Year: 2006

I’d heard quite a lot about the book “The Curi­ous Incid­ent of the Dog in the Night-Time” by Mark Had­don, but I tend to dis­count the breath­less reviews in news­pa­pers and the like, since I find I often don’t have any­where near as high an opin­ion of any giv­en book as review­ers do. But when a couple of blog­gers I read recom­men­ded it, I decided it was prob­ably worth a try (thereby prov­ing the old adage about word of mouth being much more effect­ive than oth­er forms of advert­ising). So when I was last in Oxford, I picked it up in one of the 3‑for‑2 Sum­mer Read­ing sales. And promptly decided it was worth read­ing, and worth the book­club read­ing. Which we did.

The book works on a num­ber of levels, I find. It’s writ­ten simply enough that it’s a quick read, without los­ing depth of mean­ing. As an adult read­ing the book, you know what’s going on long before the nar­rat­or Chris­toph­er does, leav­ing you to observe his fig­ur­ing it out too, and to won­der what he’ll do when he knows. Chris­topher­’s observ­ances of life and people, the seem­ing logic (although much of it isn’t at all logic­al) are remin­is­cent of vari­ous sci­ence fic­tion char­ac­ters, such as Spock in Star Trek, or the wit­ness Ann in “Stranger in a Strange Land”. The book lets you see the dicho­tomy where sci­ent­ists are trained to not jump to con­clu­sions, and to be care­ful about assum­ing that A implies B, but in social inter­ac­tions people are expec­ted to infer motives from beha­viour, and to make assump­tions about likely causes and mean­ings. Chris­toph­er has prob­lems in large part because he does­n’t make the con­nec­tions and infer­ences that most people would make. The big­ger part is that his reac­tions to vari­ous stim­uli are so over­whelm­ing that oth­er people can­’t under­stand them.

I like tak­ing books like this to book­club because we dis­cov­er dif­fer­ent mean­ings in the dis­cus­sion; every­one sees dif­fer­ent points. One mem­ber, who works in the school sys­tem here, poin­ted out how high-func­tion­ing Chris­toph­er was when he could make him­self remem­ber the extra teach­ing he was giv­en, that he could learn what the expec­ted reac­tions were to every­day social inter­ac­tions even if he did­n’t under­stand them. And that the care-givers also have to be taught how to react, how to sup­port the learn­ing pro­cess that takes so much longer and is so much harder than with chil­dren who don’t have Asper­ger­’s or autism.

All in all, an excel­lent book to read and think about, espe­cially if you’re a geek, sci­ent­ist, or have friends or fam­ily who are. There are cer­tain traits that Chris­toph­er has that geeks and sci­ent­ists share, though (of course) not usu­ally to the same degree.

The book­club decided to read Hein­lein’s mas­ter­piece — the bril­liant spec­tac­u­lar and incred­ibly pop­u­lar nov­el (quote from the back cov­er of the Ace Sci­ence Fic­tion edi­tion, pub­lished in 1987). The book Stranger in a Strange Land has­n’t quite stood the test of time (assum­ing it ever did match up to the breath­less praise). War of the World’s review is decent and points out some of the strengths and weak­nesses of the book.

The book­club found the book worth read­ing for its his­tor­ic­al value, even though the sex­ist and racist tones are irrit­at­ing, the dia­logues don’t quite match up to the sup­posed soph­ist­ic­a­tion of the char­ac­ters (par­tic­u­larly Jubal), and the bits about the archangels don’t appear to serve any pur­pose. The book could have done with a good edit­ing. A couple of inter­est­ing ques­tions came up – we spent some time dis­cuss­ing pri­vacy in a tele­path­ic world, espe­cially on how one would bring up chil­dren with a sense of who they are in such a com­munity, and the implic­a­tions of a group where people take money as they need it and give money as they can (shades of the social­ist ideal from each accord­ing to his abil­ity, to each accord­ing to his needs that nev­er seems to work bey­ond a small circle of people, such as a family). 

In the end, we came to the con­clu­sion that there were good ideas in the book, and parts of it were reas­on­ably well-writ­ten, but that there must be bet­ter sci­ence fic­tion out there, with believ­able dia­logues and char­ac­ters. Does any­one have recommendations?