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Chiang writes science fiction the way mathematicians write proofs: every premise is taken seriously, every implication followed to its end. There's no hand-waving. If language can be processed all-at-once instead of sequentially, what does that do to free will? If a calculator could prove arithmetic inconsistent, what would mathematicians actually do with that information, day to day? The stories are thought experiments that happen to also be tender.

My favorites in the collection:

  • Story of Your Life — the obvious pick, but earned. The grief is built into the grammar. Reading it the second time, knowing what's coming, is somehow more devastating, not less.
  • Tower of Babylon — the most quietly subversive theology I've encountered in fiction.
  • Hell Is the Absence of God — Chiang at his most Old Testament. Reads like a parable that Borges might have written if Borges had been an evangelical.
  • Understand — the only honest "what if you got smarter" story I've read. Most versions of this trope flatter the reader; this one doesn't.

What I keep returning to is how unsentimental Chiang is about his characters' intelligence. Smartness in his stories is a tool, sometimes a curse, never a personality. Compared to most fiction about scientists, this is almost shocking.

"From the beginning I knew my destination, and I chose my route accordingly. But am I working toward an extreme of joy, or of pain? Will I achieve a minimum, or a maximum?"

Read: three times. Will read again.