8 ms·

Ted Chiang on Seeing His Stories Adapted and the Ever-Expanding Popularity of SF

185 points by curtis 10y ago

intrasight 10y ago
I saw "Arrival" last night. I enjoyed it so much that I just purchased "Stories of your Life and Others".
- Analemma_ 10y ago
  Same! People have been telling me for a while to read Ted Chiang and I kept putting it off, but Arrival was good enough that I figured it was time to bump him to the head of the queue. My brother says the short story is better than the movie: same basic idea but without the intrusive Hollywood tropes, so I'm looking forward to it.
mad44 10y ago
EDIT: SPOILER alert for the sensitive gents I read the "Story of Your Life", which Arrival was based on. It was a very good read. I read it 2 hours in one breath. Here is a tongue-in-cheek review. The aliens were using a declarative language. (The narrative calls it teleological, but I like the programming language analogy.) https://www.google.com/search?client=opera&q=imperative+language&sourceid=opera&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8#q=declarative+language https://www.google.com/search?client=opera&q=imperative+lang... The linguist uses imperative language. https://www.google.com/search?client=opera&q=imperative+language&sourceid=opera&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?client=opera&q=imperative+lang... At the end of the story, the linguistic sees the benefits of using declarative/functional language and becomes a convert ;-)
- maneesh 10y ago
  That is certainly not spoiler free
- ssivark 10y ago
  [SPOILER ALERT] My interpretation of the duality was somewhat different. Human speech is sequantial and the signal is transmitted as a time-series. On the other hand, it seemed like the language used by the aliens was much more like a Wavelet transformed [1] version of the time-series signal, where: The structure is decomposed into coarse and fine details. The coarse details (forming the backbone of the message) do not have a particular location in the sequential representation. The finer details are placed at an appropriate position (the sequential part is important). I now wonder if there is a link between what I thought and what you pointed out :-) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavelet_transform#Principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavelet_transform#Principle
YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
Thanks for this- I read "Understand" around the mid-'90s in a Greek translation. I lost the copy of the magazine that it was printed in so I could not remember the name of the author, besides the fact that it was Asian. I did remember the story though and the title. I just had a look at Chiang's page on wikipedia and found it there :)
sanxiyn 10y ago
Ted Chiang also wrote "The Lifecycle of Software Objects", where said objects are sentient digital pets. The story is freely (and legally) available on the web. Highly recommended.
- quantumhobbit 10y ago
  Link for those like me that want to read it: http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2010/fiction_the_lifecycle_of_software_objects_by_ted_chiang http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2010/fiction_the_...
- nl 10y ago
  This is one of the most haunting stories I've ever read. If you know someone who thinks SciFi isn't worth reading, give them this.
waterphone 10y ago
After decades of reading many authors who I love, Ted Chiang jumped right up into the top few before I was even finished reading Stories of Your Life and Others.
Yhippa 10y ago
Has anybody read Story of Your Life and then seen Arrival? I'm curious to know how close it is to the book before I shell out the dough to see it in the theaters.
- cesarbs 10y ago
  I have. The movie changes things a bit, but it captures the spirit of the short story very well. I recommend both reading it and watching the movie.
- jraedisch 10y ago
  The movie sacrifices some of the logical soundness of the short story to make it more accessible and dramatic. That said, I found it equally enjoyable.
- Osmium 10y ago
  I have. I would definitely recommend watching the film first, before reading the story. The film is great. It adds a little side-plot to make it work better as a film, but it doesn't properly explain the core physical idea behind the short story (honestly, I can't imagine how it could, the story almost assumes its readers have some physics background, though it does try to explain). Having read the story first, I almost found the film a little boring, which is such a shame because it's a truly beautifully shot, well-executed film. I suspect I'll enjoy it a lot more watching it a second time...
- jemfinch 10y ago
  It's not very close at all. I found it disappointing, to be honest. Very little on the mystery of deciphering Heptapod B, nothing about the breakthrough in communications based on Fermat's Principle, and honestly very little of interest. The story was fantastic, and I'll probably re-read it before the end of the year. The movie was utterly forgettable.
