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This book is about as 'sci fi' as an episode of . Moon basically takes 'Flowers for Algernon' and hacks off the ending. The writing was alright, and there was some interesting characterization, but I suspect it only got the Nebula and Clarke because award committees love nothing as much as political correctness. This book is the equivalent of an actor making an Oscar bid by playing a mentally-challenged character.

I know Moon is a sci fi author, but in this book, it feels like she just stamped on the 'Sci-Fi' label in order to draw an audience, or perhaps because her publisher refused to authorize a genre switch. I hope that isn't true, because that's always a cheap move. This is just modern pop-fiction, an 'emotionally confessional' book with a veneer of 'vaguely near-future'.

This wouldn't have been a problem if Moon had used this opportunity to explore human psychology, which was how 'Algernon' and 'A Clockwork Orange' treated this same theme, but she didn't. She rehashed half of an interesting idea, and failed to capitalize on it.

Speculative Fiction has always been obsessed with what makes us human, and how much we can change before we stop being human at all. While that should be the main theme of this book, it goes almost unexplored.

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 denouement following the climax is particularly tidy, with all the subtlety of the end of an 80's college movie where we learn through super-imposed text that "Barry went on to win the Nobel prize" to the strains of Simple Minds.

And it's a shame, because the story leading up to the climax is interesting enough, presenting the psychological workings of autism. Moon researched this disorder much better than Mark Haddon in his 'Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night Time', but then, Moon's son is actually autistic.

There was also a part about fencing, which excited me at first, being a former competitive fencer and coach, but instead, it was just weird SCA dressup boffing. Not that I have anything against SCA dressup boffing (or do I?).

It's an alright read, goes pretty quick, and it might give you some insight into brain disorders, but it doesn't tie human experiences together; which is really a shame, because other sci fi books have successfully used this topic to ask some very difficult and profound questions about how the future of technology might change the way we think, and about the different ways people process information.

'Flowers for Algernon' tackled the exact same themes and was written sixty years before Moon's less profound attempt. You'd think we'd have something more to say after sixty years of neurology and psychology, but apparently not. It also pales in comparison with 'A Clockwork Orange', another good light sci fi which explores the morality of changing the way that people think.

This book was light and fluffy, especially given its subject matter, and while it will probably make soccer moms feel proud of themselves for reading something so 'different', it doesn't endeavor to change the way they think about humanity, the mind, or the possibilities within us.