Aug 22, 2020
Karen “Kea” Anderson from Kea’s Flight is autistic
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Karen “Kea” Anderson from Kea’s Flight is autistic
Lefty from Kea’s Flight is asexual!
Kea's Flight - Kindle edition by John C. Ricker, Erika Hammerschmidt. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Use features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while reading Kea's Flight.
I just read this sci-fi novel, and it’s so good! It featured multiple autistic, disabled, and queer characters, and is written by two autistic authors. I found the protagonist, an autistic girl named Kea, to be super relatable. I love being able to relate to a main character! I also love that it portrays positivity, hope, and small acts of resistance in a dystopian setting. Circumstances are terrible, but this is not a bleak, cynical story. I really recommend this book, especially for autistic people looking for representation. The authors are currently working on a sequel, which I’m really excited for!
It’s only $3.89 for Kindle right now.
Here’s the summary on Amazon:
It's the 25th century, and humans have learned how to end unwanted pregnancies by removing and cryogenically freezing the embryos to save for later. But they never planned for how many there would be, or how much control people would want over their offspring's genetic makeup. Kea was an exile before she was born. Grown from an embryo that was rejected for having autism-spectrum genes, she has been raised on a starship full of Earth's unwanted children. When a sudden discovery threatens their plan to find a home, Kea must join with other rejects to save the ship from its own insane government.
Scifipulse recently caught up with Erika Hammerschmidt. She is an author, artist and speaker. Whose work includes Kea's Flight
Please check out my interview with Erika Hammerschmidt. Thanks a lot :)
I'm looking for a photorealistic artist who can draw faces and spaceships.
I'm interested in commissioning a design for a new book cover, for the relaunch of Kea's Flight.
The rough outline in the picture above is my concept. I'd like the cover to depict a young woman's face, about 20 years old. Just from the eyes up, looking over the surface of a chessboard. The chessboard is a piece of checkered fabric with frayed edges, and the chess pieces on it are a button, a screw, an action figure's foot, and a broken marble.
There is a parrot-shaped barrette on one side of her hair. (This is not in the book, but it represents her fascination with parrots.) The space behind her head is outer space, with a planet and moon on one side, and a spaceship on the other. The spaceship is two cylinders end to end, joined with a connecting tube.
I'll be posting this request on 99designs as well. To give an idea of what I'm looking for, here are examples of some artists whose styles I think would work well for this:
https://99designs.com/profiles/paganus
https://99designs.com/profiles/ramonamarc
https://99designs.com/profiles/1756599/designs/699310
https://99designs.com/profiles/1328241
See this post at https://www.erikahammerschmidt.com/2018/10/23/keas-flight-book-cover-commission/
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Follow for more alien/avian/autistic slices of life. I make crafts, write books, keep pets, grow plants, and have insights. https://www.erikahammerschmidt.com
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Way back in 2011, John and I self-published a novel called Kea's Flight.
It was one of the first sci-fi novels with explicitly autistic protagonists. Don Sakers reviewed it in Analog Magazine, and for a while it got a fair amount of attention in the online autism community.
In the 25th century, unwanted embryos can be removed and cryogenically frozen until they're wanted. This means there are more frozen embryos than anyone wants, and Earth's hypocritically pro-life government has found a solution. Robots and human convicts will raise the surplus kids, who grow up on starships bound for distant planets.
Kea was exiled as an embryo for having a genetic predisposition to autism. She has spent the first two decades of her life on a ship populated by young people who were removed for having disability-related genes.
She invents secret codes using board games, lectures herself on linguistics to stave off panic, and named herself after a species of parrot. And when a disaster threatens their plan to find a home, Kea must join with other rejects to save the ship from its own corrupt government.
We are getting gradually closer to publishing the sequel, Kea's Landing. And as we approach that time, we are thinking about a relaunch for the first book.
Although the book was notable for its time, I now feel that we could have done better. We're planning to relaunch a new edition by the end of this year, with some editing and a new cover. I hope we'll improve it a little bit, without disturbing the essence of what made it appeal to early readers.