- jessriedel 10y ago
  To expand on what others have said (spoilers): The movie basically cuts physics completely out of the story (no principle of least action, no diffraction), which makes the continuing presence of Ian awkward since he doesn't have much to do. I thought this was disappointing but inevitable; general audiences don't want a 20 minute physics lesson at the theater. Less understandable for me was that the film also eliminated any of the functional interaction for how Louise (or any linguist) would go about learning a previously unknown language by interacting with a native speaker. All of the guess-and-check, experimental structure that goes into this lingual interaction is gone from the film. The humans and aliens talk/grunt to each other, look confused, and then Louise just periodically declares out loud that she's figured things out. In the book, laymen can at least get a hint of how a linguist (and physicist!) thinks and solves problems, but the audience learns nothing like this in the film. Finally, the film has unambiguous communication backwards in time, violating the known laws of physics. I've talked to people say they saw this in the original short story, but I think a careful reading shows that, though the narrator adopts a framing of fatalism/predestination, none of the real-world events described by the narrator actually require retro-causation. In the film (spoiler!), Louise literally use memories of the future to figure out what telephone number to dial. Also, the standard Hollywood tropes weren't as bad as they could be, but still distracting. Does every film featuring the military need a painfully one-dimensional rude hawkish general who inexplicably wants to attack the enemy in every situation?
joggery 10y ago
Exhalation is one of the best SF stories ever written: http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/exhalation/ http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/exhalation/ (Somewhere out there is an audio version crisply and cerebrally voiced by Tom Dheere.)
- hentrep 10y ago
  I don't think this is the recording you refer to, but here is an audio version of Exhalation: http://escapepod.org/2009/04/10/ep194-exhalation/ http://escapepod.org/2009/04/10/ep194-exhalation/
  - joggery 10y ago
    Thank you! That's actually the one I meant. (With apologies to Mr Dheere. I haven't heard his rendition.) Ray Sizemore reads it in a detached manner (reminiscent of the Emergency Medical Hologram in Star Trek Voyager) which is highly suited to the material. Consider: A monologue. No relationships. No sex. No strikingly new ideas. Mostly expositional. Yet so darned good.
neves 10y ago
This thread had 2 very good links to Chiang short stories: http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/exhalation/ http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/exhalation/ http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2010/fiction_the_lifecycle_of_software_objects_by_ted_chiang http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2010/fiction_the_... Do you have any more good links to free Chiang stories?
- yolesaber 10y ago
  My personal favorite, "The Great Silence" - http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/the-great-silence/ http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/the-great-silence/
- nyolfen 10y ago
  Division by Zero: https://web.archive.org/web/20110319012240/http://www.fantasticmetropolis.com/i/division/full/ https://web.archive.org/web/20110319012240/http://www.fantas... > A brilliant mathematician wrestles with the consequences of her earthshattering proof. Understand: https://web.archive.org/web/20110527120639/http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/under.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20110527120639/http://www.infini... > An experimental treatment bestows a regular person with superintelligence, propelling him into a dangerous series of mindgames. Story of Your Life: http://web.archive.org/web/20101206050220/http://guccipiggy.objectis.net/prose/storyofyourlife http://web.archive.org/web/20101206050220/http://guccipiggy.... > A talented linguist reflects on her life as she struggles to grasp the meaning of an alien language. Nebula Award (Best Novella). [this is the story the recent film Arrival is based on] Seventy-Two Letters: http://web.archive.org/web/20010802144026/http://www.tor.com/72ltrs.html http://web.archive.org/web/20010802144026/http://www.tor.com... > In a world where mystical scrolls impart animating power, a shocking discovery threatens to upend society. Hell is the Absence of God: http://www.e-reading.club/bookreader.php/70896/Chiang_-_Hell_Is_the_Absence_of_God.html http://www.e-reading.club/bookreader.php/70896/Chiang_-_Hell... > An unbeliever struggles with the question of faith when God is scientific fact and angels routinely visit the earth. Hugo, Locus, Nebula Awards (Best Novelette). What's expected of us: http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/21st_century_science/lectures/whats_expected.html