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Ted Chiang: The Secret Third Thing

293 points by pseudolus 1y ago

ljlolel 1y ago
Arrival is my new favorite movie ever
- LinchZhang 1y ago
  We're doing a watch party next Monday! In case you and/or ppl you know live in East Bay!
  - ayaros 1y ago
    Now I feel bad I won't be able to attend, being on the other side of the country... :(
    - LinchZhang 1y ago
      Well, feel free to send my review to anybody cool living in SF or East Bay, especially people new to the area! Maybe they'd read the review and think they'd vibe well with me :)
- lzyuan1006 1y ago
  Me too
- BeetleB 1y ago
  I didn't like the movie at all. I later read the story and it was fantastic.
simpaticoder 1y ago
Ted Chiang does love to explore the counter-factual with empathy and openness where he somehow manages to take himself out of the story in the admirable Virginia Wolfe sense. The OP misses the biting critique hidden in these tales. For example Omphalos, Hell Is the Absence of God, and Tower of Babylon, can all be read as a devastating critique of religion. They all clearly articulate what the world would be like if certain religious beliefs were true. Since those worlds are nothing like our own, the beliefs are false. There is a strong element of cosmic horror in each of these stories that implicitly make a strong case that we are quite fortunate that our religions do not accurately describe nature. Exhalation is one of my favorites. There is profound lesson about the nature of the mind, expressed simply as a sequence of discovery by a lone scientist in a very alien world. But the world is an idealized, simplified version of our own with much simpler source of work in the physics sense. I very much wanted to know more about the nature of that world, and for the people there to find a way out of their apocalyptic predicament. But that story, like it's world, is hermetically sealed perfection. The fate of our own universe is the same, but with more steps in the energy cycle and a longer timeline. The silence bounding that story is a beautiful choice, one that makes it a real jewel.
- LinchZhang 1y ago
  Thank you for the valuable and constructive comment! I just didn't feel like discussing the satire angle was very interesting! In the article: > In Omphalos, Young Earth Creationism is empirically true2. Astronomers can only see light from stars 6,000 light-years away. Fossilized trees have centers with no rings. The first God-created humans lack belly buttons. The scientists in that story keep discovering multiple independent lines of evidence that converge on creationism: because in that universe, they're simply correct. I think this section makes it very clear that in one sense, it's a clear satire of religion, or at least Creationism (implied: we do not see this, so it's implausible we're in a YE Creationist world). I didn't think it was worth spelling it out. Also overall I thought anti-religious satire in fiction is fairly common (I remember reading Candide in high school, and Pullman around the same time or a little earlier) and far from what makes Chiang special. Agree with your thoughts on Exhalation. I hope they make it out, but also completely understand why Chiang ended the story where he did.
  - simpaticoder 1y ago
    TBH I'm glad you left it out! It's an uncomfortable aspect to his stories. His narration hovers above the action with such perfect grace... The satirical element, or its implication, somehow mars that perfection. It is probably better left unsaid by critics and admirers, and left to the individual reader. In truth I shouldn't have mentioned it.
    - deleted 1y ago
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- adaml_623 1y ago
  I think OP was incorrect in writing, "thermodynamics appear to work differently", in Exhalation. I think the thermodynamics works the same and you've nailed it by describing it as hermetically sealed perfection. It's a simpler world where a self-aware being can see and almost feel the march of entropy and their own brief existence being part of that.
- poszlem 1y ago
jdlshore 1y ago
If you like Chiang, Netflix has an adaptation of his work called “Pantheon” that’s very good. Animated, two seasons, about the rise of uploaded humans. I don’t know which of his works it’s based on, so can’t say how true it is to the original, but I enjoyed it.
- mettamage 1y ago
  That was a really fun show. It got even better at the end
- tocs3 1y ago
  I think you are mixing up Chang and Ken Liu. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon_(TV_series)
  - jdlshore 1y ago
    Oh, I think you’re right. Oops!
- doctoboggan 1y ago
  Just chiming in to recommend this show as well. Very well done and it has a complete story arc in 2 seasons which is close to my optimal TV show duration. Like the other comment said, this isn't a Ted Chiang adaptation though, it's based on a few short stories by Ken Liu. You can read one of the stories here: https://bigthink.com/high-culture/ken-liu-short-story/ https://bigthink.com/high-culture/ken-liu-short-story/ However, in this case I think the TV adaptation did a better job with the story than the original short.
mcphage 1y ago
> Chiang’s much weaker at the middle level, where we consider how societies and civilizations collectively face novel technologies. I’m not really sure this matters. The ideas are interesting for their effects on the characters of the story—going in depth on the world building outside of the characters doesn’t really mean anything. For the author’s example: yes, economic experiments and drug experiments would be cheaper, but like… so what? What does that mean for the characters in the story? His stories aren’t an exploration of ideas for their own sake, they’re created with a purpose, and this middle level world building doesn’t move that purpose forward at all.
curtisszmania 1y ago
[dead]
manfromchina1 1y ago
