On the Awesomeness of Ted Chiang

Because I don’t write about science fiction often enough. Crossposted from elsewhere.

Ted Chiang’s science fiction career has been pretty remarkable. While he’s only published a handful of short stories over the past twenty years, nearly all of them have been nominated for major awards, and most of them won. His subgenre is difficult to pin down—while stories like “Tower of Babylon” and “Seventy-Two Letters” are steeped in religious mythology, “Understand”, “Exhalation” and “Division by Zero” deal with more technical or scientific concepts. “Story of Your Life” and “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” play with time and non-linear storytelling. I would say that they are all thought experiments of a sort—polished, philosophical explorations of clearly defined ideas.

That may make Chiang’s work sound rather dry—and maybe it is, I enjoy a certain amount of didacticism in my SF so I’m not the one to say—but while intensely cerebral, his fiction still remains human. Chiang is not one of those writers who seems to think that scientific extrapolation and character development are mutually exclusive, nor the kind that peoples his stories overmuch with brilliant straight white middle-aged men who have difficulty relating to women (which is why I hesitate to call his work “hard SF”). Rather, he eagerly explores how big, world-changing theoretical paradigm shifts affect the everyday lives of ordinary people. In “Division by Zero”, a mathematician’s discovery precipitates a psychiatric crisis and turns her marriage upside down; in “Hell is the Absence of God”, a brutally literal depiction of born-again Christian theology, people form support groups in the wake of angelic visitations, which heal some and disable others. “Story of Your Life” is both an inventive imagining of what alien language could be like, and the story of a woman coping with her daughter’s untimely death.

I could go on and on about Chiang’s writing, but why not see for yourself? Several of his stories are available online in various formats, as listed at Free Speculative Fiction Online:

  • “Understand” (1991), HTML. More conventional and much inferior to his later stuff, but you may find differently.
  • “Division By Zero” (1991), HTML.
  • “Hell Is the Absence of God” (2001), podcast.
  • “What’s Expected of Us” (2005), published in Nature as part of the esteemed science journal’s “Futures” short fiction series (later published as an anthology). Available at Concatenation in PDF with many others. Also, podcast.
  • “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” (2007), podcast, and archived (HTML): page 1, page 2, page 3.
  • “Exhalation” (2008), podcast, and various formats available at Nightshade Books (and may I say it is the most gorgeous and moving illustration of the Second Law of Thermodynamics EVAR, I highly recommend it if you want your MIND BLOWN)

Oh, and he recently had a new novella come out! There are quite a few interviews and reviews floating around out there, but I’ll wait till I’ve read it to write more.

You or Your Memory: Candas Jane Dorsey’s Black Wine

The Mountain Goats, The Sunset Tree – “You or Your Memory” (Lyrics.)

I’m afraid I can’t bring myself to write something appropriately reviewerly, like “Candas Jane Dorsey’s Black Wine is as dark and heady as its fictional namesake drink”, without copious eye-rolling; nor do I have the patience to give a proper synopsis as you can find in any review online, such as “It follows several generations of mothers and daughters who blah blah blah…”—see, I’m bored already.

Let’s start again. What I find most extraordinary about Black Wine on a technical level is what Dorsey doesn’t do. The narratives are tangled and non-linear, and it takes a while to work out how many women there are—one? two? many?—and how they are related. Not every character even has a given name. There is very little physical description. There are lacunae and episodes of amnesia and dissociation. The geography of her world—which seems to be a descendant of our own or maybe an alternate version of it—is deliberately vague and yet dreamily evocative: the sailor town, the trader town, the mountains, the dunes of Avanue. There is no map on the frontispiece. There are several different languages, but we don’t “see” them—they are all represented by English. All this is immensely refreshing to the sf/f reader jaded by the last fifty years or so of worldbuilding wankery, and even more remarkable is that it works.

But none of this tells you what Black Wine’s really about.