http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/21st_century_science/lectures/w... > A simple time machine undermines the concept of free will, with disastrous consequences. The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate: http://web.archive.org/web/20120911120914/http://www.dregston.com/boards/read.php?16,22867,22867 http://web.archive.org/web/20120911120914/http://www.dregsto... > An ancient alchemist introduces a traveling merchant to a mysterious time-traveling gateway. Hugo, Nebula Awards (Best Novelette). [I looted these from here, fixing the broken links I could and excluding the ones I couldn't: http://www.metafilter.com/98974/This-isnt-your-grandfathers-science-fiction http://www.metafilter.com/98974/This-isnt-your-grandfathers-... -- there are a few more links in there, including some essays.]
moyix 10y ago
One little-known fact about Ted Chiang is that he also works as a technical writer and has written documentation for Microsoft (on MSDN). If you've read their C++ documentation, it's possible you've already read some of his work!
- zeristor 10y ago
  Then perhaps he is the sort of person who reads HackerNews...
wyager 10y ago
If you're looking for similar stories, I think the ultimate trifecta of "whoa dude" sci-fi authors is Ted Chiang, Charlie Stross, and Greg Egan. Chiang and Egan are a bit more high-concept. One of my favorite things about Egan is that a number of his "one big lie" sci-fi stories come with a list of scholarly citations.
- another 10y ago
  I would add Peter Watts. We shouldn't restrict this club to authors that provide citations, but he does satisfy that criterion as well.
Animats 10y ago
"Ever-expanding popularity of SF?" If all the vampire/werewolf/zombie/paranormal/magic stuff was pulled out of the SF section, SF would be much smaller. (More of that is in "Teen Paranormal Romance", which at peak had six cases at the local Borders.) It's not that SF is more popular, it's that its definition has broadened.
nullnilvoid 10y ago
My first reaction of SF is San Francisco, not Science Fiction. Am I the only here?
curtis 10y ago
One of the things that Ted Chiang talks about is the adaptation of James Ellroy's novel L.A. Confidential to the film of the same name: If I had read the novel first, I would have said it was impossible to adapt into a movie. But what the screenwriters did was take the protagonists of the novel and construct a completely new plot in which those characters could play the same basic roles. The resulting movie is faithful to the spirit of the novel even though it’s radically unfaithful to the text. That’s an approach that would never have occurred to me; I think I’d be too reverent of the original to adapt anything to film. I think the challenges of adapting Story of Your Life to film were different, but it was certainly something I was thinking about when I walked into the theater. I personally think they did a pretty good job, but I suppose that depends on what you thought the essential part of Story of Your Life was. Now that I think about it, the movie Ender's Game was pretty faithful to the source novel, but probably fell down as a movie because of it. It's interesting to think about how that movie might have been better if it had tried to be (as Chiang says of L.A. Confidential) "faithful to the spirit of the novel" while playing faster and looser with the actual source material.
- ghaff 10y ago
  You may be right about Ender's Game. I'm not sure what was exactly wrong with it; I just found it flat and fairly uninteresting while the original novella is one of the best. Of course, it's tough in SF where there's always a loud contingent (of what is your most natural constituency) over pretty much any deviations from a beloved book. Yet, there are aspects to novels that don't translate well into film and, in most cases, films need to simplify--dropping characters and streamlining plots.
  - curtis 10y ago
    I think adapting the original Ender's Game novella rather than the novel would have made a lot of sense and would have made for a much tighter movie. I think there's just too much stuff in the full novel and trying to cram it all into the film made it impossible to pace things well. I've long been of the opinion that novella-length stories are the best match for movie length (2-ish hours) adaptations and that novels usually just have too much stuff for a faithful adaptation. The Ender's Game movie just happens to be a really good recent example.
mad44 10y ago
[SPOILER ALERT] If you found the ideas in this book about time and fate and freewill, you will also enjoy TimeQuake by Kurt Vonnegut from 1997. Highly recommended. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timequake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timequake
mucker 10y ago
I've only read Chiang's, "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling" which was up for a Hugo a few years ago. I voted against it since it was bland. Are any of his other stories better?

