I really enjoyed the frustration of the article's author in trying to attribute Ted Chiang's writing to his personal life or history.
We as humans seem to have this unceasing tendency to essentialize -- to believe that everything we do comes from deep-seated psychological needs. We project every action onto some event from years past with a parent, a lover, a friend.
I feel like this is borne out of a desire to believe that behavior is deterministic. That if only we too had undergone the experiences of the person who we're reading about, we too would be that acclaimed sci-fi writer, or famous entrepreneur, or asshole president. It excuses, to some extent, the fact that we are not that person.
But sometimes that's not the case. Sometimes we just build shit for fun. It doesn't all have to be us coming to terms with our distant father.
Zuckerberg, of all people, once had a quote vis-a-vis The Social Network (can't seem to find it) that basically amounted to the idea that they had to make the entirety of Facebook be about his rejection by a girl because the idea of people building something cool for its own sake doesn't make a good movie.
What's interesting for me is I feel like this armchair psychologizing we all do is getting worse. I don't have any evidence to back this up, just a feeling -- as we're exposed to more people's behaviors, we fall back to essentialist attributions of that behavior more and more.
> That if only we too had undergone the experiences of the person who we're reading about, we too would be that acclaimed sci-fi writer, or famous entrepreneur, or asshole president.
This reminds me of a great line from a story by Borges:
> El método inicial que imaginó era relativamente sencillo. Conocer bien el español, recuperar la fe católica, guerrear contra los moros o contra el turco, olvidar la historia de Europa entre los años de 1602 y de 1918, ser Miguel de Cervantes.
> The first method that he imagined [in order to write Don Quixote from scratch centuries later] was relatively simple. Learn Spanish well, return to the Catholic faith, fight against the Moors or against the Turk, forget the history of Europe between the years 1602 and 1918, be Miguel de Cervantes.
I highly recommend the story (called "Pierre Menard, Autor del Quijote" or "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote").
> I really enjoyed the frustration of the article's author in trying to attribute Ted Chiang's writing to his personal life or history.
I thought that recent article in Vanity Fair about AI risk and Elon Musk was a great example of this instinct to try to reduce everything down to personal traumas or monkey politics. Apparently Musk cannot really be concerned about AI risk, it has to be some ulterior reason: perhaps he's envious of Larry Page! Or it's propaganda for Tesla! Or desperate attention-whore behavior (because he doesn't get enough attention?) or something, anything, which is not, y'know, being worried about creating intelligences without builtin human morality & limits.
I learned about the phenomenon you're describing in English class. The professor's thesis was that the desire to create a narrative is a fundamental part of the human experience. In essence what you're saying is that The Social Network's narrative--the entirety of Facebook [is] about [Mark Zuckerberg's] rejection by a girl--is not a compelling enough narrative for you. For you, you would much prefer a different narrative--that he was building something cool for its own sake. As an engineer I can relate to your preferred narrative, but Hollywood doesn't consider us its target audience.
This raises the question: what's a good metric that's used to decide what the narrative is?
A major theme in non-fiction writing today is to construct a narrative around the events and objects.
That the writer couldn't do this with Chiang is hilarious. Chiang sounds like a great guy at a dinner party: incredibly nerdy and learned, but not playing the normal social games.
Too bad the article's author hadn't read other Chiang's works: I'd love to see an article which derives "Understand", "Seventy-Two Letters", "The Evolution of Human Science" or "Exhalation" from the personal history.
I got the audiobook from Audible [1] after reading about it on HN and that's the only story I asked my wife to listen to - she loved it and she's not a science fiction fan.
"Exhalation" is my favourite Ted Chiang story. It can be read at Lightspeed [1].
I'm probably in the minority here, but I didn't really enjoy "The Lifecycle of Software Objects". I though it was too long and, while I work in firmware, the story's software model didn't connect with me.
Wow, there are so many interesting bits here that I felt compelled to comment on some:
1. "... they gave thanks that they were permitted to see so much, and begged forgiveness for their desire to see more.” When I discover with mind-blowing physical discovery (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules%E2%80%93Corona_Boreal...) I sometimes feel this way about humanity's great foray into the universe.
