A new dawn

“Normal” is just a drier setting, Elizabeth Moon says in her Nebula-winner sci-fi novel Speed of Dark. The hero, Lou Arrendale, is a “high-functioning” autistic. Thanks to intensive childhood therapy, he has flowered into a productive member of the community. But he missed out on the medical advances that “cured” autistics who were born after him. He often wonders how normal normal people are, especially when he goes to a supermarket.

Now, an intolerant new supervisor has turned Lou’s life upside down: either submit to an experimental surgical treatment to normalise autistic adults, or resign, he’s told. Should he give in? What would it “cost” his identity? Even if the risky surgery were to succeed, would he still be himself?

Would he be like a caricature, a seemingly normal version of his former self ? Lou is not one of those people who think that God makes bad things happen just so that people can grow spiritually! Lou believes his autism was an accident.

God did not prevent it, but He did not cause it either. Lou thinks while his autism was a random accident, what he does with it is all about him. Meanwhile, the reel life envisioned by Moon’s fiction inches closer to real life.

After years of stagnating research, doctors have made a series of therapeutic advances: first they found a drug candidate for reducing the symptoms and learning disabilities associated with Down’s syndrome. Then they found a way of turning off the genes causing the syndrome. Now, a new key to turn down the syndrome has been reported. Should we thank God, science or chance?