Haddon obviously doesn't suffer from a problem such as Asperger's, but there is lot of him in Christopher -- the love of math, for example, and also his need for solitude. "I was always one of those outsider kids," he says. He read gobs of science as a kid, avoiding fiction like a contagion. It wasn't until his teen years that he began wanting to write, and it was only at the last moment that he decided to study English lit rather than math at Oxford. "A narrow escape," he now thinks.