Stories of Your Life and Others
In one sentence: Stunning expansion of science fiction to very distant possible worlds and emotionally unusual near ones. Borgesian scifi.
To be read when: annoyed by the sterility of median scifi and the folksy ignorance of median litfic; if disparaging scifi; if you think Black Mirror is deep...
Astoundingly good. The stories are extremely miscellaneous (hard Sumerian mythology, linguistic-physics ethnography, singularitarian tragedy, Arabian Nights fantasy, mechanical-philosophy tragedy, misotheistic tragedy), but bear one heavy theme - that rationalism, materialism is not the enemy of humanism, but is much more able to accommodate us, our highest values, than is romantic supernaturalism.
So he's an artistically successful Yudkowsky; Chiang's own presumable nerdiness disappears behind his powerful austere prose, even when characters are expounding the principle of least action or the details of ancient masonry.
'Story of Your Life' is so much more interesting, emotionally and scientifically, than the Arrival film it was made into. It is about how alien and repugnant amor fati is, and maybe variational physics.
'Tower of Babylon' is rousing minutiae. 'Hell is the Absence of God' takes the tired, speculative, stupid themes of the Abrahamic conversation - faith, will, love, persistence, atheism - and wrings out a new chord from them. Ah!
Galef type:
Theory 1 - models of how a phenomenon works, &
Theory 3 - pointing out a problem, &
Values 2 - thought experiments to reflect on how you feel about something , &
Style 3 - tickles your aesthetic sense in a way that obliquely makes you a more generative thinker .
To be read when: annoyed by the sterility of median scifi and the folksy ignorance of median litfic; if disparaging scifi; if you think Black Mirror is deep...
Astoundingly good. The stories are extremely miscellaneous (hard Sumerian mythology, linguistic-physics ethnography, singularitarian tragedy, Arabian Nights fantasy, mechanical-philosophy tragedy, misotheistic tragedy), but bear one heavy theme - that rationalism, materialism is not the enemy of humanism, but is much more able to accommodate us, our highest values, than is romantic supernaturalism.
So he's an artistically successful Yudkowsky; Chiang's own presumable nerdiness disappears behind his powerful austere prose, even when characters are expounding the principle of least action or the details of ancient masonry.
'Story of Your Life' is so much more interesting, emotionally and scientifically, than the Arrival film it was made into. It is about how alien and repugnant amor fati is, and maybe variational physics.
'Tower of Babylon' is rousing minutiae. 'Hell is the Absence of God' takes the tired, speculative, stupid themes of the Abrahamic conversation - faith, will, love, persistence, atheism - and wrings out a new chord from them. Ah!
Galef type:
Theory 1 - models of how a phenomenon works, &
Theory 3 - pointing out a problem, &
Values 2 - thought experiments to reflect on how you feel about something , &
Style 3 - tickles your aesthetic sense in a way that obliquely makes you a more generative thinker .