Bebe Parton's Blog

Clementine, the main character in Humanity 8.0: The Last Administrator, is autistic.

I am autistic too, although I was only diagnosed as an adult. By then, I had already spent years wondering why things that seemed easy or natural to other people could be so difficult for me.

When I started writing Clementine, I did not want her autism to be a mystery to solve, a hidden superpower or something she needed to overcome.

It affects how she processes noise, uncertainty, change and other people. It affects what she notices, how directly she speaks and what happens when she becomes overwhelmed. But it is not the explanation for every decision she makes.

Sometimes she is observant and funny. Sometimes she understands a situation before anyone else does. She can also be defensive, jealous, controlling and completely wrong.

That mattered to me.

Autistic characters are sometimes written as either emotionally detached geniuses or unusually innocent people who exist to teach everyone else a lesson. I wanted Clementine to feel like an actual person. She loves deeply, gets frightened, makes excuses and convinces herself that controlling the circumstances around someone is not the same as controlling them.

It is a useful distinction until it isn't.

Giving her control over humanity made this even more important. The device does not turn her into a different person. It simply gives her existing fears, instincts and flaws far more power than they should ever have had.

I did not want readers to agree with everything she does. I wanted them to understand how she got there, even when they desperately wanted her to stop.

That, for me, is much more interesting than writing someone who always makes the right choice.

You can find Humanity 8.0: The Last Administrator here on Goodreads.

I never really planned to write Humanity 8.0.

The original idea came from a dream about humanity being reset and someone being left with a device that could control what happened next. I kept thinking about it afterwards, especially about what an ordinary person would actually do with that kind of power.

Then my mum died in March.

That changed the story quite a lot.

The science fiction part was still there, but the question at the centre became much more personal: if someone offered you the chance to have the person you lost back, what would you be willing to agree to?

Clementine isn't a scientist, politician or chosen saviour. She's just someone grieving her mum who suddenly gets given far more control than any human being should probably have.

And, unsurprisingly, she doesn't always use it particularly well.

A lot of the book became about that line between protecting people and controlling them, and how easy it is to convince yourself you're doing one when you're actually doing the other.

It's strange having the book out in the world now after spending so long with these characters.

If anyone reads Humanity 8.0, I'm always happy to answer questions about the story, the characters or where the idea came from. Spoiler-free if needed.