My kingdom for an Editor

Nice weather edition.

Kea's Flight by Erika Hammerschmidt and John C. Ricker.

This is such a hard book to rate. I found two sides, one which I liked, the other I didn’t much. For one, the whole set of ideas, characters (on the first half) and setting are amazing. On the other side, the execution, the lack of editor work and choice of progression were problematic for me.

The book takes a deep dive into tricky and not explored enough themes like autism, mental health, abortion, human rights, disability and how relative the normal label can be and the dire consequences of letting prejudice rule things. In a dystopian future where abortion is substituted by embryo removal (because is a sin, of course) of those deemed undesirable (another murky arena here), the way out is to send the unwanted to grow on decaying ships with shady people to take care of them, on course to probable planets to establish colonies. That felt a bit of a stretch, humanity has refined through history the out-of-sight (supposedly… come on) disposal of entire groups of people in cheaper, less fantastic ways. Anyhoo, we are in one of those ships, filled with kids that are treated poorly, which take us to the very real and actual misunderstanding of how some of these disorders work, where does that characteristic relates to value as a person and what opportunities might be denied by ignorance, worse, how much damage these attitudes can bring.

The characters are where the book shines, for the first half at least. We get a truly neurodivergent group of people, the mains being Aspies and autistic developed with thoughtful care, and they give us a glimpse of their perspective…. Maybe a little too much and here is where the first issue pokes out, there is a flood of ideas to communicate that aren’t filtered and the problem is not those ideas on themselves (I found them extremely interesting), but the delivery. They became extensive monologues that bury the plot, and the characters interactions feel less genuine and more as a stiff vehicle for those ideas. After the first half, even the characters are deeply buried in this flood and things start to fall to pieces. The interesting characters lose consistency, having huge shifts from one moment to another, lacking the progression and depth expected for them to take place. And finally, the ideas themselves lose track.

I guess the issues that bugged me more are borne of this departure. Take Kea for example, at first, she is strong willed and has a very clear independent and creative thought, this is completely washed away by her love for Draz. I kept thinking: Poor girl! The excessive praise for Draz, checking on him for things she already knows, it made a hollow out of her, she even starts doubting her value. Spoiler. What if she didn’t have the opportunity to trick Screen Man at the end? Where would her self-worth would be? End of spoiler. You also wonder here, where is the worth of non-savant neurodivergents? She is a supposedly linguistic savant (in a way, it felt more like she liked languages a lot, but I am ignorant of the issue, so…) and by that her super ability “isn’t useful”. Like… what? And here comes Draz, the computer savant, I didn’t understand the “leader” notion, it felt mismatched. I think their notion of group is the same, the way it holds itself and how they interact is different, but having ideas and hacking doesn’t make a leader out of you, hell, you don’t need to have any savant ability for that, it is a quality and hard work on its own. I don’t know what I missed, but the role of the group in some point was make up chatter and poke their eyes out… they couldn’t even pack some water? Study a blueprint of the ship? Check the situation beforehand? You don’t need to be a genius to do such things and neither the group has to hold hands and sing kumbaya, being overwhelmed and such, more like... purposeful ninjas (don’t get me started with ninja-Draz scene) with their tasks defined? I have to confess; the level of frustration was off the charts by this point.

Random mumbling.

The Gabria situation was shallowly handled (this is subjective of course), a huge wasted opportunity too and felt a bit weird the “I have empathy when others have empathy for me”. Why be greedy with empathy-like-gold-nuggets? It kind of gave me the impression that it reinforces the stereotype about care and empathy for neurodivergent people, when it is a more complex subject. Maybe I am not seeing something, the Gabria chick thing could have been a nice way to link and explore both things a bit deeper, just saying.

And then...

I don’t think I will continue the series, I liked very much what the author has to say, but the book didn’t work for me as I would love to.