Autism was added to the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1980, but Asperger's syndrome wasn't included as a separate disorder until the fourth edition in 1994. Like most distinctions in the world of childhood developmental disorders, the line between classic autism and Asperger's syndrome is hazy, shifting with the state of diagnostic opinion. If not forcibly engaged, these children spend their waking hours in trancelike states, staring at lights, rocking, making high-pitched squeaks, and flapping their hands, repetitively stimulating ('stimming') their miswired nervous systems.Īsperger's notion of a continuum that embraces both smart, geeky kids like Nick and those with so-called classic or profound autism has been accepted by the medical establishment only in the last decade. At the less fortunate end of the spectrum are what diagnosticians call 'profoundly affected' children.

Once he gets out of junior high hell, it's not hard to imagine Nick creating a niche for himself in all his exuberant strangeness. He'll be able to live and work on his own. One of the estimated 450,000 people in the US living with autism, Nick is more fortunate than most. In the taxonomy of autism, those with Asperger's syndrome have average-or even very high-IQs, while 70 percent of those with other autistic disorders suffer from mild to severe mental retardation. His inability to pick up on hidden agendas makes him easy prey to certain cruelties, as when some kids paid him a few dollars to wear a ridiculous outfit to school.Īsperger's syndrome is one of the disorders on the autistic spectrum-a milder form of the condition that afflicted Raymond Babbitt, the character played by Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man. Clearly bright and imaginative, he has no friends his own age. He's infatuated with fantasy novels, but he has a hard time reading people. They've known that Nick was an unusual child for a long time. Nick's father is a software engineer, and his mother is a computer programmer. The music of his speech is pitched high, alternately poetic and pedantic-as if the soul of an Oxford don has been awkwardly reincarnated in the body of a chubby, rosy-cheeked boy from Silicon Valley. 'I'm thinking of making magic a form of quantum physics, but I haven't decided yet, actually,' he explains.

As he tells me about his universe, Nick looks up at the ceiling, humming fragments of a melody over and over. He's already mapped out his first planet: an anvil-shaped world called Denthaim that is home to gnomes and gods, along with a three-gendered race known as kiman. Nick is building a universe on his computer. Autism-and its milder cousin Asperger's syndrome-is surging among the children of Silicon Valley.

Silberman autism