absurdity of the things that neurotypical, regular humans do is actually really funny. Well, it's really a very fascinating ritual. The ceremony begins with the bride being given away. Excuse me, given away?

Like an object? As in free girl with every large fries? I also talked with Nick Walker, who teaches psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Nick is known for creating the term neuroqueer to describe the overlap between gender diversity and neurodiversity. Neuroqueer has something intrinsically, fundamentally in common with speculative

fiction, which is that it's very much about the possible. It's all about that question, what if I'm a trans woman in the very early stages of transition, still kind of looking like a big old bald dude here? And I can tell you that the transgender experience is very much about possibility, about like, who could I be? Could I be someone dramatically different from what I was raised to be? Besides the idea of reimagining yourself with boundless possibilities, Nick is

also drawn towards the world building aspect of speculative fiction. I think that the autistic mind just in general, and again, there's a lot of diversity among autistic minds, but we are associative thinkers generally and capable of holding a lot of detail in our memories and putting it together into very three-dimensional pictures of how things work. And there's a joy in that. The fourth person that I interviewed was Quinn Dexter. Quinn did a deep dive into the connection between autism and sci-fi fandom for his YouTube channel Autistamatic. And for him, worldbuilding is also a big part of the appeal. In any imaginary world, anything that isn't written down or on screen

isn't real. Only that which has been put into it by the writers is considered part of that world. Now, that can change at any time, at the writer's whim, but it gives us an established framework. There's no umming and ahhing about it. There's no doubt. That kind of certainty really does appeal to people who have very little certainty in their lives. And that applies to all marginalised peoples, not just autistic people, but even more so to us, because we are not seeing the world through the same eyes that other people are. And OK, it may be breaking some of the laws of physics, but nonetheless, we know how those laws of physics are being broken in that fantasy world.

It's all there for us to see. And that's in contrast to the real world, which feels more elusive, changing, inconsistent in a frustrating way? Very much so. Autistic people have a reputation, which is for being blunt, sometimes tactless. But it's because we have such a strong desire for the truth that living in this world where the truth is actually a very elusive entity these days, seeing a world whereby the truth is written down and there's no argument about it that's a very attractive prospect i mean the amount of autistic people i know who've got their

their copies of um encyclopedias of various different laws you know i've got my old star trek encyclopedia up there i've got equivalent ones for doctor who people have got ones for lord of the rings all sorts of major properties where these books have been written. They've all got them. They all refer to them. That's also why he's drawn towards utopias and dystopias. Well, that's the thing. Utopias and dystopias, they both have something in common. You've either got the ideal world where everything works properly, and you know where you stand in that world because of it, or you've got the opposite where nothing works properly

and everything is out to kill you, but you know where you stand in that world as well. Several months ago, I did an episode about headcanon, where fans come up with theories about stories or characters. And I learned that autistic headcanon is a popular guessing game, where fans talk about which characters they feel like they can relate to because they think these characters have autistic traits. Now in real life, you should not try and diagnose

real people or celebrities that you don't know as possibly being autistic. But everybody I spoke with said that diagnosing fictional characters is just harmless fun. And you'll see certain characters come up a lot, like Sherlock Holmes or Sheldon Cooper from the Big Bang Theory. And there are a lot of characters in Star Trek, which makes sense because the Federation in Star Trek puts a high value on neurodiversity. Like one of Quinn's favorite characters going back to his childhood is Spock.

Like one of Quinn's favorite characters going back to his childhood is Spock. The thing about Spock in particular was that we saw two sides of him. We saw the external side of Spock, which people saw him as being logical and unemotional. But we also knew that there was another side to him. We knew that Spock was not unemotional, but although he was only half Vulcan himself, he and the rest of the Vulcans, they suppressed their emotions. It was a conscious choice. It was do that or destroy themselves. So it wasn't that he didn't experience emotions or that he didn't feel,

but he chose not to act on them. He chose not to express them. The release of emotions, Mr. Spock, is what keeps us healthy, emotionally healthy, that is. That may be, Doctor. However, I have noted that the healthy release of emotion is frequently very unhealthy for those closest to you. for those closest to you. That very much echoes the way it feels as an autistic person, where a lot of people think that you don't have the same emotional responses,

that you don't have empathy in the same way that they do. The fact of the matter is, we do. But we don't always express it in a way that's visible, or at least not in ways that people expect to see. Quinn also feels a connection with data from the next generation. Not just data as a character, but the way people treat data. One of his favorite episodes is The Measure of a Man. A scientist named Bruce Maddox petitions to take data away so he can disassemble them, study them, and build more datas.