So let’s start over yet again. It’s about pain, memory, language, and identity. It’s about how the authoritarianism of the state reproduces itself at every level, down to the power dynamics of sex. (There is a lot of sex in the book, from incestuous sadomasochism to joyously easygoing tripartite bisexual handfastings to furtive fucking that can only be named what it is, “love”, in the secret sign language of slaves.) It’s about the self-perpetuating cycle of domination, control, and abuse. Most of all, though, Black Wine is about freedom. In Ursula K. Le Guin’s Tehanu—which reminds me in many ways of Black Wine—Tenar says, “I am trying to find somewhere I can live.” (Or something like that; this is from memory.) Similarly Ea says, “Only today as I sat in my bath did I realize that my whole life has been spent in the search for safety.” And the trader says of Essa, “‘She had to find a place to live the rest of her life. And she set out.’”

Anyone who has ever cut a parent out of her life, or tried to, or would if she could, or subconsciously kept a list of what she would grab if she had to run and could only take what would fit in one bag, or vowed never to raise children lest she pass on her family’s heritage, or abandoned everything to start over somewhere else, where nobody knows her, or ever gets the euphoric urge to walk away from her home and keep on walking, as far as she can—any such person will understand intimately what Black Wine is about. But Dorsey’s writing is so viscerally true and her world so gorgeously realized that—I hope—any reader will come to know something of these things, too.

Old Habits Die Hard

Originally posted in November 2009

It seems that, even among people who should know better, it is very easy to fall into the trap of thinking of oneself as a mind encased in a body. That is, thinking that there are two very different kinds of stuff in the world: mental stuff (thoughts, emotions, memories), and physical stuff (organs, bacteria, tables). This way of thinking, which expresses itself in platitudes like “mind over matter”, is called dualism, and it has been deeply unfashionable among philosophers for the past two hundred years or so. The cool kids have long ago moved on to monism, which is the idea that there’s only one kind of stuff in the world (nowadays, matter—i. e., atoms and molecules—but more on this later) and everything is made of it. Of course, the rest of the world generally takes longer to catch up with philosophy, so you still see people unashamedly espousing dualist metaphysics, unaware that it is the philosophical equivalent of wearing white after Labour Day.

This way of thinking is especially pernicious when it comes to matters of health. In some cases, the mind is thought to be “really you”, and your body is a thing that can conspire against you. “That’s the depression talking.” It leads to a kind of “love the sinner, hate the sin” mentality with regards to disability or chronic illness…but having been well acquainted with that mindset I assure you it’s just a long-winded way of saying “hate the sinner”. However, in other cases, “mental” things are considered less real than “physical” things. “It’s all in your head” (as if your head weren’t a part of you, or what goes on in your head isn’t “real”). Or the artificial distinction between mental and physical disabilities.

It’s all the same stuff, people.

An Introduction

Hi, I’m Neville Park. I’ve been blogging under another handle for several years, but my blog is no longer public due to privacy concerns. I miss having a public voice, though, so here I am!

All I ask of you, readers, is to respect my anonymity and respect each other. Please don’t refer to or speculate on my other pseudonym or real name. Don’t make personal attacks. And if a comment you want to make is eerily reminiscent of Derailing for Dummies, step back and think about what you’re saying and why.

Here goes!

On Memory, and Other Things

There is a town in north Ontario
with dream comfort memory to spare,
and in my mind I still need a place to go;
all my changes were there.

Neil Young, “Helpless”

Memory oppresses me.

The Shadow of the Torturer, Gene Wolfe

Great is the power of memory, an awe-inspiring mystery, my God, a power of profound and infinite multiplicity. And this is mind, this is I myself. What then am I, my God? What is my nature? It is characterized by diversity, by life of many forms, utterly immeasurable…

Augustine, Confessions X. xvii (26)

The priest in the booth had a photographic memory
for all he had heard

Belle and Sebastian, “The State I Am In”

I have recently been reading Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun tetralogy and thinking about how torture, time, memory, and confession are twined together. This essay, “Torture and Confession in Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun”, has been a kind of starting-point.