2. "He writes the science fiction that would have existed in an earlier era, had science existed then." I interpret this to be a very insightful comment on what SF is. Some people take SF to be inventing stuff, humans always did that sort of thing through mythology (in fact one can argue that in the past we had much more of it and science kills it). OTOH I think the real SF is taking a scientific framework and tweaking parts of it what-ifs to demonstrate aspects of humanity, in way any other work of literature operates. This does require science.
3. "Chiang’s vision of a world without faith, in which the certain and proven existence of God is troubling, rather than reassuring." This is absolutely true, if the existence of God were to be proven beyond doubt (which, if you think about it seems paradoxical) existence would be intolerable, much more so than if the reverse was proven.
4. "I believe that the universe is deterministic, but that the most meaningful definition of free will is compatible with determinism”. Spot on! "We must believe in free will -- we have no choice." - Isaac Bashevis Singer
5. “There’s a book by Umberto Eco called ‘The Search for the Perfect Language,’ ” he said. Great book that I would recommend to anyone.
6. "In “Understand,” he pointed out, the protagonist learns to reprogram his own mind." After finishing Snow Crash I have been thinking that some form of brain hacking should be possible using light pulses and linguistics as input (http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/11187/are-the-langu...).
Altogether an amazing guy, ordering his books from Amazon right now.
Hell is the Absence of God is really great and I don't normally go for that sort of thing. There used to be an audiobook version on youtube which looks like it's been taken down now. Anyways hunt it up if you can, it's great commute material.
Chiang's "Understand" and "Story of Your Life" are two of the best stories ever written in my view. They evince a mastery of prose craftsmanship that's incredibly rare, combined with fascinating but logical plot ideas.
Being a Chiang fan is frustrating though because he writes so little!
I specifically read "Story of Your Life" a few months back prior to watching Arrival, as some people here claimed they liked the movie Adaptation better. I have to say I agree. It was a fine short story, and had some very good conceptual elements, but I found his explanation of the phenomenon and it's consequences for people subject to it lacking (or perhaps I misunderstood a portion of it). The movie skirted actual explanations with respect to this, but thus wasn't subject to scrutiny that may have shown it to be less solid than was supposed.
Agreed, he's one of the best sci-fi writers. He's got the rigor and imagination of Greg Egan but he's a much better writer and his characters are better defined. For me, the perfect combination. If he wrote more he'd be the best. Unfortunately his output is tiny.
chiang got me into borges, and i can't recommend him enough if you're a fan of the former. i love chiang but borges has become my favorite fiction author. borges also seems quite popular among programmers.
Stanislaw Lem, and the Strugatsky Brothers - I think that Soviet-era SF really asked the 'big' questions and is far away from today's 'SF but actually just an action movie with lasers instead of bullets' standard.
For Lem, try Solaris, or His Master's Voice. He often dealt with how alien intelligence is impossible to understand (compare Wittgenstein: if a lion could speak we would not understand him). He also wrote many satires (Pilot Pirx / Fables for Robots).
The English translations of the Strugatsky Brothers you commonly get aren't good as they're translated from (I think) German, not Russian, but the new direct translations from Olena Bormashenko are MUCH better, they flow so much better. Stay away from the old ones.
Get Hard To Be A God, or maybe Stalker.
Also seconding Borges, and perhaps Umberto Eco, and Hesse's The Glass Bead Game.
"He writes the science fiction that would have existed in an earlier era, had science existed then" made me think with amusement of caveman science fiction [1].
I've been a fan of Chiang for a very long time. I'm a real fan of superintelligence fiction [2] and "Understand" [3] was the first to catch my attention.
> A talented linguist reflects on her life as she struggles to grasp the meaning of an alien language. Nebula Award (Best Novella). [this is the story the recent film Arrival is based on]
> An unbeliever struggles with the question of faith when God is scientific fact and angels routinely visit the earth. Hugo, Locus, Nebula Awards (Best Novelette).
The article mentions this several times. He still is a technical writer, and it is his primary source of income because he only writes when a good idea comes to him. I would be curious to find out how much he got paid for "Arrival".
Someone just told me this yesterday, and I found it so interesting. I'd be so curious to know what he was writing / who he was writing for. Those must be some fantastic docs!
> In “Understand,” he pointed out, the protagonist learns to reprogram his own mind. He knits together the vocabularies of science and art, memory and prediction, literature and math, physics and emotion. “He’s searching for the perfect language, a cognitive language in which he can think,” Chiang said. “A language that will let him think the kinds of thoughts he wants.”
