Another book
Jan. 9th, 2007 07:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mschatelaineWow, I'm ploughing through them this year. I just finished Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang.
This is a beautiful book. The stories do what SF in my opinion is all about, which is to see how people deal with ideas, especially ideas that are not common or are new to the common world. So there is the devotion of the society who are building a tower to Heaven, and the dilemma of a man who has to learn to love God in order to join his wife in Heaven. There are the emotions of a woman devoted to mathematics who develops a proof that 1+1 doesn't necessarily equal 2, and the title story is about a woman who learns an alien way of thinking, away from cause following effect.
The nearest equivalent I can think of are Greg Egan's short stories, but unlike Egan, Chiang's focus is on the people, not the idea. The are there as themselves, not as avatars to explicate a concept as in 'The Infinite Assassin' and similar stories. Devotion crops up a lot, not necessarily only in religious terms; the stories mostly deal with strong human feelings and the ways in which people think.
The one story whose ending I didn't understand was the mathematics one, and I'm inclined to think it's a failing on my part, so I'm going to re-read it and ask around for explanations.
This is a beautiful book. The stories do what SF in my opinion is all about, which is to see how people deal with ideas, especially ideas that are not common or are new to the common world. So there is the devotion of the society who are building a tower to Heaven, and the dilemma of a man who has to learn to love God in order to join his wife in Heaven. There are the emotions of a woman devoted to mathematics who develops a proof that 1+1 doesn't necessarily equal 2, and the title story is about a woman who learns an alien way of thinking, away from cause following effect.
The nearest equivalent I can think of are Greg Egan's short stories, but unlike Egan, Chiang's focus is on the people, not the idea. The are there as themselves, not as avatars to explicate a concept as in 'The Infinite Assassin' and similar stories. Devotion crops up a lot, not necessarily only in religious terms; the stories mostly deal with strong human feelings and the ways in which people think.
The one story whose ending I didn't understand was the mathematics one, and I'm inclined to think it's a failing on my part, so I'm going to re-read it and ask around for explanations.
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Date: 2007-01-09 08:07 pm (UTC)