Book Review: Irrelevant

Title: Irrelevant 

Author: Sara Addison-Fox

Date: 2019

ISBN: 978-0-9951188-2-9

Quote: "I'm not supposed to be nervous about the day I take my Relevance Test, but I am."

Does Relevance mean intelligence? Competence? Not...exactly. It turns out to mean something more like "ability to function as part of a totalitarian government." 

The narrator of that passage (this is one of those books where two narrators take turns, and they sound exactly alike) is Mallory. Addison-Fox obviously believes Mallory is autistic. Young people like Mallory accept the label "autistic" so they can get pensions but, even though Mallory does show a few reactions that suggest some brain trauma in her past, she's not disabled in any way. She's very sensitive to others' "feelings" as well as her own, and there's nothing abnormal about her "feelings." Anyone who remembers that "autistic" literally means disabled by having perceptions so skewed that one fails to learn to communicate even basic approval and disapproval with other people, by being a person who's likely to fall over sidewise if spoken to unexpectedly or howl with pain at the touch of water, will cry foul to Mallory's even claiming that label for herself, much less anyone else telling her that it describes her. 

Mallory is an intelligent eighteen-year-old with a conscience and a habit of rocking back and forth when crying, visualizing a friendly flying dragon when distraught. She fails the Relevance Test because, when asked what she'd do in various job situations, she gives answers indicating that she'd think for herself rather than obey or conform. She's not allowed to go home, but dumped outside the city walls into a little community of fellow Irrelevants. None of them shows any evidence of brain trauma, though the author evidently thinks they're autistic too. 

Real autism, the falling-over-if-spoken-to and howling-at-the-touch-of-water and similar genuinely disabling symptoms, does not exist in this story and it seems unfair to people who have real autism that the book mentions autism at all. A case could be made for using "autistic" to mean "self-directed," if it weren't in general use as meaning "disabled by inability to perceive consensus reality." But it is. Mallory's world doesn't seem to be so much healthier than ours that nobody has the disability we know as autism. The suspicion arises that people whom anyone not on the take would call autistic don't exist in Mallory's world because they're killed and made into the unpalatable nutrient bars people eat.

Anyway, while undergoing the torture of withdrawal from various drugs she's been fed for years--some to maximize docility, some as experiments--Mallory forms an instant bond with a boy, Cristan, who's been dumped out long enough that his skin has tanned. He has lots of temporary tattoo ink, which Mallory adores, not because ink does anything for women but because women tend to adore any and all characteristics of men who show actual concern about us before demanding that we make unwanted babies with them. They can hardly keep their hands off each other even as they're learning how the city government became increasingly totalitarian, even shutting out colors, apparently because it was allowed to do so. It all began with censorship, they're told.

This is volume one of a trilogy, so questions remain unanswered, the main plot unresolved, at the end. 

If you like dystopias, what's not to like about this one is that reading it may make you want to buy the other two books in the trilogy. If you don't like dystopias, well, you've been warned.