However, in being someone with Asperger's Syndrome who is devoted to science fiction, I am hardly alone. Surfing the Internet brings to light numerous observations that science fiction fans frequently exhibit all the traits of Asperger's Syndrome; a recent autobiography by one man with the condition, Will Hadcroft's The Feeling's Unmutual: Growing Up with Asperger Syndrome (Undiagnosed) (2004), describes his youthful fascination with science fiction and fantasy; and a book designed to comfort children with Asperger's Syndrome, Kathy Hoopmann's Of Mice and Aliens: An Asperger Adventure (2001), describes a boy with the condition who meets a newly arrived space alien and compares the boy's problems in adjusting to his world with the alien's problems in adjusting to life on Earth. All explicit links between science fiction and Asperger's Syndrome will necessarily be recent, because the condition — although first identified by Austrian doctor Hans Asperger in the 1940s — was not named until 1981 and was not accepted by the medical community until the 1990s; but there seems little doubt that Asperger's Syndrome has been around for a long time, and some have theorized that a wide variety of historical figures, including as Isaac Newton, Ludwig van Beethoven, Jane Austen, Alexander Graham Bell, and Albert Einstein, had Asperger's Syndrome. Still, there are reasons to believe that the condition became more and more common during the twentieth century — perhaps uncoincidentally, also the century that saw the emergence of the genre of science fiction.
