Science fiction fans tend to love outsider stories like this, as many of us identify with the position of the outsider, even when we are white middle-class citizens solidly inhabiting all the demographic medians of American society. And all of us relate to stories about that period of our lives when we were painfully insecure and made momentous decisions that changed our lives forever.

Also, the story has a delightful frisson of horror running through it like a steel thread. The narrator, who is obviously ambivalent about the characters and the story he is describing to us, slowly begins to foreshadow a rather nasty ending to his tale. From the first paragraph, we know we are hearing the history of something momentous ("It all started when Cletus Jefferson asked himself 'Why aren't all blind people geniuses?'") But as the story goes on -- about halfway through, in fact -- we start to get a chilling idea that this momentous change under discussion isn't for the better.

Cletus Jefferson, the lovelorn boy genius of this story, spends all his time on science in college and very little on those required humanities courses that most schools force on all their students, even the science nerds who find the humanities tiresome. It's a shame, the narrator tells us, because "If he had paid more attention in trivial classes like history, like philosophy, things might have turned out differently. If he had paid attention to literature he might have read the story of Pandora."

This is, by the way, the point at which you should stop reading this review if spoilers annoy you. There will be several good bits further on but, if you like surprises, you're just going to have to be strong and stop now.

And of course, the story has a classic science fiction "twist" ending, where you find out what has happened to both Cletus and his true love Amy. You also find out what happened to the nameless narrator, whose glum tone reflects the dregs of a life he is living out in a world that Cletus and Amy have changed entirely. Because Cletus, in his thirst for knowledge, has invented the next step in human evolution and boosted Amy up the step (incidentally, without her permission). The narrator is one of those people who got left behind.

Which is to say that the story has all the elements of a science fiction classic that most of us respond to without even thinking about it. It feels like a real science fiction story and a good one. It feels neat.

The really great thing about the story is that it practically begs you to keep thinking about it. And the more you think about it, the more you realize there is more to the story. The title, for instance, "None So Blind," is only the first part of the familiar proverb "There's none so blind as those who won't see." It's not a good thing to be the person who refuses to see (at least the way my grandmother used to say it.). The willful refusal of knowledge is a sign of excessive conservatism and stubbornness, especially in American culture where to know is all.