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Ted Chiang’s Sci-Fi stories: reviewed by Joyce Carol Oates

Thursday, May 9, 2019 21:43

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The May 13, 2019 New Yorker has a review, by Joyce Carol Oates of Ted Chiang’s Sci-Fi oeuvre [Page 63 ff.]:

2002’s Stories of Your Life and Others and his newest Exhalation [Knopf]

Ms. Oates’ offers excerpted sentences that told me the stories were right up my alley since they pertain to concepts and ideas often discussed here and at other UFO blogs and sites.

For instance “In an appendix to the collection, headed ‘Story Notes,’ Chiang says that the ‘Alchemist’s Gate’ was inspired by the physicist Kip Thorne, who speculated that one might be able to create a time machine that obeyed Einstein’s theory of relativity.”

In her mention of a story about a parrot, whose species is facing extinction, Oates offers this from the tale:

“The universe is so vast that intelligent life must have surely have arisen. The universe is also old that even one technological species would have had time to expand and fill the galaxy. Yet there is no sign of life anywhere but on Earth. Humans call this the Fermi Paradox … sometimes known as the Great Silence. The universe should be a cacophony of voices, but instead it is disconcertingly quiet.”

And in “What’s Expected of Us” is this:

“Pretend that you have free will. It’s essential that you behave as if your decisions matter, even though you know they don’t. The reality isn’t important: what’s important is your belief, and believing the lie is the only way to avoid a walking coma. Civilization now depends on self-deception. Perhaps it always has.”

“The Truth of fact, the Truth of Feeling” is a meditation on memory. And “The Lifestyle of Software Objects” is about virtual robots, “digients.”

“Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom” (in Exhalation) concerns a “paraself” – a self that inhabits a parallel universe.

Ms. Oates gives a “high five” to both the 2002 book and the new one, Exhalation so I ordered both from Amazon, which my pal Bryan Sentes will rebuke because of the bad working conditions, he says, at the large retailer.

(I’ve asked for his forgiveness.)

http://ufocon.blogspot.com – The UFO Iconoclast(s)

Source: https://ufocon.blogspot.com/2019/05/ted-chiangs-sci-fi-stories-reviewed-by.html

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