Sunday 2014-06-08

Stories of your Life and Others by Ted Chiang

Chiang loves the sad; in each of these stories he worked in a central element of loss / betrayal / destruction.

It'll be when you first learn to walk that I get daily demonstrations of the asymmetry in our relationship. You'll be incessantly running off somewhere, and each time you walk into a door frame or scrape your knee, the pain feels like it's my own. It'll be like growing an errant limb, an extension of myself whose sensory nerves report pain just fine, but whose motor nerves don't convey my commands at all. It's so unfair: I'm going to give birth to an animated voodoo doll of myself. I didn't see this in the contract when I signed up. Was this part of the deal?

Though it is funny to see how much of a negative superreaction I go through when reading a story that attempts to be smart, and then fails. Mention "understand" to me, and you'll get a good rant.


[permalink] I'm behind on my emails - but this was the first book I read when I went to Dubai, and couldn't stop. Let's hear the rant!

[permalink] (oops, rkabir)

[permalink] I believe you can deduce my rant from knowing a) i have a rant about this, and b) i view the story as failing somehow. This parallels the meaning of "understand" in the context of the story, and was meant to be poking fun at Chiang. lol.