Ted Chiang returns with another awe-inducing sci-fi collection | Hacker News Reader

Ted Chiang returns with another awe-inducing sci-fi collection

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49 pointssohkamyung10 comments

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Here's a list of all 9 stories:

- The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling

- What's expected of us

- The Merchant and the Alchemist's gate

- Exhalation (found online at http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/exhalation/ )

- The Lifecycle of software objects

- The Great Silence ( available at http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/the-great-silence/ and https://electricliterature.com/the-great-silence-by-ted-chia... )

- Dacey's Patent Automatic Nanny

- Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom (new)

- Omphalos (new)

Some of them (and some others) are also available as audiobooks at https://www.sffaudio.com/features/author-pages/ted-chiang/

I've only read his re-released stories in the "Arrival," compilation, but to me, to describe Chiang as a sci-fi writer is like saying Google is in the computer business.

We inhabit a contemporary world with more technological and social change than the ones which formed the collection of tropes that got authors grouped into sci-fi or cyberpunk in the first place. I don't think devices like time machines and other magic used to create the reflections of characters and situations is sufficient for relegating authors to sci-fi anymore.

Arrival and "Story of your life's" treatment of language and time and experience, and sympathy for the motivations of a super intelligence in "Understand," were succinct descriptions of huge questions. When you compare those to the stupid, 250 page harangues of living national treasures, relegating Chiang to sci-fi puts me into a fit of pique.

Why "relegating"? Is this about that old chestnut of sci-fi not being good literature (so if something is good literature then it can't be sci-fi, by definition)?

If you are interested in publishing, it's still an issue, even if readers don't care.

It depends on who your publisher and target audience is. See this recent article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19708789

But publishing is not a problem for Chiang. He even publishes short stories, which should be the hardest to publish (I understand that publishers belive the larger the better).

_What's Expected of Us_ was originally published in 2005 and is available here: https://www.nature.com/articles/436150a

_The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling_ was originally published in 2013 and is available here: https://web.archive.org/web/20140222103103/http://subterrane...

For more on the publication history of some of these novelettes, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Chiang#Works.

Wow thank you for this. What’s Expected of Us was incredible.

Is this book new? I've read most of these stories, I think...

It's a new book, but it's a collection of the short stories he published since his last collection.

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