The curious fascination that many autistic people have for quantifiable data, highly organized systems, and complex machines run like a half-hidden thread through the fabric of autism research. Asperger may have been the first clinician to notice that his patient’s imaginations occasionally anticipated developments in science by decades, forcing him to amend his statements that their interests were “remote” from real-world concerns. Many turned their youthful obsessions with science fiction into a career in science. For many people on the spectrum in the years when they were still invisible to medicine, science fiction fandom provided a community where they finally felt like savvy natives after years of being bullied and abused by their peers for seeming naive, awkward, and clueless.
Another community that enabled autistic people to make the most of their natural strengths was amateur radio. By routing around the face-to-face interactions they found so daunting, even people who found it nearly impossible to communicate through speech were able to reach out to kindred spirits, find potential mentors, and gain the skills and confidence they needed to become productive members of society.
SCIENCE FICTION
From Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories grew pulp fiction and the first fandom in the modern sense, with its own elaborate customs, art forms, specialized jargon, conventions, and absurdly bombastic internecine warfare. This fractious and fertile milieu nurtured the careers of many writers who went onto mainstream fame, including film critic Roger Ebert and screenwriter Leigh Brackett, celebrated for her work on The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye, and The Empire Strikes Back. Other fans became science fiction immortals themselves, including Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Frederick Pohl, and Ursula K. LeGuin.
Most importantly, magazines like Amazing Stories and Weird Tales fired up the imaginations of those who turned the extravagant visions of their favourite authors into cold facts. The original members of the British Interplanetary Society, founded in 1933 to promote space exploration, were avid readers of the pulps. Arthur C Clarke observed in 1948, that many American scientists were also fervent fans, and that “aeronautics would never have reached the stage it has now if it wasn’t for science fiction, which has done much to break down the psychological barrier that retard our progress.”
Darko Suvin, a leading scholar of the genre, described the subversive impulse at the heart of science fiction as an expression of “cognitive estrangement” from the mainstream. Fandom tapped into a deep yearning to rise above the circumstances of humdrum existence and become part of something noble, people-informed, and not widely understood. The thrill of being part of something that few people could appreciate was particularly keen for those who had spent their lives being ridiculed. No one could make you a fan – or prevent you from being one – but yourself and no one could judge you but your peers of choice: your fellow ”fen”. Early fans indulged these newfound feelings of confidence and superiority to the hilt, referring to the clueless nonfans who ran the world as ”mundanes”.
Unlike cult followings based on sports teams or rock stars, science fiction fandom was rooted in an essentially solitary activity: reading. Traits typically viewed as pathological or pathetic in the mainstream (like obsessing over trivia while accumulating vast hoards of treasured ephemera) were rewarded in the community as signs of “trufan” commitment. Fandom offered what every homesick space child yearned for: membership in an elite society of loners united by their belief in the future. For those who had felt like exiles their whole lives, forced to live among strangers, becoming a fan was like finally coming home.
In 1940, a Canadian, A.E. van Voyt raised the bar and inaugurated the golden age of science fiction. He portrayed “normal” human beings not as saviours but as the enemy. His tropes echoed through later generations of science fiction: the political machinations in Dune, Star Trek’s half-Betazoid counsellor Deanna Troi, the hunt for rogue replicants in Blade Runner, the mutant superpowers of the X-Men. First-generation fans saw a reflection of their predicament in the tale of the superintelligent, supersensitive, and profoundly misunderstood mutants struggling to survive in a world not built for them.
Claude Degler carried this notion further. He was obsessed with electricity at a very young age and plunged into science fiction. Precociously bright, Degler made the honour roll in high school, but when he was 15, his anxiety, depression, and violent outbursts – exacerbated by constant bullying – resulted in his expulsion. In 1936, he was committed to the Eastern Indiana Hospital for the Insane. After reading van Voyt’s Slan, his true destiny became clear. He and his fellow fen were “star-begotten” mutants trapped behind enemy lines. Science fiction was the first stirrings of a geek uprising against the mundanes who had oppressed them for so long. “Fight to make the world safe for science fiction”. He contributed to a dizzying array of publications in the 1940s and advocated the formation of all-fan households called Slan shacks, where his comrades could pursue their passions with minimal interference from pesky mundanes. One in Battle Creek, Michigan attracted fans from everywhere, to savour “the feeling of closeness, of being able to be open in our ideas”. Slan shacks popped up all over the US and the United Kingdom. He fell out of favour when it became obvious that many of the organizations existed only in his brain. But there was more than a grain of truth in Degler’s insistence that science fiction fans were mutants struggling to survive in the margins of a society that did not understand them. A significant minority of his fellow fans would likely have been eligible for a diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome had one been available. For people on the autism spectrum, the alternate universes of science fiction may have felt less alien than the baffling sea of mundania in which they found themselves marooned.
HAM RADIO
Many fans were also ham radio operators, and there was a significant crossover between the two subcultures. A significant number with keen interests in science and engineering ended up working in menial jobs because of their limited social skills. Fandom was a community that was unusually accepting of individual quirks and differences.
Gernsback’s amateur radio network turned out to be a boon for those most likely to yearn for an Isolator. One ham alone in a garage with a spark transmitter was a nerd – but a network of hams was a force to be reckoned with. By chaining stations together in relays, a Chicago amateur could “work” his equivalent in Christchurch, passing messages around the globe. Planet Earth suddenly became a very small and convivial place for a ham.
During WWII, the British spy agency MI8 secretly recruited a crew of teenage wireless operators to intercept coded messages from the Nazis. By forwarding these transmissions to the crack team of code-breakers at Bletchley Park led by the computer pioneer Alan Turing, these young hams enabled the Allies to accurately predict the movements of the German and Italian forces.
With the rise of wireless, the scattered members finally had a way to become a collective force in the public sphere. Ham radio was an activity that rewarded fascination with apparatus, systems, and complex machines, and amateurs with keen memorization abilities had an advantage because all hams in the United States were required to learn Morse code to earn their FCC licenses until 1990. With parts available by mail at reasonable prices, it was an affordable hobby that could be pursued in solitude Hams who struggled with spoken language could avoid talking altogether by communicating in code. (a photo of an early gathering of hams showing two men sitting across a table from one another, communicating by tapping out dots and dashes on milk bottles with spoons). But those who enjoyed gabbing away could “chew the rag” with other hams for hours, employing a lexicon as witty and ritualized as the jargon of fandom. The culture of wireless was also a strict meritocracy where no one cared about what you looked like or how gracefully you deported yourself in public. If you knew how to set up a rig and keep it running, you were welcome to join the party.
A new world opened up to him. First, he gets a new name – his radio call letters. Thenceforth he has a new personality and new social status.
Wireless also offered ways into the job market for people who couldn’t depend on their ability to charm interviewers or cultivate networks of in-person contacts. The society of hams also enabled shy introverts to study the protocols of personal engagement from a comfortable distance. They learned about communication between people – the give-and-getting process, which is what communication is all about.
TV made its public debut in 1928, 172 spacecraft left the earth’s surface in 1967, and a new generation of visionaries raised on do-it-yourself electronics and pulp science fiction was laying the groundwork for a global network that would make the wireless revolution look quaint.