185 points by curtis 10y ago

intrasight 10y ago

I saw "Arrival" last night. I enjoyed it so much that I just purchased "Stories of your Life and Others".

Analemma_ 10y ago
Same! People have been telling me for a while to read Ted Chiang and I kept putting it off, but Arrival was good enough that I figured it was time to bump him to the head of the queue. My brother says the short story is better than the movie: same basic idea but without the intrusive Hollywood tropes, so I'm looking forward to it.

mad44 10y ago

EDIT: SPOILER alert for the sensitive gents I read the "Story of Your Life", which Arrival was based on. It was a very good read. I read it 2 hours in one breath. Here is a tongue-in-cheek review. The aliens were using a declarative language. (The narrative calls it teleological, but I like the programming language analogy.) https://www.google.com/search?client=opera&q=imperative+language&sourceid=opera&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8#q=declarative+language https://www.google.com/search?client=opera&q=imperative+lang... The linguist uses imperative language. https://www.google.com/search?client=opera&q=imperative+language&sourceid=opera&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?client=opera&q=imperative+lang... At the end of the story, the linguistic sees the benefits of using declarative/functional language and becomes a convert ;-)

maneesh 10y ago
That is certainly not spoiler free
ssivark 10y ago
[SPOILER ALERT] My interpretation of the duality was somewhat different. Human speech is sequantial and the signal is transmitted as a time-series. On the other hand, it seemed like the language used by the aliens was much more like a Wavelet transformed [1] version of the time-series signal, where: The structure is decomposed into coarse and fine details. The coarse details (forming the backbone of the message) do not have a particular location in the sequential representation. The finer details are placed at an appropriate position (the sequential part is important). I now wonder if there is a link between what I thought and what you pointed out :-) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavelet_transform#Principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavelet_transform#Principle

YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago

Thanks for this- I read "Understand" around the mid-'90s in a Greek translation. I lost the copy of the magazine that it was printed in so I could not remember the name of the author, besides the fact that it was Asian. I did remember the story though and the title. I just had a look at Chiang's page on wikipedia and found it there :)

sanxiyn 10y ago

Ted Chiang also wrote "The Lifecycle of Software Objects", where said objects are sentient digital pets. The story is freely (and legally) available on the web. Highly recommended.

quantumhobbit 10y ago
Link for those like me that want to read it: http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2010/fiction_the_lifecycle_of_software_objects_by_ted_chiang http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2010/fiction_the_...
nl 10y ago
This is one of the most haunting stories I've ever read. If you know someone who thinks SciFi isn't worth reading, give them this.

waterphone 10y ago

After decades of reading many authors who I love, Ted Chiang jumped right up into the top few before I was even finished reading Stories of Your Life and Others.

Yhippa 10y ago

Has anybody read Story of Your Life and then seen Arrival? I'm curious to know how close it is to the book before I shell out the dough to see it in the theaters.