take Data away so he can disassemble him, study him, and build more Datas. The crew objects, they have a trial, and Picard puts Maddox on the stand. Is your contention that Lieutenant Commander Data is not a sentient being and therefore not entitled to all the rights reserved for all life forms within this Federation? Data is not sentient, no. Commander, would you enlighten us? What is required for sentience? Intelligence, self-awareness, consciousness. Prove to the court that I am sentient. This is absurd. We all know you're sentient. So I'm sentient, but Commander Data is not. That's right. It does mirror that stripping of humanity

that so many of us are aware of, that we've experienced, whether it be in the school system or, you know, we see it in church, we see it in families, that autistic people are treated a lot of the time as being slightly less than human. What we saw with data in The Measure of a Man with Bruce Maddox was exactly that. Maddox was denying that Data had agency. He denied him the right to be himself. That struck such a chord with me and with so many people I know

that I think cemented Data as being, if you like, an autistic icon. think, cemented Data as being, if you like, an autistic icon. Another character who comes up a lot is Sylvia Tilly from Star Trek Discovery. One of the reasons why Nick Walker finds this character appealing is because unlike Data or Spock, Tilly is human. And the actress Mary Weissman has stated that even though she wasn't trying to portray Tilly as autistic, she's very happy that autistic fans feel like they can relate to her. There's a way of moving she's got. There's this particular kinetic style that she's got.

And a way of speaking, there's a high level of anxiety of the sort that a lot of autistic people end up with because of how they've been pressured to perform in a particular way. You know, they've been pressured to act non-autistic and pressured to prove themselves. And they develop this intense sense of internal pressure and anxiety. And Tilly's character definitely shows that in a big way. This is so neat. They told me because of my special needs that I couldn't have a roommate, which is kind of a letdown because a roommate is like an automatic built-in friend. And then they told me that I was going to have a roommate. And so now I guess that's you.

Hi, I'm cadet Sylvia Tilly. Although for some people, being a fan and seeing yourself in characters isn't satisfying enough. In recent years, there have been more and more autistic authors telling their own sci-fi stories. But when it comes to getting their work out there, they're coming up against obstacles in the real world. We'll hear about that after the break.

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So whether you're going for a run or just running late, do what life throws your way and smell like you didn't. Find Secret at your nearest Walmart or Shoppers Drug Mart today. At the beginning of the episode, we heard from Ada Hoffman and Dora Raymaker. They're both fiction writers. And one of the reasons why they wanted to tell their own stories is because when neurotypical authors create autistic characters, they sometimes fall back on cliches,

where the autistic character is seen as an unemotional math genius, or a victim, or both. Dora says, just look at the game Mass Effect 2. There's a storyline with an autistic character who's horribly abused, and yes, this is terrible, but in the end, none of it's actually about him, it's about his brother. But it's not centering autistic experience. It's not centering autistic culture or neurodivergent culture.

Look at him. Your brother will never be the same. The damage may not be permanent. He might recover some semblance of his mind. Square root of 906.01 equals 30.1. Ada is also bothered by how often autistic characters are portrayed as burdens. You'll see that, you know, from the neurotypical protagonist's point of view, this character is just like the most annoying and they can't stand them and they're so frustrated with everything that the person has to do and they really don't like

this character at all they really don't want this character to be around the character is really something they're kind of saddled with but at the same time you know the narrator is telling you all these things about oh the character was so patient and good for allowing this autistic person to exist around them at all. And it's like, don't do that. I feel so bad about myself when I read things like that. Now, Ada doesn't start out writing a story with the intention of dispelling stereotypes. Like one of her recent books, which is called The Outside, takes place in a future where space-traveling humans are at the mercy of intergalactic gods that are actually super intelligent AI. Her main character, Ysera Shine, is autistic, but that wasn't the original plan.

