Portrayal of neurodiversity in Seveneves by Neal Stephenson

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Niall
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02 Dec 2015, 5:42 am

Readers of the works of science fiction writer Neal Stephenson will be familiar with his positive treatment of neurodiversity, from the characters of both Lawrence and Randall Waterhouse (and others) in the uber-geek tome Cryptonomicon (with its theme of instructing genocide-target populations on defensive warfare) to just about everyone in the Baroque Cycle.

This is not a review, of which there are plenty out there. This is a spoiler-light (but not spoiler free) examination of themes of diversity, particularly neurodiversity, in Stephenson's neutronium-hard science-fiction novel Seveneves. If a copy of the Cryptonomicon is arguably the most information-dense object in the universe, Seveneves has to be one of the hardest. Both should be read by any self-respecting geek.

It's not fair to say that this book is about neurodiversity, but it's a vein that runs through it, one that is crucial to its structure, but a quick web search suggests it has been largely overlooked.

The novel opens with the surface of the Earth under imminent certainty of complete obliteration, the extinction of all life inevitable. The future of the world's life lies underground, or off the planet. At the beginning this is curtailed by some unpleasant realities. Most of the survivors are going to have to be, to put it less than finely, functional uteruses to carry diverse genetic material to term: and competition for those places is going to be vicious.

To make the first bit of it work requires people intensely focused on technology: it's even specified that the population on the initial space station is “skewed towards the Asperger's end of the social spectrum”.

From an Aspie perspective however, perhaps the most interesting character in the first part of the book is Sean Probst – highly intelligent, self-made billionaire, and utterly clueless social klutz who is smart enough to see the flaws in the plan and get them fixed. He's the one who realises the whole plan is a way to keep seven billion doomed people as quiescent as possible until the end, until he points out that there is a way to actually make the scheme work. It's mentioned in passing that he's on the Autistic spectrum. Did I mention he saves humanity? Without giving too much away, Probst is very definitely a positive role model for many Aspies. The main problem is that he's also one of those characters who raise expectations in our own minds and those of others.

(Spoiler) By the end of the second part of the the book many of the plans have come to nothing, and most of humanity has succumbed to disaster, accident, illness and conflict, to the point where the survivors, eight women of whom one has already gone through menopause, can sit round a table and work out where to take the species.(/spoiler)

It's clear from this, and the loss of a bank of diverse human embryos, that the only way forward lies in artificial parthenogenesis, where an embryo with a single parent can be created out of a normal egg, in a way that the offspring will look a bit like the parent, but not be a true clone. It's going to take their one remaining geneticist a while to work out how to create a functioning Y-chromosome but, in the meantime, there is a serious threat of hereditary disease. These can be edited out, but what actually constitutes disease?

The removal of alpha thalassemia, a blood disorder that reduces the production of haemoglobin, from the human genetic heritage is a fairly straightforward decision. Cystic fibrosis and breast cancer go the same way.

Far too many of us are familiar with the debilitating effects of bipolar disorder, but there is an argument to be made that it's actually a useful adaptation. “When things are bad, you become depressed, retreat, conserve energy. When things are good, you spring into action with great energy.” Depression too, the ability to recognise the worst of outcomes, has its uses in society, but with great cost to the individual. These are questions that are not truly resolved (although there is a hint later that depression has been left alone), but Stephenson is at least ready to ask them.

It's agreed, under a certain amount of duress, that any recognised genetic disease will be identified and edited out of the human genome. After that, each embryo will have one tweak, at the discretion of the mother. Needless to say, there is a lot of gaming of the system, which only makes things more interesting.

There has already been a lot of commentary online, in relation to this novel, about the extent to which personality traits might be genetically determined, a point that might be taken as given by many Aspies. Is aggression, for example, actually bad, or is the problem a lack of discipline? Finding genetic markers for these might be more complicated. The first question about whether such traits can be determined genetically is an important factor in the third and final part of the novel.

All this is in a high-tech environment where many of the instincts that served us well on the plains of Africa are obsolete, and what is needed is a species made up of intelligent nerds.

The third part of the book jumps ahead five thousand years: all the people we have learned to care about before are long dead, and the terraforming of Earth is under way. Thousands of years of deliberate genetic tinkering, the kind of selective mating that goes on when you spend a lot of time among those you perceive as your own kind and more open pairings you'd expect of more conventional mixing, as well as other factors emerging from the peculiarities of living in a big orbital settlement, have resulted in a human population of around three billion, but one probably much more diverse, certainly genetically and arguably culturally, that that of the human species of the early twenty-first century. Arguably there are seven major human “races”, although they seem to be at least partly capable of reproducing with each other, often complementing each others strengths. This is to the point of reconstructing a strain very like Neanderthals. It's also clear that, while this has been a source of conflict, it's one of the things making it all work.

There is nothing like Asperger syndrome mentioned among these complex, often interbreeding populations, but it's clear that many Aspie traits have survived, even thrived, in the high-tech environment.

The most interesting character, to me at least, in the third part of the book is a distant descendant of the survivors' geneticist. Her only surviving offspring had a set of epigenetic switches encoded in her DNA, which were passed on to future generations. At periods of extreme stress, these switches turn on, and the personality of the individual changes over the space of a few days. This is followed, presumably in order to ensure the long-term survival of the new genotype coupled with the benefits of genetic recombination, with a period of intense sexual desire.

This strikes me as a great idea for a species that may face major changes in its environment. Eventually an individual's genotype will “fix” into a final configuration, but it's unwise for any member of this part of the human race to marry beforehand, lest their partner wake to find the old personality dead and a new one in its place.

It's clearly hard on the individual, just as AS is hard on the individual, but it has great benefits for the broader population - a theme that runs through the whole book.

This novel is a strong read for any lover of hard science fiction, and for anyone interested in neurodivergent populations and heterozygosity in general. There are many more ideas expressed in this work – as usual Stephenson has done his research, and it's hard to summarise even one aspect of it - but this is a positive depiction of how a diverse population is stronger than a more limited one.


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Dennis Prichard
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13 Dec 2015, 7:43 am

I wish for a future where people will be more the same.

Like more autistic.


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Niall
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13 Dec 2015, 7:48 am

Dennis (or anyone who agrees with him):

Why?


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Eloquaint
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17 Jan 2016, 9:30 pm

I have a serious bone to pick with how Stephenson represents bipolar disorder. And I have treatment-resistant bipolar, so this is a subject to which I have dedicated a lot of thought and research time.

“When things are bad, you become depressed, retreat, conserve energy. When things are good, you spring into action with great energy.” Bulls**t. That's the description of a healthy human mind reacting to trauma or bereavement or some other form of grief. Bipolar episodes are arbitrary periods when one's circumstances may very well-often do- have NO bearing on one's mood. Any form of biochemically based depression is not the same as the kind of depression for which one can account-the kind for which you can point to a specific cause and say "There, that's it. That's how it began."

Unless Stephenson is referring, with great subtlety, to the feelings in the brain of the bipolar person, his characterization is wrong. I think, having read the book twice, that he is not employing such sensitivity.

I also think that, as usual, he wraps up the story too quickly. Does he get bored at the end of his 800 page novels? He's my favorite living author, but the criticism remains. Also, if you're interested in neurodiverse characters in his works, you should check out Barb in Anathem.


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