I’ve always loved aliens and robots. Spock and Data have been some of my all-time favorite characters since I was a kid, and since then I can add on many more: Murderbot, the Doctor (from Doctor Who), the other Doctor (from Voyager), and now Rocky from Project Hail Mary. It’s hard to even say why. They’re just obviously the best characters!

In neurodivergent circles, I find a lot of us imprint on these characters and obsess over them. Or we make our own kinds of aliens and invent complicated worlds for them. There’s something we find relatable there.

But I have also heard it said that robots and aliens should not be autistic-coded, or that these characters can’t represent real autistic people. I’ll be honest, that criticism bugs me a lot. But I also don’t want to dismiss it out of hand.

What is it about robots and aliens?

It almost seems unavoidable that, when you invent a type of person that has an entirely different way of thinking from the average human, that character is going to seem autistic to readers. Which seems odd, because couldn’t you just make them different from the human norm in the opposite way to whatever autistic people are like?

Well, you can’t, actually. Because autism is a very big umbrella, united only in the fact that autistic people diverge from the norm. You can say, “Oh, instead of a very literal robot (too autistic coded) I’ll make a very non-literal alien who speaks only in cultural references!” Oops, there are also autistic people who do that.

In fact, the whole exercise in imagining a non-human mind is about moving your empathy beyond similarity (“we’re all the same deep down”) and into acceptance of difference (“many people feel entirely unlike how I do, but their feelings are just as important”). An idea which is crucial to autism acceptance. 

You cannot erase autism by saying “I’m sure that autistic person feels just like me.” They don’t, and if you treat them like they do, you may make them very uncomfortable or fail to communicate well. The only way to accept an autistic person is to figure out how their brain works, as best you can, and work with that. Which incidentally is also how you would communicate with an alien if you met one!

Another key point is the experience of—if you’ll pardon the word—alienation. When a robot or alien exists within a mostly-human cast, they have the experience of constantly having to explain themselves, to adapt. It’s an experience autistic people understand very well. Whenever there is one character different from the others, we immediately point and go “that guy. That guy is me.”

Symbolic vs. literal representation

Science fiction and fantasy have a way of discussing real-world issues with analogs and parallels. In some ways, this can be better than doing it directly, because by abstracting the issue from our present-day biases, we can see the thing more clearly for what it is. At the same time, these plots can be criticized for not actually doing representation.

Take Star Trek. In the TOS episode “Balance of Terror,” another officer expresses mistrust for Spock, saying that because he looks like a Romulan, he might secretly be working for the Romulans. This is a very obvious symbolism for the way white Americans mistrusted Japanese-Americans during World War II. The writers were counting on people who saw that theme in this new context to understand that looks are a stupid reason to mistrust somebody who’s been on your side all this time. And then maybe they would put two and two together and think, “Huh. I guess we shouldn’t act that way in real life either.”

But in that same scene, Sulu is sitting on the bridge, played by a real Japanese-American actor who suffered internment. That’s literal representation. The writers didn’t want to say that even in the future there would be bigotry against Japanese people. So they didn’t write that plot about Sulu, but they did have him there.

Both kinds of representation are important, in my opinion. Symbolic representation cuts to the heart of  issues, while literal representation is about making sure the cast of a story represents real humans as they actually are. One hundred plots about space racism don’t take the place of putting real Black people on the bridge. Both are vital.

In the same way, I would say that robots and aliens may be an excellent symbolic representation of autism. We can talk about issues like communication and alienation without having to literally include all the autism criteria in the DSM. I often enjoy this kind of representation better for being a little less direct.

But it’s not actual representation. It is not a substitute for having humans with literal autism on the page. Because autism is a condition experienced by humans which involves, specifically, growing up outside the norm for your own species. That’s a different experience than being a robot or alien who was always expected to be like that.

The problem

So what is the problem people are pointing to, when they say “robots and aliens are bad autism rep”?

The first concern people seem to have is that it’s dehumanizing. If we’re saying this robot is like an autistic person, are we then saying autistic people are like robots? If we say Spock is autistic-coded, will people start thinking all autistic people are like Spock?

It’s a valid critique. There’s already a misconception that autistic people aren’t emotional, because they may not express their feelings the same way others do. So robot depictions can reinforce that. Likewise whatever alien you choose can reinforce other misconceptions. In general, if autism is only ever represented by non-humans, it’s a little alienating in itself, suggesting that this isn’t a perfectly normal human way to be.

Bullied by the narrative

There’s one specific kind of autism coding that deeply upsets me, and I don’t think authors can get away from it by saying, “That character isn’t actually autistic, they just come across that way to readers.” This is a thing that I call narrative bullying, for lack of a better word.

This is when you have a character—often the comic relief character, but it can be a background character or villain—with whom the perspective of the story tells us not to empathize. Their feelings, whether fear, hurt, love, or anger, are played for laughs. Consider Gimli, in the Lord of the Rings movies (not the books). His entire existence is there to lighten the mood. Other characters experience fear, love, the horrors of war, and so on. Gimli’s just mad he can’t see over the wall. Haha let’s all laugh at Gimli.

I hate this. I hate it so much. Because when a character is like this all the time, the audience is given permission not to empathize with them at all. Their feelings don’t matter.