I read Understand by him a really long time ago. I thought it was really good. However at the time I didnt understand the motivation of one of the main characters in it and the ending felt unjustified because of that. Years ago someone posted The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate (pdf) by him on here. That one was a trip. He nailed the atmosphere and cadence of One Thousand and One Nights with a time travel story superimposed on top of it. Or it least that's how I remember it. Thought it was very Sufi in how it was told.
- LinchZhang 1y ago
  The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate is SO good. I tear up every time I reread it. If you haven't already done so, check out The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling.
root_axis 1y ago
Interesting observation. Spoilers -> He does the same thing in Tower of Babel, where the topology of the universe is structured in such a manner that the tower can physically reach "heaven", which ends up being a surprise to the reader and the characters at the same time. Masterful stuff. I want to nitpick two things. On compatibalism, the first definition presented is the correct one, the framing that "you have to make peace with determinism" isn't quite right. For compatiablists, determinism is freedom, because if one's actions did not follow from prior causes then they would not align with one's internal states. The other is sneaking in the characterization of Chiang's AI doomer skepticism as a "blindspot". This topic is being debated to death on HN every day so I'll leave that argument for another thread, but IMO it contradicts the tone of the article about a writer whose depth of thought the author was just heaping praise on. I'm not saying its necessary to adopt his views on all things, but I think it deserved more than a footnote dismissal.
- LinchZhang 1y ago
  I appreciate the nitpicks! Re #1 It's been several years since I read up on that area of philosophy. I'll need to reread some stuff to decide whether I think the definition I used is a fine enough simplification for sci-fi readers (and, well, myself) vs whether it missed enough nuances that it's essentially misleading. (Some academic philosophers follow me on substack so maybe they'll also end up correcting me at some point!) Re #2 ah I don't think of it as "sneaking in". It's more like "this is a view I have, this is a view many of my readers likely also have, given that this is a widely debated topic (as you say) and I'm not going to change anybody's minds on the object level I'm just going to mention it and move on."
  - the_af 1y ago
    For the record, I also found #2 jarring. I understand you cannot write as if walking on egg shells; you have your position and maybe your readers do as well. But this is far from a settled matter, and Chiang's position (which was describing earlier rather than current LLMs, but I still think it arguably holds today) is arguably correct, or valid. I probably agree with Chiang more than I agree with you, which is why I find it odd to call it a blind or weak spot as if the matter was settled. Maybe "while I admire Chiang, I fundamentally disagree on some topics, such as LLMs" would have felt less jarring. (Not saying you must write like this, and it's impossible to write in a way nobody will object to. I'm just explaining why I -- and presumably the person you're responding to -- found it jarring).
lmm 1y ago
> Many of his readers, even in their otherwise rave reviews, miss this. Multiple reviewers complain about how the science in his stories are “unrealistic” (e.g. strong Sapir-Whorf is “discredited”). They expected hard science fiction; Chiang was doing something different. Chiang created different universes with internally self-consistent scientific laws, using science fiction and alternative science as a vehicle for exploring philosophical progress and human relationships. This is being overly kind. "What if religion was actually true?" does not create a universe with internally self-consistent scientific laws; it creates a universe full of impossibility from which you then pick and choose one or two things to focus on, and end up with not science fiction but fantasy.
- alexey-salmin 1y ago
  It's not impossible from a scientific perspective for a planet to be terraformed and seeded with intelligent life by some overly advanced spices (you can say "god-like"). Or to create a simulation with intelligent life in it and to save some resources by starting 6000 years ago from a complex seed state rather than simulating 16 billion years of physics to see the intelligent life emerge or not. That would be rather inconvenient for the PhD studying simulated intelligent life, he'd better just purchase and rearrange some pre-computed data. The difference between science and religion doesn't lie in disagreement over particular facts or any facts at all, the difference is in the approach. Religion can explain anything but predicts very little (except for sociological phenomena which it predicts rather well). Science is built around making verifiable predictions but doesn't in fact give any answers, only theories that are (mostly) consistent with observable events (so far). They can however agree or disagree over any particular set of facts. Take any religious belief and you can build a scientific world where it is true.
  - avar 1y ago
    > science is built around making verifiable > predictions but doesn't in fact give any > answers, only theories This is just redefining "theory" and "answer" to the point of meaninglessness. Darwin didn't know a lot of things about evolution or biology, and I'm sure he had questions about some of those things. If you could talk to him today you could give him answers to those questions, and the reason for that is that those answers are found in theories and scientific progress in general. But yes, it doesn't provide "answers" in the mushy religious sense, i.e. "what is it all for?". > The difference between science and > religion doesn't lie in disagreement > over particular facts or any facts at all Yes, it does. You're just implicitly excluding all the parts where religious texts make empirical claims about reality as unimportant or allegory, because religion has already lost those arguments. Do you think Galileo clashed with the Catholic church over heliocentrism because the church didn't understand what religion should and shouldn't be making claims about?
