Saturday, March 3, 2018

Book review: The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon

The Speed of Dark is a science fiction novel first published in 2002.  It is astonishingly good. The main reason it is so good is the voice of the protagonist. 

In the novel, therapies for autism that treat it in early childhood have been found. However, the protagonist, Tom, is too old for them.  He is definitely autistic and he also has a great many abilities. In particular, he has an extreme ability to see patterns. This serves him well in his job (which is never specified too exactly, but involves some sort of high level pattern matching) and in his hobby of fencing, where he picks up on the patterns of his opponents.

Tom lives an ordinary life in extraordinary ways. He has a job, he has attractions to a woman and worries if she reciprocates, he has a hobby, he has friends - some of them autistic and some not. At his job, he has a sympathetic boss but that boss's boss is very unsympathetic boss.

Moon, who has an autistic son, manages to show all this through Tom's eyes while using that to make us see Tom very vividly.  She also puts in some plot twists which I will not detail in order to avoid spoiling the novel for you.

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