Thanks for the write up! Given the awesome panel and audience, I'm eager for as many reports from this one as possible. My people is so right on.
One point was made re: OCD. It's all well and good to sprinkle some on a detective to explain why they're good at details (I'm looking at you, Monk) but the actual experience of OCD if often being too stuck to get to the scene of the crime.
John Varley has several heroes with serious mental illness. Both in the Titan, Wizard & Demon "Gaean Series" and in Steel Beach, where the hero's constant suicides are foiled by very advanced medicine.
I'm also rereading Marge Piercy's heartbreaking Woman on the Edge of Time. Piercy plays with the "mad seer" trope in very intriguing ways. If her "crazy" hero is indeed only imagining her contact with folks 250 years in the future, it's still a much better use of her time than being "present" in the hellish reality of ward life in a public mental hospital in the 1970s.
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One point was made re: OCD. It's all well and good to sprinkle some on a detective to explain why they're good at details (I'm looking at you, Monk) but the actual experience of OCD if often being too stuck to get to the scene of the crime.
John Varley has several heroes with serious mental illness. Both in the Titan, Wizard & Demon "Gaean Series" and in Steel Beach, where the hero's constant suicides are foiled by very advanced medicine.
I'm also rereading Marge Piercy's heartbreaking Woman on the Edge of Time. Piercy plays with the "mad seer" trope in very intriguing ways. If her "crazy" hero is indeed only imagining her contact with folks 250 years in the future, it's still a much better use of her time than being "present" in the hellish reality of ward life in a public mental hospital in the 1970s.