renewiltord 1y ago
Hell is the Absence of God is one of my favourite stories of all time. Ted Chiang is truly incredible. The short story anthologies are unbelievable. Every one a banger.
- LinchZhang 1y ago
  It's really cool that you ask 10 people their favorite chiang story, and chances are, you'd get 11 answers. And he didn't even write that many more than 10 stories! Really tells you both how talented he is, and how different stories just speak to different people.
AceJohnny2 1y ago
If you like stories of science fiction, I'm surprised no-one mentioned Greg Egan. "Singleton": what if many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory was real? The Orthogonal trilogy, starting with "The Clockwork Rocket": what if space-time was Riemannian rather than Lorentzian? Physics explained at https://www.gregegan.net/ORTHOGONAL/00/PM.html https://www.gregegan.net/ORTHOGONAL/00/PM.html
- orthoxerox 1y ago
  Greg Egan can write character-based science fiction when he wants to as well (you can find it in his short stories), but it has to be a topic that resonates with him personally. Without a resonance, the stories often look like "plausible vignette - fast-forward through technological implications - another plausible vignette with characters already changed by the experience".
  - pavel_lishin 1y ago
    I think he exceeds at doing both at once. One of the things I loved most about The Clockwork Rocket wasn't the exploration of a universe unlike our own - to be honest, most of it went over my head - but the characters dealing with very human issues in a very non-human world. Dichronauts is very similar; in a universe with a slight tweak to the laws of physics, we spend most of the book exploring the consequences of that tweak, but also the experiences of the characters living in it, some of which are a consequence of their world, and some of which feel like situations we could very easily find on our planet.
ayaros 1y ago
I've been an ardent compatibilist for a long time, but I had no idea there was even a term for it. I'm grateful to now have additional context on my own belief system - context I didn't even know existed! It's weird because when I try to explain it to people they often don't seem to get it. It's like everyone gets locked into these false dichotomies... they become unable to look past them! I loved Arrival but never really bothered to look into Story of Your Life or its author. I guess now I have to go and read all of Chiang's work... Stories about consistent fictional science are indeed a rarity. This is also why I like Sam Hughes' work (aka qntm) - he does this pretty well himself.
- kridsdale1 1y ago
  You are one of today’s lucky 10,000. You’re going to have a great time reading those 2 anthologies.
  - ayaros 1y ago
    I've already read much of qntm's work!
- LinchZhang 1y ago
  OMG I'm so glad this review might have an impact! Please do check out Story of Your Life and then read the other stories! Without giving too many spoilers away, the short story's plot is simultaneously extremely similar to and extremely different from the movie. YMMV on which one you prefer, fans are divided. In my experience people who read the short story first prefer the story, and people who watch the movie first prefer the movie. But you might be different! Just read it first and report back what you feel!
  - ayaros 1y ago
    I mean, I'm a bit biased towards Denis Villeneuve. The man is literally the modern embodiment of Stanley Kubrick and everything he stood for. His films contain everything that's lacking in modern cinema - decent plots, good writing, slower pacing, artful framing and composition of shots, a dedication to hard sci-fi, respect for source material, very careful attention to lighting and sound design, miniatures so thoughtfully combined with CGI you don't even notice them because it all blends together so seamlessly, as special effects should... I could go on forever. I worship the ground he walks on. With that said, trying to compare the two would be like trying to compare apples and oranges. Films and prose are two separate mediums. Some things which work well in one don't work in the other. It's like the difference between 2001 the film vs. 2001 the book - perhaps my favorite example since they were simultaneously written and directed as counterparts to each other (as opposed to one being based on the other, as is usually the case).
teekert 1y ago
Nitpick (and overall I agree with tfa): "In Exhalation, thermodynamics appear to work differently". I'd say it works the same, but in a very simplified universe, so it gives you a much better understanding of the concept. Which is again, pretty genius. Oh and "I think he doesn’t understand the power of this singularity-level technology he just introduced." <- I think he does, but this take would make for a much more boring and less powerful story. Not addressed in tfa but there is one story where writing is first introduced in a society, and before that they had 2 concepts of truth: "The real truth" and "What all parties find convenient". So powerful, I think we do this more that we think, see also that story about that guy that needs coming to terms with his own memory. Read Ted Chiang people. Any new book of his is an insta-buy for me. I think Greg Egan is up there with Ted Chiang btw, his stories are much longer but still have this high level of scientific and thoroughly structured imagination.
adaml_623 1y ago
I feel the author of the article shows extraordinary hubris in writing, "his lack of output being tragic for a generational talent".
- jimmcslim 1y ago
  Maybe, but I did come to the article hoping to learn that he had just published another collection of short stories, but alas not.
- nyeah 1y ago
  I could interpret that sentiment as "it's a terrible shame we don't have more Chiang to read". In that interpretation I don't see article-author-hubris.
sriku 1y ago