I was like, this is a dark book. It's cosmic horror. It has, you know, this and this happening. Like, I can't do that with not autistic character. That's too problematic. I can't do that. But as I got further into the manuscript, I realized this was an autistic character, whether I liked it or not. The feelings that I was exploring by writing her were autistic feelings. What were those moments like? Where were the moments where you're like, I recognize myself in the way I'm writing this character. And now this is the way I now that I had this realization, this is how I want this to play out specifically in the story and in the writing. So for Ysera, it's different for every character. But for Ysera, it was specifically about sensory overload. You know,

I have this character, she goes through this cosmic horror story, She's encountering all these horrific, incomprehensible things. And she has a sensory overload reaction to that. She melts down, she gets frozen and overwhelmed. And I was like, these are, these are the feelings I have in my daily life that I want to use this character to talk about. And if I take them away, if I make her non-neurotypical, if I try to figure out what's the neurotypical way of responding to cosmic horror, then the thing that makes the character interesting to me would go away. I couldn't do that. Here is the actress Shannon Tayo reading from the outside. Ysera groaned and waited for her breathing to go back to something resembling normal. Her feet weren't going to like the walk back.

She wasn't even sure where she was. She wobbled to her feet, ignoring the protest from her heels and calves, and turned to fish the tablet out of her pocket and froze. Standing in the half-eaten department store with papers strewn around her feet was a pale Anitayan woman in a lab coat

with her hair tied loosely back staring straight at Ysera. It couldn't be. It was another trick of the light. Ysera was crap with faces anyway. She just had to look again from another angle, and it would be some other irritating gone person who just happened to have one or two features

that looked a bit like Dr. Talir's if the light hit them wrong. The light shifted. Dr. Talir walked nonchalantly out of the half-eaten building and nodded to Ysera. She looked the same as always. Hello, she said. You said, said Ysera, still panting slightly with exertion. You said, I know where to find you. Dr. Talir shrugged. And now you do.

Dora Raymaker takes a different approach in writing fiction. They do think about creating characters that will dispel stereotypes, like in their book Hoshi and the Red City Circuit, which is a sci-fi neo-noir. book Hoshi and the Red City Circuit, which is a sci-fi neo-noir. All of the autistic type characters in that book are forced to be programmers because that's what they're considered valuable for because of how their minds work. But what happens when they're not any good at that or they don't want to? Hoshi's no good at that. She's an investigator. But none of the characters in the book are labeled as autistic. I made up this thing called K syndrome, but it clearly comes from autism and it comes from

a lot of my own personal experiences and the experiences of a lot of people in community. And I didn't want people to look at it and be like, well, that's not what autism is like for me. Or, you know, I wouldn't diagnose that person based on the DSM. Like, I didn't really want, that's not what's important. That's not what I wanted to explore. I wanted to explore that particular experience of neurodivergence and its relationship to other people and society and structural oppression

and what is valued and what is human. There's a scene in the book where Hoshi goes to a department store dressing room to eavesdrop on criminals, and she has these neuroimplants that can mute parts of her senses or amplify others. So she can basically give herself sensory overload and then fine-tune it to her advantage. Although it also can be very debilitating and there's a limit to just how far

something like that can actually go. It's not a cure. I stood still, breath held, but heard nothing. So I dropped my audio filters completely. Sound. Stampeding, roaring, hissing, cracking, rasping, ticking, thrumming, screaming sound. Fingers pressed to my eyes till I saw stars. Sweat prickling the bridge of my nose.

Focus, Hoshi. Isolate. Identify. Factor what is figure and what is ground. Find labels for all the sounds. Dear Trinity, please unbraid the cacophony. Help me through the maelstrom. Separate the signal from the noise. Information encoding. There.