We don't want to change much. But we feel it would be appropriate to do a few things, like:
- tone down how much the narrative talks about savant skills. (Not all autistic people have them, and they shouldn't be the only reason to accept us)
- add some moderation and nuance to Kea's rather opinionated rants about Earth's political issues, early in the book
- cut out some excess expository dialogue in places where readers feel that the story drags on too slowly
All this will be done gently, so as not to mess with what worked well for many readers. I'm well aware that some of the appeal of the story came with certain passages that may seem excessive to neurotypicals.
Those who loved Kea's linguistic infodumps, for example, should not fear losing them in the new edition. We'll only cut the parts that actually manage to bore US on our current read-through.
Anyway, we are hoping to have the new edition out by January of 2019. This may be over-optimistic, since our lives have been quite busy. But having a goal is better than nothing.
As time goes on, I'll be posting updates regarding the search for an artist to do our new cover, and any other developments that come up.
See this post at https://www.erikahammerschmidt.com/2018/10/04/kea-relaunch/
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Follow for more alien/avian/autistic slices of life. I make crafts, write books, keep pets, grow plants, and have insights. https://www.erikahammerschmidt.com
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Anyone want to pre-read the sequel to Kea's Flight?
Yup, we've got a sequel to this book written:
http://www.erikahammerschmidt.com/keas-flight/
(As that link explains, Kea’s Flight was an autism-centric science-fiction story self-published in 2011, that even got a nice review in Analog. Summary:
It’s the 25th century, and humans have learned how to end unwanted pregnancies by removing and cryogenically freezing the embryos to save for later. But they never planned for how many there would be, or how much control people would want over their offspring’s genetic makeup.
Kea was an exile before she was born. Grown from an embryo that was rejected for having autism-spectrum genes, she has been raised on a starship full of Earth’s unwanted children. When a sudden discovery threatens their plan to find a home, Kea must join with other rejects to save the ship from its own corrupt government.)
The sequel is called Kea's Landing, and I think it can be understood without reading the first book. In fact, I want it to be, and I'd like at least one proofreader who hasn't read the first one, to make sure it can.
(It's over 700 pages/300,000 words, just warning you. Some swearing, some sexual content.)
If you help out, I'll credit you on the dedication page!
I'll just send you a PDF and you can send me your comments on whatever you want. Or nothing, if you can't find anything to say-- no obligations. No real time limit. Just whatever you feel like giving. As much or as little as you’d like.
Here's the summary:
The coup is over. The Board has been overthrown, and Kea has inherited the office of Optimizer.
Together with Draz and Monarch, she now commands the colony starship that has always been her home. Young, socially challenged and inexperienced with power, she struggles with her fear of making the same mistakes as the dictatorial regime that came before her.
Meanwhile, she's investigating a mystery. She and Draz have found a hidden folder of journal entries from an enigmatic young writer named Mara, who has created a secret world of friendships and fairy tales, stirring Kea's empathy and challenging her views about disability and gender.
But nothing prepares Kea and her crew for what they will discover on the planet where they finally land to build their new city.
Without warning, they find themselves in a world that's both human and alien, caught in an otherworldly conflict involving genetic weapons, extreme body modifications, cloned spies, language barriers... and even parrots.
Through it all, Mara's journal gets even more mysterious. Is Kea reading the last words of just another casualty from the previous regime? Or will Mara's story turn out to be interwoven with space colony diplomacy, high-tech espionage, the secret past of Kea's enemies and allies, and the future of her newly founded home?
As I’ve mentioned before, John and I are working on a sequel to our novel “Kea’s Flight.” And we are trying to make it more sensitive and progressive than the first book, with wider representation of different disabilities, as well as wider representation of POC and the LGBT spectrum.
We are hoping to publish a new, edited edition of the old book around the same time we publish the sequel, because there are some formatting issues we want to correct, and perhaps some extras we want to add. But we’re questioning how much, if any, we should edit the old book’s actual content.
There are areas in “Kea’s Flight” where the main characters, despite being mildly disabled and among the most progressive people in their world, still seem out of touch on some social issues, including the rights of people with more severe issues like nonverbal autism and intellectual disabilities. I mean, they don’t lack concern for such people’s well-being, but there are scenes where it appears they don’t realize that they can actually ask those people for their opinions and listen to their thoughts.
