Beyond Fiction: Cody Sisco on Neurodivergence, Technology, and Resilience

hello everyone and welcome back to telling my story the podcast where we explore real stories personal journeys challenges lessons and the experiences that shape who we become every once in a while you meet someone whose work goes beyond simply telling a story their work challenges you to look differently at society technology, identity, and even yourself. Today, I'm joined by Cody Sisko, a cyberpunk author, editor, publisher, and literary-cultural prose user. Cody writes cautionary utopias and unattainable history stories with a particular focus on queer science fiction and characters who refuse to be silenced or broken. His works explore fascinating and sometimes uncomfortable ideas around neurodivergence, technology, mental health, addiction, identity, and resilience. Cody, welcome to Telling My Story. It's a pleasure to have you here with us today.

Thank you so much. I'm looking forward to our conversation.

All right, to begin, I'd love to take you back to the beginning. What experiences and ideas led you to become the storyteller you are today?

Yeah, I think I grew up in a fairly... comfortable environment. So I grew up in California in the San Francisco Bay Area in a suburb. And, you know, life was kind of idyllic, you might say. I went to a public school. And On the surface, all was well, but growing up queer at that time was a bit of a challenge in terms of social acceptance. And so I think from a very young age, I learned to find, as Toni Morrison would call it, the source of my self-regard inside and to cultivate a kind of resistance within myself to persevere and fight against the social stigma around me. And so I think that, you know, hardened me in some ways, made me perhaps a little more brittle, but it's a quality that I took forward into my writing career much later when I started to write Broken Mirror, my first book. And it really fed this, you might say, obsession or interest in writing about characters who find themselves at odds with the world around them and yet still persevere and resist.

Well, that's actually very inspiring. So let's go to your novel, The Broken Mirror. Your novel, The Broken Mirror, features a young bioinformatic progeny whose cognitive condition is criminalized by the state. What inspired that premise?

A little bit of what I mentioned around my own life, but also, you know, I look around at family members and people that I went to school with and really just the wider society. And I see so many people who are struggling with poverty. cognitive differences. And we as a society tend to medicalize those. So anyone who diverges from the norm, the question arises, well, is this a condition? Is this an illness? Do we need to diagnose this? Do we need to medicate this? And I think that we've seen a rise in that phenomenon, the medicalization of difference. And of course, there are mental health problems and there are a variety of solutions, including pharmaceuticals. But to the extent that we conceive of difference as something to be eradicated, that's what causes me to... Well, to to to be concerned. And so, you know, addiction among my peers is another phenomenon that that is quite disturbing. You know, it