I wonder how many of us have, at some point, harbored the (if poorly formed and not at all thought-through) beginnings of such an idea.
A script based on another of his stories,
“Understand,” is also in development.
How in blazes do you make a movie of a story that happens almost entirely in the guy's head? And what on Earth did they do to the ending to make it mainstream-palatable? That said, I sort of feel like the author buried the lede, with this one. It's one of my favorite stories, and I hope they do it justice.
[Mild spoilers ahead] There's the drama of the initial accident, then the recovery. Stealing the vials. Pursuit by the government agency. Locating the opponent, and the final conflict between them. Plenty to work with there, I think.
The challenge, as you say, would be to do justice to the story and not turn it into some kind of car-chase/superhero mess.
I've yet to have the chance to read any of his work, mostly because I'm working on my own things now and don't have a lot of time for pleasure, which would be the point of reading these first and foremost.
That noted, I'm happy to see people take an interest in reading fiction again. It was nice with Harry Potter. It's nice with Ted Chiang. My hope is that the accessibility and popularity inspire additional interest in fiction reading, and I'm sure it happens as with music. There's a catch though.
The unfortunate part is that both JK Rowling and Ted Chiang are, practically and reasonably speaking, genre authors and that can be limiting to growth as a reader. I love genre works of quality, because, just being real here, the signal-to-noise ratio of quality-to-sub-par in certain genres is abhorrent. It's like finding a great "Metal" proximity band like Tool, checking out all their work, and wanting more, going back into the category and finding...definitely not more Tool.
I'm very happy for him and hope he enjoys the success, fiscal rewards, and, best of all, freedom to write!
Take careful note, all would-be writers:
>In 1989, he attended the Clarion Workshop, a kind of Bread Loaf for sci-fi and fantasy writers...
Sure, he's a hobbyist but that's a hobby that's been going for almost 30 years. Practice makes better. He's no overnight sensation...y'all just finally found him.
>“But what makes any human being a good, reliable worker?” he asked me. “A hundred thousand hours of good parenting, of unpaid emotional labor. That’s the kind of investment on which the business world places no value; it’s an investment made by people who do it out of love.”
This is an absolutely wonderful perspective, and can truly be applied to creative endeavors as well.
What an amazingly snobby reply to an article about someone writing good fiction.
I'll leave a much better writer than me to do the arguing, Ursula K. LeGuin, although I realize you won't read either of these articles because you're too busy "working on [your] own things now," but I'll post them because they're great.
Ursula K. Le Guin talks to Michael Cunningham about genres, gender, and broadening fiction. [1]
> And that, of course, is the lingering problem: The maintenance of an arbitrary division between “literature” and “genre,” the refusal to admit that every piece of fiction belongs to a genre, or several of genres.
> Realism is of course a tremendous and wonderfully capacious literary genre, and it has dominated fiction since 1800 or before. But dominance isn’t the same thing as superiority. Fantasy is at least as immense as realism and much older — essentially coeval with literature itself. Yet fantasy was relegated for fifty years or sixty years to the nursery.
On Serious Literature. [2]
> But it [Genre fiction] was dead, dead! God damn that Chabon, dragging it out of the grave where she and the other serious writers had buried it to save serious literature from its polluting touch, the horror of its blank, pustular face, the lifeless, meaningless glare of its decaying eyes! What did the fool think he was doing?
If you're working on your own work, reading high-quality works can really tell you how to do things.
Among other things, Ted Chiang is excellent at non-linear storytelling, and at communicating complex and nuanced ideas through narrative.
The actual definition of a genre is based on sales demographics ("do people who buy SciFi buy this book?" - why Vonnegut is in Literature, and LeGuin is in fantasy), but if I had to pick...
SciFi is about consequences (what happens when....)
Fantasy is about narrative (a story about a boy....)
Literature is about a message that cannot be communicated any other way than the story that is told.
I have no idea how to tell you what Arrival was about without retelling the story.
> the signal-to-noise ratio of quality-to-sub-par in certain genres is abhorrent
Sturgeon's Law, 90% of everything is crap
re: overnight success, Ted Chiang got a Nebula Award for "Tower of Babylon" (1990) which was his first published work when he was 23. He wasn't writing for extremely long before he was recognized for his talent.
