by Theodore Boronkay
Fantasy and sci-fi literature are both filled with examples of neurodivergent characters in strange universes. SFF writers can highlight realities ignored in our familiar reality by re-positioning the marginalized within hypothetical contexts that other genres couldn’t explore, allowing them the best opportunity to comment on the treatment of the neurodivergent. Dr. Matthias Stephan, an English literary scholar, further argues that fantasy is the superior genre for marginalization commentary because it’s frequently more detached from contemporary reality than even sci-fi. Though compelling, this argument reduces SFF’s representation to being measured only by how estranged an SFF text is from reality. Furthermore, fantasy texts like Every Heart a Doorway and sci-fi texts such as The Speed of Dark, complicate Stephan’s over-simplification of neurodivergent representation in the two genres.
In his essay, “Do you believe in magic? The Potency of the Fantasy Genre,” Stephan relies on literary critic Darko Suvin’s explanation of the difference between sci-fi and fantasy. Using Suvin’s analysis, Stephan highlights how sci-fi’s rationality situates its stories within the real world, or in Suvin’s words, the ‘zero world of empirically verifiable properties.” In other words, sci-fi’s appeal is its merging of the imaginative and the possible by creatively applying actual scientific principles. Conversely, Stephan insists fantasy’s reliance on magic, a force definitionally devoid of rational explanation, makes the genre far more “purely” imaginative and estranged from “zero world” reality than sci-fi.
At the heart of both genres, though, is the novum, a thing or group of things that separates an SFF story’s universe from the readers’ world. Stephan describes fantasy nova as the infusion of exclusively supernatural laws of nature into the fantasy universe. For example, while a sci-fi novum could be an extraterrestrial starship, a fantasy novum could be a race of elves who can cast spells.
In fairness, Stephan’s basic definitions of the two genres are logical. Fantasy literature’s magic can make the impossible possible without rationalization, while sci-fi’s science requires rationalization to make the impossible possible. Nevertheless, the scholar’s conclusions aren’t as strong as his definitions.
According to Stephan, the more “estranged” a story is, the freer the writer is to reimagine real-world issues of marginalized groups. However, fantasy’s abstract illustration of life with a neurodivergent condition isn’t necessarily more impactful than sci-fi’s more “grounded” illustration. Furthermore, Stephan’s “estrangement spectrum” undervalues sci-fi’s imaginative potential and ignores the consequences of removing context by placing marginalized identities in an obscure reality.
An example of such removed context is Seanan McGuire’s fantasy novella, Every Heart a Doorway. The novella is set in a “Home for Wayward Children” in which youths who’ve traveled to parallel realities, called “portal worlds,” interact while learning to cope with their return to reality. Despite its location on planet Earth, the Home is still what Stephan would categorize as a “secondary world,” a world similar to the reader’s that is also exposed to supernatural nova.
When first meeting Nancy, Eleanor West—the Home’s owner—rejects realist philosophy by declaring, “‘Real’ is a four-letter word.…’” Those who’d ended up in portal worlds “unburdened” by any rational scientific laws take the supernatural for granted. While not the primary setting, the “portal worlds” also exemplify literary fantasy’s “second-worlding” element.
Stephan might claim that the novella’s absolute estrangement from reality “allows us the freedom to explore all possible speculative alternatives” to our constrained world. Theoretically, these “speculative alternatives” can situate the neurodivergent in scenarios where their perspectives and experiences can be thoroughly explored.
For example, the novella’s characters, namely Nancy, the protagonist, exemplify a particular dimension of neurodivergence, represented by their portal worlds. Nancy’s portal world, titled “The Halls of the Dead,” seems to reflect depression and anxiety. During her time in the Halls, Nancy “had sometimes been expected to hold her position for days at a time, blending in with the rest of the living statuary.” This stillness, comparable to a living death, indicates an avoidance of active participation in, a symptom of depression.
Eleanor further reinforces the depressive overtones of the Halls by noting the fact that Nancy “must have been someplace with no sun … given the skin on [her] neck.” A lack of sunlight symbolizes a refusal to go outside into the sun, a debilitating form of depression. Finally, the convergence of depression and anxiety is emphasized after Nancy walks into the Home’s dining room and reverts to her statuesque condition, remembering that when “she was still [in the Halls], the ghosts couldn’t see her to steal her life away.” The idea that any activity might drain one’s life is a significant factor behind the lethargy of those with extreme anxiety and/or depression.
The fact that it takes two paragraphs to provide a layman’s diagnosis for just one character from this novella was the actual purpose of highlighting the above quotes. Whether urban fantasy or not, Every Heart a Doorway, like many other fantasy texts, avoids most modern language related to neurodivergence. However, by placing familiar medical realities in a “purely imaginative” context, some readers may struggle to decode the story’s allegorical representation properly. As a result, the reader’s own subjective interpretation is the only true frame of reference for the possible mental states of the “wayward children,” leading to simple conjecture. Fantasy’s limitless estrangement is thus both its strength and its shortcoming.
In contrast, sci-fi texts like Elizabeth Moon’s The Speed of Dark are unencumbered by the obscure language that mires literary fantasy. In the aforementioned text, the “cognitive constraints” of science fiction allow the protagonist’s neurodivergence to be recognizable to the reader. The protagonist, Lou Arrendale, a bioinformatics specialist, specifically has autistic traits which his employer coerces him into “curing” with a neurological intervention in the novel’s near-future setting.
