If I were given only one word to describe “Movement” by Nancy Fulda, I would choose beautiful. I have more words, and will do my best to use them well, but I wonder if any can do as much justice to the story as the one.
Hannah is an unusual character, suffering from what specialists call “temporal autism,” though she isn’t sure how aptly the label fits. At least, not the autism part. She is trapped in a strange world, with unique perspectives and ways of perceiving things. Her parents are trying to decide whether or not to okay a procedure to make her “normal,” and Hannah does not know what she thinks about that.
One of the powers of the written word over more visual mediums like television is the ability to get inside a character’s head and show us a perspective we would not otherwise know. For the space of this story, I was Hannah, looking out at a futuristic world through her eyes. And it was…beautiful.
I highly recommend this story.
Quotable Line: “Connections within my brain are forming, surviving, and perishing, and with each choice I make I alter the genotype of my soul.”
Title: Movement
Author: Nancy Fulda
Length: 3900 words
Published in the March 2011 issue of Asimov’s.
Also available in kindle edition.
Nancy Fulda is a Phobos Award winner, a Vera Hinckley Mayhew Award recipient, and has been honored by Baen Books and the National Space Society for her writing. Her fiction has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Jim Baen’s Universe, Apex Digest, and other professional venues. She has been a featured writer at Apex Online, a guest on the Writing Excuses podcast, and is a regular attendee of the Villa Diodati Writers’ Workshop.
Nancy is donating all December revenue from sales of Movement to the National Foundation for Autism Research. You can learn more about that at her web site.
Three-Question Interview
Hannah is a terrific character, one who, I think, represents any number of people who don’t quite live in the world the way we expect them to do. Who or what was your inspiration for her character?
My son has an autistic spectrum condition. At the time I was writing Movement, he and I were struggling to understand each other. It doesn’t feel right to say that Hannah’s character was inspired by him, because he and Hannah have almost nothing in common. (My son is verbal; Hannah isn’t. My son expresses his fascination with causality through games and stories; Hannah dances.) But Hannah’s personality and her unique perception of time definitely grew out of my floundering desperation to comprehend a mental architecture that was utterly foreign to me, and from my son’s tender and diligent attempts to do the same.
I am pleased to report that, for my son and me, the story has a happy ending. There are plenty of mountains left for us to scale, but we’ve found a common ground that lets us be ourselves and still enjoy each others’ company.
Would you stop writing for a million dollars?
I hope my writing never gets so bad that someone would pay that much money to get me to stop.
What are you working on now?
I’m completing the first draft of a coming-of-age novel set on a planet with a slo-o-o-o-w axial rotational and nomadic caravans that live in the twilight regions between day and night. The story focuses on Mikaena, who’s a sort of black sheep in her caravan and always gets in trouble for trying to do what’s right. She ends up involved in a plot to change society and save her world from destruction, and none of it turns out the way she expects.
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