[+] [-] hammerzeit|9 years ago|reply
We as humans seem to have this unceasing tendency to essentialize -- to believe that everything we do comes from deep-seated psychological needs. We project every action onto some event from years past with a parent, a lover, a friend.
I feel like this is borne out of a desire to believe that behavior is deterministic. That if only we too had undergone the experiences of the person who we're reading about, we too would be that acclaimed sci-fi writer, or famous entrepreneur, or asshole president. It excuses, to some extent, the fact that we are not that person.
But sometimes that's not the case. Sometimes we just build shit for fun. It doesn't all have to be us coming to terms with our distant father.
Zuckerberg, of all people, once had a quote vis-a-vis The Social Network (can't seem to find it) that basically amounted to the idea that they had to make the entirety of Facebook be about his rejection by a girl because the idea of people building something cool for its own sake doesn't make a good movie.
What's interesting for me is I feel like this armchair psychologizing we all do is getting worse. I don't have any evidence to back this up, just a feeling -- as we're exposed to more people's behaviors, we fall back to essentialist attributions of that behavior more and more.
[+] [-] schoen|9 years ago|reply
This reminds me of a great line from a story by Borges:
> El método inicial que imaginó era relativamente sencillo. Conocer bien el español, recuperar la fe católica, guerrear contra los moros o contra el turco, olvidar la historia de Europa entre los años de 1602 y de 1918, ser Miguel de Cervantes.
> The first method that he imagined [in order to write Don Quixote from scratch centuries later] was relatively simple. Learn Spanish well, return to the Catholic faith, fight against the Moors or against the Turk, forget the history of Europe between the years 1602 and 1918, be Miguel de Cervantes.
I highly recommend the story (called "Pierre Menard, Autor del Quijote" or "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote").
http://hispanlit.qwriting.qc.cuny.edu/files/2011/06/Borges-P...
[+] [-] tux1968|9 years ago|reply
I'm sorry, but you have to admit if you read back your own comment, it's mostly filled with armchair psychologizing.
[+] [-] gwern|9 years ago|reply
I thought that recent article in Vanity Fair about AI risk and Elon Musk was a great example of this instinct to try to reduce everything down to personal traumas or monkey politics. Apparently Musk cannot really be concerned about AI risk, it has to be some ulterior reason: perhaps he's envious of Larry Page! Or it's propaganda for Tesla! Or desperate attention-whore behavior (because he doesn't get enough attention?) or something, anything, which is not, y'know, being worried about creating intelligences without builtin human morality & limits.
[+] [-] ctchocula|9 years ago|reply
This raises the question: what's a good metric that's used to decide what the narrative is?
[+] [-] pnathan|9 years ago|reply
That the writer couldn't do this with Chiang is hilarious. Chiang sounds like a great guy at a dinner party: incredibly nerdy and learned, but not playing the normal social games.
[+] [-] pervycreeper|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dottedmag|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] djhworld|9 years ago|reply
Wasn't so sure about the rest of them though, I felt the Babylon story kind of eclipsed all of them.
[+] [-] exhilaration|9 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.audible.com/pd/Sci-Fi-Fantasy/Stories-of-Your-Lif...
[+] [-] himlion|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ltnately|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] voidifremoved|9 years ago|reply
Stories Of Your Life takes the central idea of Slaughterhouse-Five and dresses it up with physics. Its good, but its like a remix more than anything.
[+] [-] sohkamyung|9 years ago|reply
I'm probably in the minority here, but I didn't really enjoy "The Lifecycle of Software Objects". I though it was too long and, while I work in firmware, the story's software model didn't connect with me.
[1] http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/exhalation/
[+] [-] mrkgnao|9 years ago|reply
I haven't audibly exhaled (I am honestly not trying to pun here) at a story this way in quite a while. Thank you.
[+] [-] dagw|9 years ago|reply
Are you? I've never met anyone who includes Lifecycle of Software Objects in their favorite Ted Chiang stories
[+] [-] Jun8|9 years ago|reply
1. "... they gave thanks that they were permitted to see so much, and begged forgiveness for their desire to see more.” When I discover with mind-blowing physical discovery (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules%E2%80%93Corona_Boreal...) I sometimes feel this way about humanity's great foray into the universe.