"story of your life" isn't quite about sapir-whorf but more about the lagrangian view of the world (as opposed to the Hamiltonian). That is difficult to convey in a movie and so the sapir-whorf part got emphasized there. Also Exhalation is a beautiful story that captures the fact that all life and intelligence lives in the space between low entropy and high entropy. So it's not different thermodynamics. But overall I align with the sense of admiration the OP has for Ted Chiang. He explores "what if" scenarios with such mastery I feel like I had a dip in a fresh water pool after a read. Another of my favs (including the title itself) is "Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom".
- nyeah 1y ago
  Hi, Sriku. Um, is your dissertation available anywhere? I'm an electronic music amateur. Mostly a four-on-the-floor guy but interested in breaking out of that a bit. I'm reasonably mathy. Folks please be gentle with the downvotes. I tried an email but can't seem to make it work!
  - pkd 1y ago
    If you look at his LinkedIn he lists his thesis title, and googling that will bring you to it, hosted on his site.
    - nyeah 1y ago
      Found it, thanks!
ndsipa_pomu 1y ago
For anyone that wants a quick taste of Ted's writing, I heartily recommend having a read of The Great Silence as it's available here: https://electricliterature.com/the-great-silence-by-ted-chiang/ https://electricliterature.com/the-great-silence-by-ted-chia... The last line always gets me.
- stared 1y ago
  I it the same story as I keep sending as a taster for Ted Chiang.
- kraussvonespy 1y ago
  Oof. Things got awfully dusty in here thinking about The Great Silence. It's a very short piece with huge emotional impact.
  - jermberj 1y ago
    Something that hit me hard about this one is the purported full quote from Alex ends with "See you tomorrow." Given the context of Chiang's story, leaving this off just adds to the gut punch for me.
bananapub 1y ago
Greg Egan is someone who also does this, and does it prolifically and for the ~thirty years.
alkyon 1y ago
The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate is by far my favourite of all Chiang's stories. It is always great intellectual pleasure to read them, however sometimes I find his writing style a bit dry and I don't get so involved emotionally as with Philip K. Dick's stories for instance.
stared 1y ago
I have a slightly different reading on Ted Chiang's approach to free will. As I see it, free will is a perspective - not something true or false, just looking at things from a certain angle. Knowledge of future is another one - and it is incompatible with free will. You can choose, you can know the future, but not both.
- cantor_S_drug 1y ago
  I think free will should be understood as a game of repeated prisoner's dilemma game. Where we have to tweak our choices of whether to choose vanilla or chocolate based on our past experiences. Free will emerges in this repeated version but then determinism can creep in there too.
kbuchanan 1y ago
Thanks for this. I'd never heard of Chiang, and now I've bought my first book!
- kridsdale1 1y ago
  I feel joy for your impending joy.
- LinchZhang 1y ago
  I'm so glad my review had an effect on people! I hope the book can bring you half as much joy as it brought me <3 <3 <3
lll-o-lll 1y ago
Is this an ai written article? > In Exhalation, thermodynamics appear to work differently The whole point of this story is to explain thermodynamics (or entropy). He wrote a little note! I can’t begin to believe this was written by a human who’s really read Chiang.
- OgsyedIE 1y ago
  That is a very odd error to make and I hope the author has merely misremembered the content of the story but I carried out a short test and the results are not promising for full human authorship. Prompting "Which Ted Chiang story depicts a universe where thermodynamics works differently" led to hallucinating that Exhalation is the answer (instead of correctly stating that no story does this) with high logprobs by GPT 4.5, 4.1, o3, Claude 4 and DeepSeek R1. Only GPT 5 and Claude 4.1 gave correct answers repeatedly (on repeated sampling in their case instead of logprobs).
  - LinchZhang 1y ago
    This seems like a weird way to check if something's AI? a) Like presumably AIs are much more likely to make mistakes of a certain form if there are more such mistakes in the training data (or similar ones) b) to figure out whether something's written by AI you want to figure out if AI can independently generate it rather than heavily be tricked to make a specific mistake.
    - OgsyedIE 1y ago
      I'd previously read the story myself about a decade ago and it stuck in my mind because I quite enjoyed the autosurgery scene so all I was checking was whether it was a mistake AI commonly makes. If you're wondering about the apparently unusual depth of checking logprobs across different versions, I have a pre-existing applet for that which was built for checking some categories of press releases in my industry.
      - LinchZhang 1y ago
lxgr 1y ago
> I’ve noticed many of his readers, including some of his most positive reviewers, miss one key point or another of his works, and thus don't fully appreciate his genius. Wow, thanks for enlightening the unwashed masses of Ted Chiang fans.
motohagiography 1y ago
It seems like this was written by someone who does not read literary fiction. It was defeined by this higher order portraiture of truth, and the effect that emerges from the whole piece. It's a full composition, where like classical music, you really need to hear the whole thing and not just a few bars or a riff. Chiang is great. I think of him as the last good writer, as reviewers seemed to stop acknowledging anything good after his Exhalations, which was just before the culture was fully consumed by spasms. Maybe there is an opportunity, where AI will polarize the market for fiction, and the best stuff becomes a super valuable and rarefied pleasure against a backdrop of formulaic genre fiction and AI slop?
FrustratedMonky 1y ago
"strong Sapir-Whorf (the idea that language significantly constrains thought) isn't a largely discredited linguistic hypothesis" I didn't know this was discredited? Is it? I thought this was still being studied.
benji-york 1y ago
If you like that style of scifi, you may also like Adrian Tchaikovsky's work.
- frm88 1y ago
