Review: The Speed of Dark

The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Autistic is different, not bad. It is not wrong to be different. Sometimes it is hard, but it is not wrong."

The protagonist, Lou, is described very well by the blurb and it was a genuine delight to follow his thought processes. This review is chokkas full of quotes from the book because you don't need to be autistic to relate to many of the introspective observations:

"It would be simpler if people said what they meant."

Actually if you haven't read the blurb you ought to, I'm not even going to try to summarise it. The scifi here is about possible medical achievements which may improve quality of life for future generations while skipping over a generation of individuals who were the last to be born without genetic selection. This is my second book my Moon and I was expecting a very personal narrative which is exactly what she delivered.

There are some standard evil players in the game, the manager who puts profits before people and the doctor who projects their presumptions onto their patients are two early examples.

But most of the characters are wonderfully complex too. The head of Lou's department has some internalised guilt for abandoning his own low-functioning autistic brother to a full-time adult care facility which he assuages partly by his work with Lou and other high-functioning autistic employees.

This is not a typical scifi adventure, although there are a few hints (other than medical) at just how far ahead the science is in this future. For example:

“light is an abstraction of sorts. And they used to say it existed only in motion, particle, and wave, until early in this century when they stopped it.”

That's a science achievement that I couldn't stop thinking about and it definitely helped to get a hold of the titular idea, one that Lou mentions in several contexts throughout the story:

"In my mind, photons chase darkness but never catch up."

"Not-knowing definitely seems faster than knowing."

If you've never read from an autistic person's perspective, I think there will be plenty of insight here that may take you by surprise.

"I do not understand the rules about interrupting. It is always impolite for me to interrupt other people, but other people do not seem to think it is impolite for them to interrupt me in circumstances when I should not interrupt them."

"he is pushing into my life, rushing me, making me feel slow and stupid. I do mind that. Yet he is acting like a friend, being helpful. It is important to be grateful for help."

"All the interventions, all the training, were like software designed to make a bad computer work right. It never does, and neither did I."

"I want to know what we know now, not what my parents might have heard when they were children. What difference does it make if someone in the distant past thought there were canals on Mars?"

"Learning is not hard. Not learning is hard. I wonder why they are not learning it for long enough to feel like work. “It is easy to see in my head,” I say instead"

Once Lou finds out about the potential treatment he takes it upon himself to learn as much about the brain as he can. He's surprised to find that he can understand it quite well:

"All my advisers and counselors told me to go into applied mathematics, so I did. They told me what I was capable of, and I believed them. They did not think I had the kind of brain that could do real scientific work."

When I see it I point it out, the quote above makes the unfortunate and regrettable mistake of labelling applied mathematics as not "real scientific work".

As he's learning about brain function he begins to realise that he's not actually broken at all. He reads the following in a neuroscience textbook:

“Essentially, physiological functions aside, the human brain exists to analyze and generate patterns.”

And for Lou it really connects:

"My breath catches in my chest; I feel cold, then hot. That is what I do. If that is the essential function of the human brain, then I am not a freak, but normal. This cannot be. Everything I know tells me that I am the different one, the deficient one. I read the sentence again and again, trying to make it fit with what I know."

And that's when he realises something that we should all perhaps consider:

"Maybe if the things I was told about myself were not all correct, the things I was told about normal people were also not all correct."

The narrative changes perspective probably two or three times, to keep the reader up to date with things that Lou doesn't see.

I felt the story was a non-stop, relentless drama but maybe I connected a bit too hard. Everything could feel like it was about to blow out of proportion, his lovely old lady neighbour prying a little too much or just bumping into a girl he likes at the supermarket for two examples. But there is actually major and tense drama in this story too. One of Lou's friends is out to hurt him and he doesn't believe a friend could do that so he barely considers it, right up to gun point.

"But some people don’t think too well, and it’s easy for them to blame someone else for anything that’s wrong in their own lives."

There's a humour in Moon's writing that helped to ease some of the tension at just the right times:

"The wheel with its saggy flat tire mocks me."

I felt a bit let down by the ending. But there are enough reviews on GR that'll tell you how it ruined the whole book for them, so I'm not going to get into it. It didn't ruin it for me, it's a nice end, a lovely end, and there's nothing at all incorrect about the message that it carries. But it did feel just a bit like it took something away from some of the earlier messages in the book.

All in all this is a highly recommendable, thoughtful exploration of some unintended consequences that we should try to foresee as we advance medical science.

Lastly, just a quote. Lou's friend Tom explains that when lovers argue they don't stop loving each other:

"it’s hard to explain, Lou. We love each other, and we love each other even when we’re angry. The love is behind the anger, like a wall behind a curtain or the land as a storm passes over it. The storm goes away, and the land is still there."

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