cesarbs 10y ago
I have. The movie changes things a bit, but it captures the spirit of the short story very well. I recommend both reading it and watching the movie.
jraedisch 10y ago
The movie sacrifices some of the logical soundness of the short story to make it more accessible and dramatic. That said, I found it equally enjoyable.
Osmium 10y ago
I have. I would definitely recommend watching the film first, before reading the story. The film is great. It adds a little side-plot to make it work better as a film, but it doesn't properly explain the core physical idea behind the short story (honestly, I can't imagine how it could, the story almost assumes its readers have some physics background, though it does try to explain). Having read the story first, I almost found the film a little boring, which is such a shame because it's a truly beautifully shot, well-executed film. I suspect I'll enjoy it a lot more watching it a second time...
jemfinch 10y ago
It's not very close at all. I found it disappointing, to be honest. Very little on the mystery of deciphering Heptapod B, nothing about the breakthrough in communications based on Fermat's Principle, and honestly very little of interest. The story was fantastic, and I'll probably re-read it before the end of the year. The movie was utterly forgettable.
jessriedel 10y ago
To expand on what others have said (spoilers): The movie basically cuts physics completely out of the story (no principle of least action, no diffraction), which makes the continuing presence of Ian awkward since he doesn't have much to do. I thought this was disappointing but inevitable; general audiences don't want a 20 minute physics lesson at the theater. Less understandable for me was that the film also eliminated any of the functional interaction for how Louise (or any linguist) would go about learning a previously unknown language by interacting with a native speaker. All of the guess-and-check, experimental structure that goes into this lingual interaction is gone from the film. The humans and aliens talk/grunt to each other, look confused, and then Louise just periodically declares out loud that she's figured things out. In the book, laymen can at least get a hint of how a linguist (and physicist!) thinks and solves problems, but the audience learns nothing like this in the film. Finally, the film has unambiguous communication backwards in time, violating the known laws of physics. I've talked to people say they saw this in the original short story, but I think a careful reading shows that, though the narrator adopts a framing of fatalism/predestination, none of the real-world events described by the narrator actually require retro-causation. In the film (spoiler!), Louise literally use memories of the future to figure out what telephone number to dial. Also, the standard Hollywood tropes weren't as bad as they could be, but still distracting. Does every film featuring the military need a painfully one-dimensional rude hawkish general who inexplicably wants to attack the enemy in every situation?

joggery 10y ago

Exhalation is one of the best SF stories ever written: http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/exhalation/ http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/exhalation/ (Somewhere out there is an audio version crisply and cerebrally voiced by Tom Dheere.)

hentrep 10y ago
I don't think this is the recording you refer to, but here is an audio version of Exhalation: http://escapepod.org/2009/04/10/ep194-exhalation/ http://escapepod.org/2009/04/10/ep194-exhalation/
- joggery 10y ago
  Thank you! That's actually the one I meant. (With apologies to Mr Dheere. I haven't heard his rendition.) Ray Sizemore reads it in a detached manner (reminiscent of the Emergency Medical Hologram in Star Trek Voyager) which is highly suited to the material. Consider: A monologue. No relationships. No sex. No strikingly new ideas. Mostly expositional. Yet so darned good.

neves 10y ago

This thread had 2 very good links to Chiang short stories: http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/exhalation/ http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/exhalation/ http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2010/fiction_the_lifecycle_of_software_objects_by_ted_chiang http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2010/fiction_the_... Do you have any more good links to free Chiang stories?

yolesaber 10y ago
My personal favorite, "The Great Silence" - http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/the-great-silence/ http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/the-great-silence/
nyolfen 10y ago
Division by Zero: https://web.archive.org/web/20110319012240/http://www.fantasticmetropolis.com/i/division/full/ https://web.archive.org/web/20110319012240/http://www.fantas... > A brilliant mathematician wrestles with the consequences of her earthshattering proof. Understand: https://web.archive.org/web/20110527120639/http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/under.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20110527120639/http://www.infini... > An experimental treatment bestows a regular person with superintelligence, propelling him into a dangerous series of mindgames. Story of Your Life: http://web.archive.org/web/20101206050220/http://guccipiggy.objectis.net/prose/storyofyourlife http://web.archive.org/web/20101206050220/http://guccipiggy.... > A talented linguist reflects on her life as she struggles to grasp the meaning of an alien language. Nebula Award (Best Novella). [this is the story the recent film Arrival is based on] Seventy-Two Letters: http://web.archive.org/web/20010802144026/http://www.tor.com/72ltrs.html http://web.archive.org/web/20010802144026/http://www.tor.com... > In a world where mystical scrolls impart animating power, a shocking discovery threatens to upend society. Hell is the Absence of God: http://www.e-reading.club/bookreader.php/70896/Chiang_-_Hell_Is_the_Absence_of_God.html http://www.e-reading.club/bookreader.php/70896/Chiang_-_Hell... > An unbeliever struggles with the question of faith when God is scientific fact and angels routinely visit the earth. Hugo, Locus, Nebula Awards (Best Novelette). What's expected of us: http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/21st_century_science/lectures/whats_expected.html http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/21st_century_science/lectures/w... > A simple time machine undermines the concept of free will, with disastrous consequences. The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate: http://web.archive.org/web/20120911120914/http://www.dregston.com/boards/read.php?16,22867,22867 http://web.archive.org/web/20120911120914/http://www.dregsto... > An ancient alchemist introduces a traveling merchant to a mysterious time-traveling gateway. Hugo, Nebula Awards (Best Novelette). [I looted these from here, fixing the broken links I could and excluding the ones I couldn't: http://www.metafilter.com/98974/This-isnt-your-grandfathers-science-fiction http://www.metafilter.com/98974/This-isnt-your-grandfathers-... -- there are a few more links in there, including some essays.]