  Seconded. Not all of it, though. Particularly the trilogies fade in quality and precision of ideas/writing when compared to the standalones. Cage of Souls is one of his latest standalones and it blew me away.
skipants 1y ago
I'm enjoying this article. One nitpick is that Black Mirror is usually dystopian in its view of technology but there has been more than 1 happy ending. The author probably only has San Junipero fresh in their mind. https://screenrant.com/black-mirror-happy-ending-episodes/ https://screenrant.com/black-mirror-happy-ending-episodes/
- janeerie 1y ago
  I don't know how one could classify USS Callister and Black Museum as having happy endings! The fates of the bad guys in those episodes are so horrible they still haunt me. Doesn't make it any better that they are bad guys!
nyeah 1y ago
Comparing to old sci fi. (For anyone who still cares!) Chiang can be pitched as today's Stanislaw Lem. (And maybe a modern PK Dick but with much less insanity.) I'm thinking especially of His Master's Voice, which is my favorite Lem story and maybe his most Chiangian. Very cerebral and great storytelling. The Chiang story where the mathematician discovers the horrible truth that 1+1=3 while her husband discovers he doesn't love her is ... I think Lem (or Dick) would be proud to have pulled that off. Note: someone else commented that Chiang often seems dryer than PK Dick, which can make C feel like more work to read. Maybe that might be true sometimes :). But maybe it's only on the surface. If that makes sense. Chiang is condensed. Dick is ... not condensed.
- the_af 1y ago
  PKD and Chiang -- I hadn't thought of this comparison, but as a fan of both, it rings true. Didn't PKD even write a nightmarish story about god and angels being literally true and punishing the infidel that echoes Chiang's story about "Hell.."? I don't think Chiang is drier than PKD. I think he's a saner PKD, without the tendency to psychedelic ramblings. I say this as an absolute fan of PKD!
overfeed 1y ago
I love Ted Chiang and re-read his stories every few years. Most of author's criticisms arise from their refusal to accept that Chiang's stories are mostly science fantasy[1][2], and not some third option. Most/all of the stories primarily focus on characters and relationships on the macro and micro. In each story, the gimmick(tm) is thoroughly examined and extrapolated in an internally-consistant way, but that is excellent world-building, and independent of genre. 1. As exemplified by Tower of Babylon which wouldn't be out of place in a fantasy anthology. 2. Understand is probably his number 2 "hardest" SF story. The way it is told is closer to a character study on the effects of human super-intelligence (unbelievably authored in 1991). Exhalation is no. 1, and it's focus is still very "soft" SF.
- 7thaccount 1y ago
  Understand was really good IMO.
- neilparikh 1y ago
  I think you’re using the typical aesthetic definition of fantasy vs. sci-fi. You’re right that under that one, Tower of Babylon would be considered fantasy. Ted Chiang has an alternate definition though, I prefer that one to be honest. His definition is about whether there are certain “special people” to whom the general laws of the universe don’t apply [0]. Under that definition, even what we would colloquially call magic (ex. turning lead to gold) would be called sci-fi, as long as everyone could do it; once you have that, you can do things like mechanize it and make factories to do it at scale, and there’s where you get the interesting second order problems. Under that definition, I think Tower of Babylon is better considered sci-fi, because there are no “special people”. The new rules of the universe also lead interesting second order effects: the tower gets so tall that entire families live in the tower, and people are born and die in the tower [1]. [0] - better explained him here: https://boingboing.net/2010/07/22/ted-chiang-interview.html https://boingboing.net/2010/07/22/ted-chiang-interview.html, see “You have very specific views on the difference between magic and science. Can you talk about that?” [1] - I don’t know if Chiang intended this, but I think you could probably draw a parallel to missionaries to the new world.
  - 1y ago
tennysont 1y ago
> The ability to send bits across parallel universes is just insane in terms of economic and experimentation value. For example, pharmaceutical companies can do $100 billion trials for all sorts of novel drugs, and trade the results of this information with their clones in other universes. I remember reading this short story and being obsessed with the consequences. It immediately solves P = NP, and makes guarding secrets way way way harder. This is the first time I've heard someone else mention it. HPMOR had a similar technology (the time turners) and threw up defensive cannon early: > If this worked, Harry could use it to recover any sort of answer that was easy to check but hard to find. He wouldn't have just shown that P=NP once you had a Time-Turner, this trick was more general than that. Harry could use it to find the combinations on combination locks, or passwords of every sort. Maybe even find the entrance to Slytherin's Chamber of Secrets, if Harry could figure out some systematic way of describing all the locations in Hogwarts. It would be an awesome cheat even by Harry's standards of cheating. > Harry took Paper-2 in his trembling hand, and unfolded it. > Paper-2 said in slightly shaky handwriting: > DO NOT MESS WITH TIME I'm a huge SciFi fan, especially Ted Chiang. I perceive his styles to be quite varied and creative. I think that he does a good job of portraying the "awe" of "awe-inspiring discovery".
- LinchZhang 1y ago
  If you like explorations of the deep impacts of parallel universes which have bridges that lets you transport bits (but not matter), you might enjoy https://brainchip.thecomicseries.com/ https://brainchip.thecomicseries.com/ I like some of Yudkowsky's shorter fiction but I could never get into HPMOR. The writing style just comes across as too smarmy. I know it's intentional but I still can't get past it (I had trouble with Thomas Covenant) as well.

