I really enjoyed reading this! It is very well written. Thank you for sharing it with your subscribers. I am definitely going to check out those books. Congratulations on being published twice in Jewish Fiction Science Fiction Writers Create!
I also felt like an alien growing up, not because I'm Jewish (I went to Jewish schools and didn't socialise with significant numbers of non-Jews until university), but because I'm autistic and wasn't diagnosed until I was thirty-seven. Until then, I just thought I was weird, intellectually clever, but lacking in common sense, social skills and the ability (and, at times, the desire) to pass as "normal." I was bullied quite a bit for this.
Inevitably, this led me on to stories about aliens and time-travellers, other beings trying to pass as normal, but struggling, like me. I always empathised more with the aliens and eccentric scientists in these stories than with the "normal" viewpoint characters.
I think science fiction inevitably attracts outsiders and misfits, often highly intelligent ones, even before taking into account that science fiction has sometimes been stigmatised as a genre and required a willingness to pay a price socially to be caught reading it or talking about it in public. I have been laughed at in public on a number of occasions for my tastes.
I totally agree with you. One of my best friend is on the spectrum, and he knows even more about SF than I do 😊 Sometimes in my teens I suspected I might be autistic because I was never interested in being part of a girls’ clique and despised the things they talked about (apart from fashion). Since I liked myself just the way I was, I never sought a diagnosis and I was lucky to have the parents who thought the world of me anyway.
Elena, I enjoyed reading your essay. I know exactly what you’re talking about—I was also born in the Soviet Union and lived there for 39 years. And I was an alien too...
A powerful essay! I can feel you as I'm also a child of a communist world and know that beneath the layer of 'equality' it is probably the most racist society of all.
I really enjoyed reading this! It is very well written. Thank you for sharing it with your subscribers. I am definitely going to check out those books. Congratulations on being published twice in Jewish Fiction Science Fiction Writers Create!
Thank you, Dawn!
I also felt like an alien growing up, not because I'm Jewish (I went to Jewish schools and didn't socialise with significant numbers of non-Jews until university), but because I'm autistic and wasn't diagnosed until I was thirty-seven. Until then, I just thought I was weird, intellectually clever, but lacking in common sense, social skills and the ability (and, at times, the desire) to pass as "normal." I was bullied quite a bit for this.
Inevitably, this led me on to stories about aliens and time-travellers, other beings trying to pass as normal, but struggling, like me. I always empathised more with the aliens and eccentric scientists in these stories than with the "normal" viewpoint characters.
I think science fiction inevitably attracts outsiders and misfits, often highly intelligent ones, even before taking into account that science fiction has sometimes been stigmatised as a genre and required a willingness to pay a price socially to be caught reading it or talking about it in public. I have been laughed at in public on a number of occasions for my tastes.
I totally agree with you. One of my best friend is on the spectrum, and he knows even more about SF than I do 😊 Sometimes in my teens I suspected I might be autistic because I was never interested in being part of a girls’ clique and despised the things they talked about (apart from fashion). Since I liked myself just the way I was, I never sought a diagnosis and I was lucky to have the parents who thought the world of me anyway.
Elena, I enjoyed reading your essay. I know exactly what you’re talking about—I was also born in the Soviet Union and lived there for 39 years. And I was an alien too...
A powerful essay! I can feel you as I'm also a child of a communist world and know that beneath the layer of 'equality' it is probably the most racist society of all.
Thank you!