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Fiction for the Autistic
Remember the SNL sketch about "dance theatre for the blind," in which the joke was that the dancers weren't blind, they were just really bad dancers and therefore appealed only to a blind audience?
I came home from Pennsic to find (among other mail) a paperback SF book from my father, Virus by Bill Buchanan. No note, no comment, but I figured he found it interesting and I would too. Within the first five pages I had concluded "This is really incredibly badly written." But I persevered, and it didn't get any better, and eventually I concluded "This is pretty well written for an autistic reader."
I'm a tech geek, not particularly sensitive to non-verbal cues or social niceties. I've always assumed that if I were to write fiction it would be plot-driven, not character- or style-driven, and as a military/cyber-thriller this book had to be plot-driven. But at least I know about the first rule of fiction writing, "Show, don't tell." In this book, every feeling, every motivation, every personal quality, is laid out explicitly in the most prosaic and literal language imaginable, as though the reader were utterly incapable of drawing his/her own conclusions about such things. There's an obligatory romance thread or two, with awkward dialogue (not in the awkward way that people actually talk when they're in love, but rather in the awkward way that somebody who had never been in love would imagine it). The author seems to equate the verb "quip" with "say with a smile," so it's often used in connection with utterances that aren't intended to be remotely funny or "quippish". The American characters are about half an inch deep, the Iraqis maybe a quarter of an inch.
The plot and the technical stuff, on the other hand, is reasonably plausible. (No spoilers, really; all of this is fairly obvious from the first chapter.) It's 2014, and the Strategic Defense Initiative has grown to 100% global coverage by satellites armed with high-energy lasers for shooting down missiles. To spot "stealth" aircraft and missiles, the satellites also have some very good, genetically developed AI. Since most of the programming was developed genetically, rather than written by human beings, no human actually understands much of it, so it works "too well" during a live test and damages some of the testing aircraft. Military personnel anxious about their careers and the program's funding insist on changing the software on an accelerated schedule, without testing; an Iraqi spy [the book was written in 1997, after the first Gulf War but before 9/11 and the second] finds out about the circumvented testing procedures and inserts a virus into the program; the satellite software becomes completely autonomous and paranoid, and starts shooting down anything that flies anywhere around the world. There's a dramatic assault on the central computer, obviously written to be turned into a screenplay, and the good guys save the world.
Anyway, that's over with. Maybe I can do something more rewarding with the rest of my weekend, like clean house.
I came home from Pennsic to find (among other mail) a paperback SF book from my father, Virus by Bill Buchanan. No note, no comment, but I figured he found it interesting and I would too. Within the first five pages I had concluded "This is really incredibly badly written." But I persevered, and it didn't get any better, and eventually I concluded "This is pretty well written for an autistic reader."
I'm a tech geek, not particularly sensitive to non-verbal cues or social niceties. I've always assumed that if I were to write fiction it would be plot-driven, not character- or style-driven, and as a military/cyber-thriller this book had to be plot-driven. But at least I know about the first rule of fiction writing, "Show, don't tell." In this book, every feeling, every motivation, every personal quality, is laid out explicitly in the most prosaic and literal language imaginable, as though the reader were utterly incapable of drawing his/her own conclusions about such things. There's an obligatory romance thread or two, with awkward dialogue (not in the awkward way that people actually talk when they're in love, but rather in the awkward way that somebody who had never been in love would imagine it). The author seems to equate the verb "quip" with "say with a smile," so it's often used in connection with utterances that aren't intended to be remotely funny or "quippish". The American characters are about half an inch deep, the Iraqis maybe a quarter of an inch.
The plot and the technical stuff, on the other hand, is reasonably plausible. (No spoilers, really; all of this is fairly obvious from the first chapter.) It's 2014, and the Strategic Defense Initiative has grown to 100% global coverage by satellites armed with high-energy lasers for shooting down missiles. To spot "stealth" aircraft and missiles, the satellites also have some very good, genetically developed AI. Since most of the programming was developed genetically, rather than written by human beings, no human actually understands much of it, so it works "too well" during a live test and damages some of the testing aircraft. Military personnel anxious about their careers and the program's funding insist on changing the software on an accelerated schedule, without testing; an Iraqi spy [the book was written in 1997, after the first Gulf War but before 9/11 and the second] finds out about the circumvented testing procedures and inserts a virus into the program; the satellite software becomes completely autonomous and paranoid, and starts shooting down anything that flies anywhere around the world. There's a dramatic assault on the central computer, obviously written to be turned into a screenplay, and the good guys save the world.
Anyway, that's over with. Maybe I can do something more rewarding with the rest of my weekend, like clean house.