293 points by pseudolus 1y ago

ljlolel 1y ago

Arrival is my new favorite movie ever

LinchZhang 1y ago
We're doing a watch party next Monday! In case you and/or ppl you know live in East Bay!
- ayaros 1y ago
  Now I feel bad I won't be able to attend, being on the other side of the country... :(
  - LinchZhang 1y ago
    Well, feel free to send my review to anybody cool living in SF or East Bay, especially people new to the area! Maybe they'd read the review and think they'd vibe well with me :)
lzyuan1006 1y ago
Me too
BeetleB 1y ago
I didn't like the movie at all. I later read the story and it was fantastic.

simpaticoder 1y ago

Ted Chiang does love to explore the counter-factual with empathy and openness where he somehow manages to take himself out of the story in the admirable Virginia Wolfe sense. The OP misses the biting critique hidden in these tales. For example Omphalos, Hell Is the Absence of God, and Tower of Babylon, can all be read as a devastating critique of religion. They all clearly articulate what the world would be like if certain religious beliefs were true. Since those worlds are nothing like our own, the beliefs are false. There is a strong element of cosmic horror in each of these stories that implicitly make a strong case that we are quite fortunate that our religions do not accurately describe nature. Exhalation is one of my favorites. There is profound lesson about the nature of the mind, expressed simply as a sequence of discovery by a lone scientist in a very alien world. But the world is an idealized, simplified version of our own with much simpler source of work in the physics sense. I very much wanted to know more about the nature of that world, and for the people there to find a way out of their apocalyptic predicament. But that story, like it's world, is hermetically sealed perfection. The fate of our own universe is the same, but with more steps in the energy cycle and a longer timeline. The silence bounding that story is a beautiful choice, one that makes it a real jewel.

LinchZhang 1y ago
Thank you for the valuable and constructive comment! I just didn't feel like discussing the satire angle was very interesting! In the article: > In Omphalos, Young Earth Creationism is empirically true2. Astronomers can only see light from stars 6,000 light-years away. Fossilized trees have centers with no rings. The first God-created humans lack belly buttons. The scientists in that story keep discovering multiple independent lines of evidence that converge on creationism: because in that universe, they're simply correct. I think this section makes it very clear that in one sense, it's a clear satire of religion, or at least Creationism (implied: we do not see this, so it's implausible we're in a YE Creationist world). I didn't think it was worth spelling it out. Also overall I thought anti-religious satire in fiction is fairly common (I remember reading Candide in high school, and Pullman around the same time or a little earlier) and far from what makes Chiang special. Agree with your thoughts on Exhalation. I hope they make it out, but also completely understand why Chiang ended the story where he did.
- simpaticoder 1y ago
  TBH I'm glad you left it out! It's an uncomfortable aspect to his stories. His narration hovers above the action with such perfect grace... The satirical element, or its implication, somehow mars that perfection. It is probably better left unsaid by critics and admirers, and left to the individual reader. In truth I shouldn't have mentioned it.
  - deleted 1y ago
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adaml_623 1y ago
I think OP was incorrect in writing, "thermodynamics appear to work differently", in Exhalation. I think the thermodynamics works the same and you've nailed it by describing it as hermetically sealed perfection. It's a simpler world where a self-aware being can see and almost feel the march of entropy and their own brief existence being part of that.
poszlem 1y ago

jdlshore 1y ago

If you like Chiang, Netflix has an adaptation of his work called “Pantheon” that’s very good. Animated, two seasons, about the rise of uploaded humans. I don’t know which of his works it’s based on, so can’t say how true it is to the original, but I enjoyed it.