The roar of the environmentals adjusting the room based on my biofeedback. The hiss of the everbulbs above. The crackle and pound and slam and tap of the environmentals adjusting the room based on my biofeedback. The hiss of the ever bulbs above. The crackle and pound and slam and tap of the sales clerk working beyond the dressing room door. The rasp of my breath sucking air. The tick tick of high heels walking on the floor one story up. Tracking across the ceiling. The thrum thrum of my heart-pushing blood.

The sound of voices through the wall on my left. Aha! I ran a subroutine to block all frequencies but those of the voices, and most of the sonic mess went away. I kept the rest of my auditory filters off. No need to amplify or reduce. As soon as I cut all the background noise, the signals of the voices came through perfectly.

We've got to take Archer down a few more notches. An older voice, male, authoritative. It's too soon. There's three whole days till last day. Younger, an unpleasant whiner. Also male. She'd be weaker by now if you hadn't bonged dealing with her last time. I didn't immediately recognize either voice. Splitting a thread of consciousness, I queried my memory index. It is challenging for any writer to get published.

Honing your craft can take years. And you have to deal with a lot of rejection letters. But Ada says there are additional hurdles for autistic writers. It can be harder to find a writing group, both because, you know, peopling is hard, but also because when you do find a group, they might all be neurotypicals. They might not understand the specific ways that you need to learn to improve your skills or the particular things you're trying to accomplish with your skills. Like everybody needs to improve their skills at writing. But if people expect you to end up writing exactly like a neurotypical,

that may not be the advice or the constructive criticism that you need to hear. And in Dora's experience, the criticism that they've gotten from agents and editors isn't always constructive. I would sometimes get a pretty decent bite and they'd want to see the full manuscript. And I've very consistently gotten back

on the times that I've done that. The agents have said, well, we love your, your writing's amazing. We love your story. We love the world is incredible, but we can't relate to your characters and we don't think we can sell them. And if you go the indie self-publishing route, that can be tough too.

Whether you do end up with a publisher or whether you self-publish, it can be a lot harder for autistic people to figure out how to do marketing in a way that works to them, how to connect to an audience. Because again, that's a social skill and it needs you to be on in some way, in a way that's often, you know, viscerally uncomfortable for an autistic person. So we face these barriers kind of at every level of the writing and publishing process. They do have an ally in Nick Walker. Besides being a professor and a writer, Nick is one of the founders of a publishing house called Autonomous Press, which has published many autistic authors. I mean, the big challenge is that we're small.

We're new and we're small and we're doing this part time, you know, on our spare time in a way we're hobbyists by necessity because we're not making any money off of this. We pay our authors good royalties and really work to promote the books. But the actual members of the collective are really doing this as a labor of love. That slows down our pacing, that we can only put out a few books a year because it just takes time to produce a good book. And we are committed to producing good books. But Dora doesn't write fiction because they want to reach a mass audience. My characters are not, I'm not writing them for the mainstream. I'm writing them because we need people like us in literature. We need to have that centering. And I've gotten, conversely, really positive feedback from within the autistic

and disability community. Those types of things make me think I'm getting it right for what I care about. So yeah, so that whole idea of relatable, relatable to whom? That's one of the great things about science fiction or fantasy. When you start reading a book or watching a show, you expect to meet characters that will see the world or reality itself in a very different way than what you're used to. The concept of normality is tossed aside, and those characters can be appreciated for who they are instead of focusing on who they're not. Well, that is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Ada Hoffman, Dora Raymaker, Nick Walker,

Quinn Dexter, and Shannon Tayo, who did the readings. Dora has a new novel out called Resonance. It's available on Autonomous Press. Autonomous Press also publishes collections of short stories called Spoon Knife Anthologies. I have links to all of their work, including Ada Hoffman's books and Quinn Dexter's YouTube channel in the show notes. Also thanks to Anna Nibbs, who is one of the listeners that suggested this topic and helped me figure out how to approach it. By the way, I am starting an Imaginary Worlds newsletter. It will let you know when new episodes have dropped and it will have notes about things I discovered while researching the episodes in the newsletters.

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