And what if that character is autism-coded? It reinforces a lack of empathy for autistic people in the neurotypical viewers, while the autistic viewers feel directly bullied. They see the autism coding or the alienation and go “that guy, that’s me!” Then five minutes later the character misunderstands something…and everyone points and laughs.

The reader who related to that person now feels bullied too. Because the whole of the narrative is saying “these traits that you relate to? We think they’re dumb and laughable.”

This happens a lot with Spock in Strange New Worlds. Spock was funny in the original series, but there he seemed in on the joke. In SNW, he often seems to be the butt of it.

Likewise, as much as I love Data, The Next Generation is a little too willing to poke fun at him sometimes. When he recites a poem, Riker falls asleep. Haha silly robot, trying to make art. Which, given his heavy autism coding, leads to a feeling of “haha, silly you, autistic viewer.” It’s a little uncomfortable just how often the rest of the crew corrects him, cuts him off, or tells him he’s doing things wrong. As much as I love the character, I think if the writers had been conscious of how many viewers would relate deeply to him, they wouldn’t have written quite so much of that.

Writing them as people

In my post about aliens, I said that you have a responsibility as an author to write aliens as people. That is, you should have all the same respect and empathy for them as you do for your human characters. That’s true whether or not they seem autistic to the reader, because you can never control who will relate to your characters. Any time you write a character who is meant to be a person, you need to give them all the thought and respect that you would give a human character.

When characters are, deliberately or not, written with autistic traits, that becomes all the more important. I think this is probably where most of the criticism comes from: when robots or aliens are simultaneously autism-coded and depersonalized (I can’t say dehumanized, but you know what I mean). They don’t feel, they’re weird, they’re creepy, they’re unrelatable. And that ends up bouncing back onto people’s perception of real-life autistic people.

For the opposite treatment, consider Murderbot. It’s actually a cyborg and does have feelings. Since we experience the whole narrative through Murderbot’s perspective, there’s zero chance of us depersonalizing it. We can see the whole time that Murderbot feels, wants, hates being treated like an object, and simultaneously refuses to try to be more human. Questions like, “Should I mimic ‘normal’ behavior to fit in,” and “How can I connect with others who aren’t like me?” are relatable questions autistic people ask themselves, dealt with narratively through this symbolic representation.

I don’t think there can be anything offensive about this way of doing it. Not everyone’s going to like it, sure, but quite a lot of autistic people love and relate to Murderbot.

How to pull it off

Hopefully I’ve made clear what the main pitfalls are. In the end, I come down somewhere in the middle on autistic robots and aliens. I don’t think it is necessarily wrong to give robots and aliens autistic traits, nor to explore autistic issues that way. But it can be problematic when those same characters are depersonalized in any way.

And there’s definitely something to be said for including literal representation as well: human characters with real clinical autism. That can educate neurotypical readers on what the autism experience is actually like, as well as simply creating a world that reflects the diversity of our own.

That said, I have often hated this type of autism representation, which is why I’ve always preferred the aliens and robots. And I think the reason for that is that people are trying a little too hard. Even autistic writers, fearful of getting something wrong, will pull out the DSM and try to stick all the traits in there. And these characters don’t feel authentic, because they’re not much more than a laundry list of diagnostic criteria.

Consider this:

“Fascinating,” Indy McAutism said, in a monotonous voice which is characteristic of autism. She put her giant headphones over her ears, because all autistic people are sensitive to sounds. Then she stimmed by flapping her hands.

“I love and respect you so much,” said Norm von Typical. “Here, I will give you a big squeezy bear hug, which I have learned from my Autism Experience that all autistic people like.”

Like. Please for the love of pete just give me a weird alien that you didn’t think was autistic when you wrote her.

This is the opposite problem to the “robot that doesn’t really read as a person” issue. This is a poster child and not a person either. She’s written to embody a list of traits, but her individuality is completely lost. I don’t want to be shown all her autistic traits before I am shown what she likes, who she cares about, and how she takes her tea.

So this is why I would say it’s a lot less important whether your autistic characters are human than whether you wrote them as a person. Write nuanced characters full of depth, and don’t play autistic traits either for laughs or for representation points. Just write people. As you go, you may find some of them are autistic. Make that just one thing about them, not their whole reason for being in the book.

What’s up with me:

This post is pretty timely for two reasons. First, it’s Autism Month, and second, this month’s sale theme is non-human characters.

Here’s an itch bundle I’m in for autistic writers of autistic books. I went back and forth about whether to submit, because I’m not diagnosed. But my kids laughed at me and said basically, “We are, and you’re no different than us.” Which is fair enough. I submitted Bisection, because not only are all the alien characters autistic-coded in one way or another, but so is Eleanor, the human scientist. There are a lot of other neat books in the bundle too. It’s only available till the 14th, so check it out soon if you’re interested.

This is where to sign up for my April Aliens sale. Despite the name, any and all non-human characters are fair game. The signup will be open until the 16th, and the sale itself begins the 23rd.

Finally, the huge biannual Narratess Indie Book Sale is live from the 11th to 13th only. Invasive is in there, along with over 250 other books at steep discounts. Be sure to check it out while it’s open.