mettamage 1y ago
That was a really fun show. It got even better at the end
tocs3 1y ago
I think you are mixing up Chang and Ken Liu. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon_(TV_series)
- jdlshore 1y ago
  Oh, I think you’re right. Oops!
doctoboggan 1y ago
Just chiming in to recommend this show as well. Very well done and it has a complete story arc in 2 seasons which is close to my optimal TV show duration. Like the other comment said, this isn't a Ted Chiang adaptation though, it's based on a few short stories by Ken Liu. You can read one of the stories here: https://bigthink.com/high-culture/ken-liu-short-story/ https://bigthink.com/high-culture/ken-liu-short-story/ However, in this case I think the TV adaptation did a better job with the story than the original short.

mcphage 1y ago

> Chiang’s much weaker at the middle level, where we consider how societies and civilizations collectively face novel technologies. I’m not really sure this matters. The ideas are interesting for their effects on the characters of the story—going in depth on the world building outside of the characters doesn’t really mean anything. For the author’s example: yes, economic experiments and drug experiments would be cheaper, but like… so what? What does that mean for the characters in the story? His stories aren’t an exploration of ideas for their own sake, they’re created with a purpose, and this middle level world building doesn’t move that purpose forward at all.

curtisszmania 1y ago

[dead]

manfromchina1 1y ago

I read Understand by him a really long time ago. I thought it was really good. However at the time I didnt understand the motivation of one of the main characters in it and the ending felt unjustified because of that. Years ago someone posted The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate (pdf) by him on here. That one was a trip. He nailed the atmosphere and cadence of One Thousand and One Nights with a time travel story superimposed on top of it. Or it least that's how I remember it. Thought it was very Sufi in how it was told.

LinchZhang 1y ago
The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate is SO good. I tear up every time I reread it. If you haven't already done so, check out The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling.

root_axis 1y ago

Interesting observation. Spoilers -> He does the same thing in Tower of Babel, where the topology of the universe is structured in such a manner that the tower can physically reach "heaven", which ends up being a surprise to the reader and the characters at the same time. Masterful stuff. I want to nitpick two things. On compatibalism, the first definition presented is the correct one, the framing that "you have to make peace with determinism" isn't quite right. For compatiablists, determinism is freedom, because if one's actions did not follow from prior causes then they would not align with one's internal states. The other is sneaking in the characterization of Chiang's AI doomer skepticism as a "blindspot". This topic is being debated to death on HN every day so I'll leave that argument for another thread, but IMO it contradicts the tone of the article about a writer whose depth of thought the author was just heaping praise on. I'm not saying its necessary to adopt his views on all things, but I think it deserved more than a footnote dismissal.

LinchZhang 1y ago
I appreciate the nitpicks! Re #1 It's been several years since I read up on that area of philosophy. I'll need to reread some stuff to decide whether I think the definition I used is a fine enough simplification for sci-fi readers (and, well, myself) vs whether it missed enough nuances that it's essentially misleading. (Some academic philosophers follow me on substack so maybe they'll also end up correcting me at some point!) Re #2 ah I don't think of it as "sneaking in". It's more like "this is a view I have, this is a view many of my readers likely also have, given that this is a widely debated topic (as you say) and I'm not going to change anybody's minds on the object level I'm just going to mention it and move on."
- the_af 1y ago
  For the record, I also found #2 jarring. I understand you cannot write as if walking on egg shells; you have your position and maybe your readers do as well. But this is far from a settled matter, and Chiang's position (which was describing earlier rather than current LLMs, but I still think it arguably holds today) is arguably correct, or valid. I probably agree with Chiang more than I agree with you, which is why I find it odd to call it a blind or weak spot as if the matter was settled. Maybe "while I admire Chiang, I fundamentally disagree on some topics, such as LLMs" would have felt less jarring. (Not saying you must write like this, and it's impossible to write in a way nobody will object to. I'm just explaining why I -- and presumably the person you're responding to -- found it jarring).

lmm 1y ago

> Many of his readers, even in their otherwise rave reviews, miss this. Multiple reviewers complain about how the science in his stories are “unrealistic” (e.g. strong Sapir-Whorf is “discredited”). They expected hard science fiction; Chiang was doing something different. Chiang created different universes with internally self-consistent scientific laws, using science fiction and alternative science as a vehicle for exploring philosophical progress and human relationships. This is being overly kind. "What if religion was actually true?" does not create a universe with internally self-consistent scientific laws; it creates a universe full of impossibility from which you then pick and choose one or two things to focus on, and end up with not science fiction but fantasy.