Now, I think this out-of-touch viewpoint is understandable considering how they’ve been raised in a dystopian environment that values normality above all else. It mirrors my own childhood experience. For example, as an Aspie kid with high intelligence and savant skills, I took a long time to learn to respect other disabled people who had low scores on intelligence tests, because a huge part of my struggle was trying to fight against the stereotype that said all special-ed kids were “like them” and therefore we all had to be treated with condescension and disrespect.
I was so fixated on trying to prove to my special-ed teachers that I was actually smart, that it took me a long time to look beyond myself, and realize that maybe other people whose minds are slower than mine ALSO shouldn’t be treated condescendingly.
So I think it’s realistic for the characters in Kea’s Flight to have a similar mental block. In the sequel there will be events that help open their minds, and important new characters that they have to learn to understand and respect (though we will absolutely not put those characters there “just to support” the original characters’ development; they have their own stories that are equally important parts of the sequel).
But I still worry about people reading the original book, seeing the characters’ incomplete understanding of the world, and giving up on reading the sequel because of disillusionment. If we make a new edition of the first book, I still don’t think we should fundamentally change how the characters behave, but I’m open to suggestions.
In the wake of "The 100," I've also become aware of another big mistake John and I made in the original Kea's Flight. There are women who are attracted to women and then die. Well, only one in the actual timeline of the story: one apparently bisexual woman who's killed off screen, and then two (possibly lesbian or possibly bi) who are mentioned dying in the back story of the villain.
Now, the response to our book has been mostly positive, and we haven't received any actual complaints about those deaths. It's true that they aren't as bad as some of the stuff on TV. The women who die in Kea's Flight aren't particularly major characters, and they aren't the only people in the book who die, though their deaths are the most prominent. Their deaths don't come out of nowhere; it's hard to avoid deaths of LGBT+ characters in a dystopian future based on modern day conservatism. And they aren't the only lesbians in the story.... at the end of the book there's still a happy and loving relationship between two very major female characters who survived.
But still. There were women who were attracted to women and then died. And we weren't aware, at the time, of how common and how devastating that is in fiction these days. And we apologize.
John and I are currently presenting ourselves as a straight couple. Really, our sexual orientations are complicated, and there are parts to them that we aren't ready to discuss in public, especially John. (On Facebook, where our more conservative relatives have an obvious presence, we wouldn't even say this much.) But, since the face we currently show the world is that of a straight couple, we don't presume we have the right to speak for LGBT communities... especially because, at the time we wrote "Kea's Flight," we were not involved enough with LGBT communities to realize how much of a problem fictional lesbian death was.
So all we can say is that we are very sorry. And in the sequel we are doing our best to make things better. There is a limit to what we can do, though. We can't change the first book, unless we put out a new edition with different plotlines, and that would still not change the copies that are out there. And since the deaths occurred off stage, we could theoretically write something into the sequel explaining that they didn't actually die... but I have a feeling that wouldn't help much (though feel free to correct me if you think it would; we're still taking suggestions).
What we're going to focus on, mainly, is just putting a greater and more diverse LGBT presence in the new novel.
I'm not sure what assurances I can give, though. If I say no one's going to die and then no one dies, I've spoiled the ending. For many people, a big part of the enjoyment of reading a book is the suspense about whether their favorite characters will survive. But I have a feeling that gay people, watching a story with gay characters unfold, don't tend to enjoy that suspense so much. So I'll just say... we've learned from "The 100" and other similar catastrophes involving popular TV shows. And we're going to write the sequel accordingly.
And we welcome input from anyone who is concerned about what we will write. That goes for anything where you feel that the original book displayed insensitivity of any kind. Again, I don’t want to try and rewrite Kea’s Flight to make the original characters into flawless paragons of social justice, because most of us don’t start out that way, especially when raised in a society that tries to make us the opposite. But I want them to show signs that they can grow and learn, both in the first book and any more to come. And I want to fight against tropes that are harmful in their over-usedness.
Thank you.