Danielle Collett’s thesis, Neurodivergence in Science Fiction: Identity, Ethics, and Technology as a “Cure,” praises this explicit language. As she explains, by clarifying that Lou is autistic, the novel keeps the reader from being forced to “diagnose” the protagonist. The Speed of Dark may be a sci-fi novel, but its world, aside from the nova of the “autism-curing” technology and space travel, is fairly indistinguishable from ours. Thus, Lou’s autism can be spoken about without being enshrouded in vague fantastical terminology.
Of course, if down-to-earth realism is the foundation of sci-fi’s social commentary, then one could argue that sci-fi is the same as other non-speculative genres. However, limited estrangement from the real world is not the same as no estrangement at all. The novel’s hypothetical procedure that can undo the neurological causes of autism might not be purely imaginative, but it counts as a “speculative alternative.”
Such a procedure bridges the gap between the neurodivergent and neurotypical while simultaneously widening the gap. Collet asserts that this cure brings important questions to the surface. Is the cure worth Lou losing his pattern-recognition skills, a key autistic trait? Is a normal life a happy one? Can an autistic person stay themselves without autism?
The hypothetical possibility that one’s very personality can be altered with one surgery is relevant for both the neurodivergent and neurotypical characters. If autism can be “removed” with a neurological procedure, then perhaps it can also be added. This scenario facilitates an important question: If Lou is defined by his neurodivergent condition, then would that not also mean that those without his condition are defined by its absence?
Collett emphasizes the symptom of pattern recognition in Lou’s autism as an important aspect of his pre-surgery lifestyle as seen by his intricate analysis of all available medical information before opting for the surgery. Relying on the language of modern science, Lou discovers, to his shock, that his autistic mind only diverges from the mainstream, not from what the brain is meant to be. His familiar reality of science textbooks and medical terminology provides Lou with the words he needs to understand his condition and the absurdity of the “autism cure.”
Unfortunately for someone like Nancy, no such language exists as a result of the fantastical setting. With no references to any describable neurodivergent condition, Nancy and her peers are instead provided with a crude classification model for their portal world experiences: the Nonsense-Logic-Wickedness-Virtue (NLWV) Compass. In Eleanor West’s Home, portal worlds are positioned somewhere within a compass that measures such worlds by the levels of logic and virtue.
Reducing someone’s mindset to four general terms, however, undermines the nuances of their neurodivergence. During her first group therapy session, Nancy is asked about whether or not the Halls of the Dead were Wicked or Virtuous and only replies that the Halls didn’t seem Wicked, defending the Lord of the Dead as fair and rational.
At the same time, though, these Halls contained life-draining entities and enabled Nancy to starve herself by living only on pomegranate juice. Sumi, Nancy’s friend, is quick to point out that the Halls may’ve been more sinister than Nancy believes.
Trapped between the fantastical dichotomy of Wicked and Virtuous, Nancy is left with nothing else to say about the Halls except that she felt safe and comfortable there. The NLWV Compass doesn’t allow for language like “manic depressive disorder,” “schizophrenia,” etc., and thus the characters are arguably ill-equipped to understand the nature of their altered psyches.
To Stephan’s credit, he does clarify that a fantasy text can have some familiar attributes and recommends that writers make sure that the estrangement does not go beyond anything plot-relevant. However, the NLWV Compass is an important part of Every Heart a Doorway’s worldbuilding and is therefore an unavoidable obstacle for the characters within the fantasy setting. The freedom from reality allows the neurodivergent characters to explore their conditions in ways they couldn’t in our “grounded” world, but this exploration fails to reveal any deeper truth about their lives.
In the case of The Speed of Dark, the truth of Lou’s autism spectrum disorder is presented in very clear terms following his choice to undergo the life-altering procedure. Interestingly, pre-surgery Lou had friends in his fencing club and even a love interest, Marjory. Following the surgery, though, he’s “lost connection with his old friends and taken up new residence [within the confines of a spaceship] … untouchable and impossibly distant.” Lou’s decision to become “like everybody else” hasn’t increased his social skills so much as it’s altered them, only gaining new friends but not more friends. While “the operation was intended to rid Lou of his autistic ‘deficits’ such as his difficulty with social interactions,” he was more alone than ever.
This tragic irony was the purpose of creating a world with a cure for autism: to impress upon the reader that autism is not a disability, but a condition no better and no worse than neurotypicality. The confines of futuristic neuroscience not only fail to limit the imaginative nature of the novel’s premise but also present Moon’s primary message in the only truly effective way.
I do not wish to promote the reverse of Stephan’s main argument. The real reason that sci-fi’s strengths are emphasized alongside fantasy’s weakness is merely to reject Stephan’s estrangement spectrum. Just as speculative nova can put real-world issues into perspective, the comparison between The Speed of Dark and Every Heart a Doorway puts fantasy’s “limitlessness” into perspective.
While imagination in SFF plays a critical role in representing neurodivergent communities, imagination should be measured by how much mental energy goes into the story, not how untethered the story is from reality. Both sci-fi and fantasy can explore new possibilities. The effectiveness of either genres’ social commentary is limited only by how the writer applies their creativity to their text. However, fantasy writers must be careful with how real-life marginalized groups are represented in the abstract, and ensure that the reader can clearly understand the subtext. Speculative fiction’s commentative potential can ultimately be found in the intersection between the realism of marginalization and the realization of another world where marginalization can be challenged.