2. "He writes the science fiction that would have existed in an earlier era, had science existed then." I interpret this to be a very insightful comment on what SF is. Some people take SF to be inventing stuff, humans always did that sort of thing through mythology (in fact one can argue that in the past we had much more of it and science kills it). OTOH I think the real SF is taking a scientific framework and tweaking parts of it what-ifs to demonstrate aspects of humanity, in way any other work of literature operates. This does require science.
3. "Chiang’s vision of a world without faith, in which the certain and proven existence of God is troubling, rather than reassuring." This is absolutely true, if the existence of God were to be proven beyond doubt (which, if you think about it seems paradoxical) existence would be intolerable, much more so than if the reverse was proven.
4. "I believe that the universe is deterministic, but that the most meaningful definition of free will is compatible with determinism”. Spot on! "We must believe in free will -- we have no choice." - Isaac Bashevis Singer
5. “There’s a book by Umberto Eco called ‘The Search for the Perfect Language,’ ” he said. Great book that I would recommend to anyone.
6. "In “Understand,” he pointed out, the protagonist learns to reprogram his own mind." After finishing Snow Crash I have been thinking that some form of brain hacking should be possible using light pulses and linguistics as input (http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/11187/are-the-langu...).
Altogether an amazing guy, ordering his books from Amazon right now.
[+] [-] mirimir|9 years ago|reply
You'd want a backup before trying anything substantial.
[+] [-] nkrisc|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frgtpsswrdlame|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cqlchess|9 years ago|reply
Being a Chiang fan is frustrating though because he writes so little!
[+] [-] kbenson|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lz400|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] intrasight|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thisone|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheGRS|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ismail|9 years ago|reply
Any other recommendations?
[+] [-] nyolfen|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] a_bonobo|9 years ago|reply
For Lem, try Solaris, or His Master's Voice. He often dealt with how alien intelligence is impossible to understand (compare Wittgenstein: if a lion could speak we would not understand him). He also wrote many satires (Pilot Pirx / Fables for Robots).
The English translations of the Strugatsky Brothers you commonly get aren't good as they're translated from (I think) German, not Russian, but the new direct translations from Olena Bormashenko are MUCH better, they flow so much better. Stay away from the old ones.
Get Hard To Be A God, or maybe Stalker.
Also seconding Borges, and perhaps Umberto Eco, and Hesse's The Glass Bead Game.
[+] [-] blacksmith_tb|9 years ago|reply
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Marusek
[+] [-] imh|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nicjm|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lz400|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rndmize|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thisone|9 years ago|reply
You'll need to like, or be open to, 50s-60s style sci-fi, however.
[+] [-] dottedmag|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WCityMike|9 years ago|reply
I've been a fan of Chiang for a very long time. I'm a real fan of superintelligence fiction [2] and "Understand" [3] was the first to catch my attention.
[1] http://dresdencodak.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/2009-09-2...
[2] https://ask.metafilter.com/286008/Seeking-Hyperbrain-Books-F...
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20140527121332/http://www.infini...
[+] [-] nyolfen|9 years ago|reply
Division by Zero: https://web.archive.org/web/20110319012240/http://www.fantas...
> A brilliant mathematician wrestles with the consequences of her earthshattering proof.
Understand: https://web.archive.org/web/20110527120639/http://www.infini...
> An experimental treatment bestows a regular person with superintelligence, propelling him into a dangerous series of mindgames.
Story of Your Life: https://web.archive.org/web/20101206050220/http://guccipiggy...
> A talented linguist reflects on her life as she struggles to grasp the meaning of an alien language. Nebula Award (Best Novella). [this is the story the recent film Arrival is based on]
Seventy-Two Letters: https://web.archive.org/web/20010802144026/http://www.tor.co...
> In a world where mystical scrolls impart animating power, a shocking discovery threatens to upend society.
Hell is the Absence of God: http://www.e-reading.club/bookreader.php/70896/Chiang_-_Hell...
> An unbeliever struggles with the question of faith when God is scientific fact and angels routinely visit the earth. Hugo, Locus, Nebula Awards (Best Novelette).
What's expected of us: http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/21st_century_science/lectures/w...
> A simple time machine undermines the concept of free will, with disastrous consequences.
The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate: https://web.archive.org/web/20120911120914/http://www.dregst...