moyix 10y ago

One little-known fact about Ted Chiang is that he also works as a technical writer and has written documentation for Microsoft (on MSDN). If you've read their C++ documentation, it's possible you've already read some of his work!

zeristor 10y ago
Then perhaps he is the sort of person who reads HackerNews...

wyager 10y ago

If you're looking for similar stories, I think the ultimate trifecta of "whoa dude" sci-fi authors is Ted Chiang, Charlie Stross, and Greg Egan. Chiang and Egan are a bit more high-concept. One of my favorite things about Egan is that a number of his "one big lie" sci-fi stories come with a list of scholarly citations.

another 10y ago
I would add Peter Watts. We shouldn't restrict this club to authors that provide citations, but he does satisfy that criterion as well.

Animats 10y ago

"Ever-expanding popularity of SF?" If all the vampire/werewolf/zombie/paranormal/magic stuff was pulled out of the SF section, SF would be much smaller. (More of that is in "Teen Paranormal Romance", which at peak had six cases at the local Borders.) It's not that SF is more popular, it's that its definition has broadened.

nullnilvoid 10y ago

My first reaction of SF is San Francisco, not Science Fiction. Am I the only here?

curtis 10y ago

One of the things that Ted Chiang talks about is the adaptation of James Ellroy's novel L.A. Confidential to the film of the same name: If I had read the novel first, I would have said it was impossible to adapt into a movie. But what the screenwriters did was take the protagonists of the novel and construct a completely new plot in which those characters could play the same basic roles. The resulting movie is faithful to the spirit of the novel even though it’s radically unfaithful to the text. That’s an approach that would never have occurred to me; I think I’d be too reverent of the original to adapt anything to film. I think the challenges of adapting Story of Your Life to film were different, but it was certainly something I was thinking about when I walked into the theater. I personally think they did a pretty good job, but I suppose that depends on what you thought the essential part of Story of Your Life was. Now that I think about it, the movie Ender's Game was pretty faithful to the source novel, but probably fell down as a movie because of it. It's interesting to think about how that movie might have been better if it had tried to be (as Chiang says of L.A. Confidential) "faithful to the spirit of the novel" while playing faster and looser with the actual source material.

ghaff 10y ago
You may be right about Ender's Game. I'm not sure what was exactly wrong with it; I just found it flat and fairly uninteresting while the original novella is one of the best. Of course, it's tough in SF where there's always a loud contingent (of what is your most natural constituency) over pretty much any deviations from a beloved book. Yet, there are aspects to novels that don't translate well into film and, in most cases, films need to simplify--dropping characters and streamlining plots.
- curtis 10y ago
  I think adapting the original Ender's Game novella rather than the novel would have made a lot of sense and would have made for a much tighter movie. I think there's just too much stuff in the full novel and trying to cram it all into the film made it impossible to pace things well. I've long been of the opinion that novella-length stories are the best match for movie length (2-ish hours) adaptations and that novels usually just have too much stuff for a faithful adaptation. The Ender's Game movie just happens to be a really good recent example.

mad44 10y ago

[SPOILER ALERT] If you found the ideas in this book about time and fate and freewill, you will also enjoy TimeQuake by Kurt Vonnegut from 1997. Highly recommended. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timequake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timequake

mucker 10y ago

I've only read Chiang's, "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling" which was up for a Hugo a few years ago. I voted against it since it was bland. Are any of his other stories better?