Michael Barnes
This was my bookclub's book of the month so I am using this review more a prompt for the meeting. When the said it was Ted Chiang’s collection of science-fiction short stories - Stories of Your Life and Others, I subsequently realised I confuse Ted Chaing with Ken Liu of the Dandelion Dynasty series (Silkpunk). Which I found relevant when think about the "silkpunk aesthetic, I was influenced by the ideas of W. Brian Arthur, who articulates a vision of technology as language. The task of the engineer is much like that of a poet in that the engineer must creatively combine existing components to solve novel problems, thereby devising artifacts that are new expressions in the technical language". Relevant to the story in Story of Your Life .
I initially mistook this collection for Ken Liu's The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories
Tower of Babylon: From the Tower of Babel (Babylon) myth springs this fully developed fantasy novelette. The protagonist of Tower of Babylon is Hillalum, a miner from Elam and a member of a group of miners who have come to Babylon to mine the vault of heaven near the top of the tower.
Understand: This first person science fiction novelette is narrated entirely in the point of view of Leon, a man who suffered brain damage and was given an experimental treatment, hormone K therapy. The therapy regenerated his damaged neurons, but an unforeseen side effect was that they came back with many more dendrites, raising Leon’s intelligence and motor skills considerably. When Leon’s doctor asks him to participate in a study in which he will be given additional treatments of hormone K, Leon quickly agrees. The concept here about how thoughts could act as software also front and center of Story of Your Life.
Division by Zero This short story examines the marriage of two professors. Renee is a brilliant mathematician whose recent suicide attempt is related to her work (I don’t want to reveal how); her husband Carl is a biologist. Many years ago Carl made a suicide attempt of his own; he has since been emotionally healed. The facts about mathematics are fascinating, especially as they pertain to the conflict in Renee and Carl’s marriage. I found this story not just intellectually interesting, but also poignant, though I was skeptical that the conclusions Carl draws late in the story were enough to result in what happened to him.
Story of Your Life (arrival) narrated in first person by Louise, a linguistics expert who is asked by the military to serve as a translator between aliens and humans.
Seventy-Two Letters This fantasy novella, set in an alternate Victorian England, begins in Robert Stratton’s childhood. As a boy, Robert is fascinated by his toy automatons’ ability to move powered only by seventy-two letter names inserted into them via paper slips. _Golem R F Kaungs Babel Aphros: The Sea God of Foam In Greek mythology, Aphros (meaning "foam") was one of the Ichthyocentaurs, a unique group of sea deities with the upper body of a man, the lower front of a horse, and the tail of a fish. Alongside his brother Bythos, Aphros was born from the union of the sea god Poseidon and the nymph Aphrodite (or in some versions, the primordial sea deities).
The Evolution of Human Science This is a very short story, only a few pages long, and written in the form of an editorial from a scientific journal. The subject of the editorial is the gap between the scientific achievements of DNT(digital neural transfer)-capable “metahumans” and the regular humans’ ability to grasp these. Prompted me with some of the arguments raised in David Brin's Uplift series.
Hell is the Absence of God. It takes place in a world in which God exists, and Hell is a plane below the ground, occasionally revealed to people on the mortal plane as if through a glass floor. Hell is also the plane that houses those are not devout descend after their death. There is a Heaven, too, widely assumed to be better although less is known about it. Hell is the Absence of God is, more than anything, an exploration of man’s need to come up with explanations for the inexplicable. As such I found it startling, yet while the world depicted in the story is surreal, the characters’ responses to it are familiar and utterly convincing.
Liking What You See: A Documentary This story explores a future world in which scientific progress in the field of neurology has made it possible to induce calliagnosia, a condition which makes it possible to look at beautiful people and remain unmoved by their beauty.
This was my bookclub's book of the month so I am using this review more a prompt for the meeting. When the said it was Ted Chiang’s collection of science-fiction short stories - Stories of Your Life and Others, I subsequently realised I confuse Ted Chaing with Ken Liu of the Dandelion Dynasty series (Silkpunk). Which I found relevant when think about the "silkpunk aesthetic, I was influenced by the ideas of W. Brian Arthur, who articulates a vision of technology as language. The task of the engineer is much like that of a poet in that the engineer must creatively combine existing components to solve novel problems, thereby devising artifacts that are new expressions in the technical language". Relevant to the story in Story of Your Life .
I initially mistook this collection for Ken Liu's The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories
Tower of Babylon: From the Tower of Babel (Babylon) myth springs this fully developed fantasy novelette. The protagonist of Tower of Babylon is Hillalum, a miner from Elam and a member of a group of miners who have come to Babylon to mine the vault of heaven near the top of the tower.
Understand: This first person science fiction novelette is narrated entirely in the point of view of Leon, a man who suffered brain damage and was given an experimental treatment, hormone K therapy. The therapy regenerated his damaged neurons, but an unforeseen side effect was that they came back with many more dendrites, raising Leon’s intelligence and motor skills considerably. When Leon’s doctor asks him to participate in a study in which he will be given additional treatments of hormone K, Leon quickly agrees. The concept here about how thoughts could act as software also front and center of Story of Your Life.
Division by Zero This short story examines the marriage of two professors. Renee is a brilliant mathematician whose recent suicide attempt is related to her work (I don’t want to reveal how); her husband Carl is a biologist. Many years ago Carl made a suicide attempt of his own; he has since been emotionally healed. The facts about mathematics are fascinating, especially as they pertain to the conflict in Renee and Carl’s marriage. I found this story not just intellectually interesting, but also poignant, though I was skeptical that the conclusions Carl draws late in the story were enough to result in what happened to him.
Story of Your Life (arrival) narrated in first person by Louise, a linguistics expert who is asked by the military to serve as a translator between aliens and humans.
Seventy-Two Letters This fantasy novella, set in an alternate Victorian England, begins in Robert Stratton’s childhood. As a boy, Robert is fascinated by his toy automatons’ ability to move powered only by seventy-two letter names inserted into them via paper slips. _Golem R F Kaungs Babel Aphros: The Sea God of Foam In Greek mythology, Aphros (meaning "foam") was one of the Ichthyocentaurs, a unique group of sea deities with the upper body of a man, the lower front of a horse, and the tail of a fish. Alongside his brother Bythos, Aphros was born from the union of the sea god Poseidon and the nymph Aphrodite (or in some versions, the primordial sea deities).
The Evolution of Human Science This is a very short story, only a few pages long, and written in the form of an editorial from a scientific journal. The subject of the editorial is the gap between the scientific achievements of DNT(digital neural transfer)-capable “metahumans” and the regular humans’ ability to grasp these. Prompted me with some of the arguments raised in David Brin's Uplift series.
Hell is the Absence of God. It takes place in a world in which God exists, and Hell is a plane below the ground, occasionally revealed to people on the mortal plane as if through a glass floor. Hell is also the plane that houses those are not devout descend after their death. There is a Heaven, too, widely assumed to be better although less is known about it. Hell is the Absence of God is, more than anything, an exploration of man’s need to come up with explanations for the inexplicable. As such I found it startling, yet while the world depicted in the story is surreal, the characters’ responses to it are familiar and utterly convincing.
Liking What You See: A Documentary This story explores a future world in which scientific progress in the field of neurology has made it possible to induce calliagnosia, a condition which makes it possible to look at beautiful people and remain unmoved by their beauty.