> An ancient alchemist introduces a traveling merchant to a mysterious time-traveling gateway. Hugo, Nebula Awards (Best Novelette).
[I looted these from here, fixing the broken links I could and excluding the ones I couldn't: http://www.metafilter.com/98974/This-isnt-your-grandfathers-... -- there are a few more links in there, including some essays.]
[+] [-] mind_heist|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kaycebasques|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jkchu|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] state|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrkgnao|9 years ago|reply
I wonder how many of us have, at some point, harbored the (if poorly formed and not at all thought-through) beginnings of such an idea.
[+] [-] andrewflnr|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andyjohnson0|9 years ago|reply
The challenge, as you say, would be to do justice to the story and not turn it into some kind of car-chase/superhero mess.
[+] [-] 6stringmerc|9 years ago|reply
That noted, I'm happy to see people take an interest in reading fiction again. It was nice with Harry Potter. It's nice with Ted Chiang. My hope is that the accessibility and popularity inspire additional interest in fiction reading, and I'm sure it happens as with music. There's a catch though.
The unfortunate part is that both JK Rowling and Ted Chiang are, practically and reasonably speaking, genre authors and that can be limiting to growth as a reader. I love genre works of quality, because, just being real here, the signal-to-noise ratio of quality-to-sub-par in certain genres is abhorrent. It's like finding a great "Metal" proximity band like Tool, checking out all their work, and wanting more, going back into the category and finding...definitely not more Tool.
I'm very happy for him and hope he enjoys the success, fiscal rewards, and, best of all, freedom to write!
Take careful note, all would-be writers:
>In 1989, he attended the Clarion Workshop, a kind of Bread Loaf for sci-fi and fantasy writers...
Sure, he's a hobbyist but that's a hobby that's been going for almost 30 years. Practice makes better. He's no overnight sensation...y'all just finally found him.
>“But what makes any human being a good, reliable worker?” he asked me. “A hundred thousand hours of good parenting, of unpaid emotional labor. That’s the kind of investment on which the business world places no value; it’s an investment made by people who do it out of love.”
This is an absolutely wonderful perspective, and can truly be applied to creative endeavors as well.
[+] [-] SamBam|9 years ago|reply
I'll leave a much better writer than me to do the arguing, Ursula K. LeGuin, although I realize you won't read either of these articles because you're too busy "working on [your] own things now," but I'll post them because they're great.
Ursula K. Le Guin talks to Michael Cunningham about genres, gender, and broadening fiction. [1]
> And that, of course, is the lingering problem: The maintenance of an arbitrary division between “literature” and “genre,” the refusal to admit that every piece of fiction belongs to a genre, or several of genres.
> Realism is of course a tremendous and wonderfully capacious literary genre, and it has dominated fiction since 1800 or before. But dominance isn’t the same thing as superiority. Fantasy is at least as immense as realism and much older — essentially coeval with literature itself. Yet fantasy was relegated for fifty years or sixty years to the nursery.
On Serious Literature. [2]
> But it [Genre fiction] was dead, dead! God damn that Chabon, dragging it out of the grave where she and the other serious writers had buried it to save serious literature from its polluting touch, the horror of its blank, pustular face, the lifeless, meaningless glare of its decaying eyes! What did the fool think he was doing?
1. https://electricliterature.com/ursula-k-le-guin-talks-to-mic...
2. http://www.ursulakleguin.com/Note-ChabonAndGenre.html
[+] [-] RangerScience|9 years ago|reply
Among other things, Ted Chiang is excellent at non-linear storytelling, and at communicating complex and nuanced ideas through narrative.
The actual definition of a genre is based on sales demographics ("do people who buy SciFi buy this book?" - why Vonnegut is in Literature, and LeGuin is in fantasy), but if I had to pick... SciFi is about consequences (what happens when....) Fantasy is about narrative (a story about a boy....) Literature is about a message that cannot be communicated any other way than the story that is told.
I have no idea how to tell you what Arrival was about without retelling the story.
[+] [-] huxley|9 years ago|reply
Sturgeon's Law, 90% of everything is crap
re: overnight success, Ted Chiang got a Nebula Award for "Tower of Babylon" (1990) which was his first published work when he was 23. He wasn't writing for extremely long before he was recognized for his talent.