Speed Of Dark: Winner of the Nebula Award (Tom Thorne Novels)

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It may sound obvious, but it’s important to stay alert when driving in the dark. Tired drivers are a serious risk on the road and fatigue contributes to 4% of fatal road crashes in Britain. Because it’s so difficult to spot, the true figure could be much higher.

Lastly, just a quote. Lou's friend Tom explains that when lovers argue they don't stop loving each other: This is an illusion that darkness travels faster than the speed of light, and it is still agreed that no physical object can travel faster — since darkness has no mass. Empty SpaceThe fascinating thing about Elizabeth Moon’s The Speed of Dark is the voice. Lou Arrendale is autistic, and never for a moment in the first person narrative that forms the vast majority of this book do we step away from the fascinating way that he sees the world. He’s like an alien, by the definition of “thinks as well as a human but not like a human,” but of course he is also human. He is utterly logical, he sees patterns, and he doesn’t perceive social signals except sometimes as an entirely learned and intellectual thing. I don’t know if this is really how autistic people think, though since Moon has an autistic son and also did a lot of research, I’m sure this is the best possible representation of how we think they think, and goodness knows it’s utterly convincing. Set in our close future, genetic testing and treatment has cured most diseases including autism. But what about those born too late for treatment? This book follows Lou, a high-functioning autistic man who is part of the “missing” generation. He works for a corporation that is promoting a trial of a drug that might cure adult autism. Lou has a good job, friends who care about him, and

If you expand the concept of dark, however, it may appear that the dark has a speed all its own. Consider a dark spot in a beam of light, which might be created by placing a piece of cloth or other object over part of the light source. While this dark spot might not meet strict criteria for total darkness, it travels at the same speed as the rest of the non-obstructed light [source: University of Illinois]. This same speed of darkness holds true if you equate darkness to how long it takes for the light to go away when the power is switched off -- again, the speed of dark in this case is equal to the speed of light. Actually if you haven't read the blurb you ought to, I'm not even going to try to summarise it. The scifi here is about possible medical achievements which may improve quality of life for future generations while skipping over a generation of individuals who were the last to be born without genetic selection. This is my second book my Moon and I was expecting a very personal narrative which is exactly what she delivered. The writer is the mother of a son (adolescent at the time of this book’s publication) that has autism. The main character in this book has autism, but it takes place in the future where he has received better early intervention and treatment than exist today.

There are intense pressures coming from the world around him–including an angry supervisor who wants to cut costs by sacrificing the supports necessary to employ autistic workers. Perhaps even more disturbing are the barrage of questions within himself. For Lou must decide if he should submit to a surgery that might completely change the way he views the world . . . and the very essence of who he is. Driving in the dark takes more concentration than daytime driving, to make life easier you should try and avoid looking directly at oncoming cars. Widen the interpretation of darkness a bit further, and consider the speed of dark matter. This mysterious energy makes up 80 percent of all matter in the universe. In a 2013 study, scientists determined that dark matter should have a speed of 54 meters per second, or 177 feet -- slow compared to the speed of light [source: Armendariz-Picon and Neelakanta]. Of course, dark matter velocity is theoretical at this point, as this matter has largely stopped moving, preferring to form haloes around galaxies throughout the universe. The 54 meters per second figure estimated its speed when the universe was first forming, extrapolated to how fast the dark matter could travel today if it were still in motion [source: Woo]. The climax is rushed and inauthentic. We never actually see the character change, we don't witness the effects as they happen, instead they are lightly explained in choppy montage at the end. Compared to the rest of the book--an internal, step-by-step presentation of a fairly different mind--this sudden, convenient, external ending is disappointing and jarring. The title refers to a philosophical construct Lou thinks of—we know the speed of light, but when light gets there, dark is there before it, and we don’t know the speed of dark. At different times this is viewed as ignorance being illuminated, and as the darkness inside of the head being pierced by light. It’s indicative of how well Moon shows Lou’s perceptions from inside that we come to value what he is the way he is and hesitate with him over having his darkness illuminated.