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Oh wow! I'm late to the Ted Chiang game, having only read his books last year, but I've read a lot of PDK, a fair amount of Gibson, and a little bit of Lem. I t

Oh wow! I'm late to the Ted Chiang game, having only read his books last year, but I've read a lot of PDK, a fair amount of Gibson, and a little bit of Lem. I think Chiang's less eager to end on a grim note than they are. And maybe that's what you're feeling. But I think the topics he deals with can be incredibly big, and incredibly dark. For instance, The Lifecycle of Software Objects was so realistic, and so dismally cynical about the software industry in particular, that it made me feel palpable fear and pre-emptive shame for the future.

vessenes 2y ago
I re-read Lifecycle based on your comment, and.. I think I have more precise critiques now; one is just that his writing is targeted a fairly simple reading level, and it bothers me. The second is that I think most of Lifecycle has been said before, and possibly better, and sometimes has been said for decades. I don’t mind a short story with a single new idea, but Lifecycle is verging on novella, and I think it didn’t need to be nearly so long, or put another way, the length wasn’t used to get the depth in to the story I’d like to see for the page count. The main Lifecycle story points: can software be human/a person? If so, does it need to be raised/cared for? What will the people who do that think about it? Is that a dead end in AGI? If software agents get autonomy, will some of them willingly be sex robots? Is that really that different than humans grinding in software jobs? I mean, okay, those are all super reasonable things to write about, and not uninteresting, but PKD famously hit up these questions of personhood in the 60s, as did Lem - PKD with weirdo psychoanalysis dystopia settings, Lem with lighthearted stories about competing constructors. I guess I didn’t find it that dismally cynical about software either, but I may be jaded ;)

vessenes 2y ago

I re-read Lifecycle based on your comment, and.. I think I have more precise critiques now; one is just that his writing is targeted a fairly simple reading level, and it bothers me. The second is that I think most of Lifecycle has been said before, and possibly better, and sometimes has been said for decades. I don’t mind a short story with a single new idea, but Lifecycle is verging on novella, and I think it didn’t need to be nearly so long, or put another way, the length wasn’t used to get the depth in to the story I’d like to see for the page count. The main Lifecycle story points: can software be human/a person? If so, does it need to be raised/cared for? What will the people who do that think about it? Is that a dead end in AGI? If software agents get autonomy, will some of them willingly be sex robots? Is that really that different than humans grinding in software jobs? I mean, okay, those are all super reasonable things to write about, and not uninteresting, but PKD famously hit up these questions of personhood in the 60s, as did Lem - PKD with weirdo psychoanalysis dystopia settings, Lem with lighthearted stories about competing constructors. I guess I didn’t find it that dismally cynical about software either, but I may be jaded ;)