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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   3357 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 22, 2023

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I found Ted Chiang's most recent collection of short fiction Exhalation in a book sale the other day. I've never read anything by him, but I thoroughly enjoyed the film Arrival which was adapted from one of his short stories, so I thought I'd check it out.

The hype is warranted. The first story I read, on Tuesday afternoon, was "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling", which does exactly what hard sci-fi is supposed to do: tells an engaging story and gets you thinking. I've mentioned this story to three people since reading it. It does something very clever by contrasting a fairly conventional Black Mirror-esque "imagine the impact this near-future technology will have on our society" story, with a parallel narrative about a nineteenth-century missionary in Nigeria introducing literacy to the natives, illustrating all the profound, non-trivial and non-obvious impacts that the written word had on their culture (and human culture in general). For me it did a wonderful job of puncturing the parochialism and small-mindedness of Black Mirror-style sci-fi: writers in this genre have no trouble speculating on the scary effects of near-future technologies (or real technologies invented since, say, 1995), but essentially take for granted every technology invented prior to 1995. Chiang is making the rhetorical point that "yes, near-future technologies will have profound impacts on our society and individual psychology - but also this has been going on forever."

I don't like to read an entire collection of short stories in one go, so after reading three stories in the Chiang collection, I started my second read of Private Citizens by Tony Tulathimutte. It's just as funny and engaging as I remembered, and I can't wait for his second book to be released.

It's worth getting Stories Of Your Life And Others too. There's quite a bit of overlap in the included stories but the variations are worth the duplications.

Did your collection include Hell is the Absence of God? I thought it was particularly good, especially in the context of books like Unsong.

Is this supposed to be a Christian fable or a cosmic horror story?

I have heard it was written because Chiang thought the book of Job was a cop-out. So…yes.

Jesus Christ.

Unfortunately not, but I'm going to read it now.

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