alexey-salmin 1y ago
It's not impossible from a scientific perspective for a planet to be terraformed and seeded with intelligent life by some overly advanced spices (you can say "god-like"). Or to create a simulation with intelligent life in it and to save some resources by starting 6000 years ago from a complex seed state rather than simulating 16 billion years of physics to see the intelligent life emerge or not. That would be rather inconvenient for the PhD studying simulated intelligent life, he'd better just purchase and rearrange some pre-computed data. The difference between science and religion doesn't lie in disagreement over particular facts or any facts at all, the difference is in the approach. Religion can explain anything but predicts very little (except for sociological phenomena which it predicts rather well). Science is built around making verifiable predictions but doesn't in fact give any answers, only theories that are (mostly) consistent with observable events (so far). They can however agree or disagree over any particular set of facts. Take any religious belief and you can build a scientific world where it is true.
- avar 1y ago
  > science is built around making verifiable > predictions but doesn't in fact give any > answers, only theories This is just redefining "theory" and "answer" to the point of meaninglessness. Darwin didn't know a lot of things about evolution or biology, and I'm sure he had questions about some of those things. If you could talk to him today you could give him answers to those questions, and the reason for that is that those answers are found in theories and scientific progress in general. But yes, it doesn't provide "answers" in the mushy religious sense, i.e. "what is it all for?". > The difference between science and > religion doesn't lie in disagreement > over particular facts or any facts at all Yes, it does. You're just implicitly excluding all the parts where religious texts make empirical claims about reality as unimportant or allegory, because religion has already lost those arguments. Do you think Galileo clashed with the Catholic church over heliocentrism because the church didn't understand what religion should and shouldn't be making claims about?

renewiltord 1y ago

Hell is the Absence of God is one of my favourite stories of all time. Ted Chiang is truly incredible. The short story anthologies are unbelievable. Every one a banger.

LinchZhang 1y ago
It's really cool that you ask 10 people their favorite chiang story, and chances are, you'd get 11 answers. And he didn't even write that many more than 10 stories! Really tells you both how talented he is, and how different stories just speak to different people.

AceJohnny2 1y ago

If you like stories of science fiction, I'm surprised no-one mentioned Greg Egan. "Singleton": what if many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory was real? The Orthogonal trilogy, starting with "The Clockwork Rocket": what if space-time was Riemannian rather than Lorentzian? Physics explained at https://www.gregegan.net/ORTHOGONAL/00/PM.html https://www.gregegan.net/ORTHOGONAL/00/PM.html

orthoxerox 1y ago
Greg Egan can write character-based science fiction when he wants to as well (you can find it in his short stories), but it has to be a topic that resonates with him personally. Without a resonance, the stories often look like "plausible vignette - fast-forward through technological implications - another plausible vignette with characters already changed by the experience".
- pavel_lishin 1y ago
  I think he exceeds at doing both at once. One of the things I loved most about The Clockwork Rocket wasn't the exploration of a universe unlike our own - to be honest, most of it went over my head - but the characters dealing with very human issues in a very non-human world. Dichronauts is very similar; in a universe with a slight tweak to the laws of physics, we spend most of the book exploring the consequences of that tweak, but also the experiences of the characters living in it, some of which are a consequence of their world, and some of which feel like situations we could very easily find on our planet.

ayaros 1y ago

I've been an ardent compatibilist for a long time, but I had no idea there was even a term for it. I'm grateful to now have additional context on my own belief system - context I didn't even know existed! It's weird because when I try to explain it to people they often don't seem to get it. It's like everyone gets locked into these false dichotomies... they become unable to look past them! I loved Arrival but never really bothered to look into Story of Your Life or its author. I guess now I have to go and read all of Chiang's work... Stories about consistent fictional science are indeed a rarity. This is also why I like Sam Hughes' work (aka qntm) - he does this pretty well himself.

kridsdale1 1y ago
You are one of today’s lucky 10,000. You’re going to have a great time reading those 2 anthologies.
- ayaros 1y ago
  I've already read much of qntm's work!
LinchZhang 1y ago
OMG I'm so glad this review might have an impact! Please do check out Story of Your Life and then read the other stories! Without giving too many spoilers away, the short story's plot is simultaneously extremely similar to and extremely different from the movie. YMMV on which one you prefer, fans are divided. In my experience people who read the short story first prefer the story, and people who watch the movie first prefer the movie. But you might be different! Just read it first and report back what you feel!
- ayaros 1y ago
  I mean, I'm a bit biased towards Denis Villeneuve. The man is literally the modern embodiment of Stanley Kubrick and everything he stood for. His films contain everything that's lacking in modern cinema - decent plots, good writing, slower pacing, artful framing and composition of shots, a dedication to hard sci-fi, respect for source material, very careful attention to lighting and sound design, miniatures so thoughtfully combined with CGI you don't even notice them because it all blends together so seamlessly, as special effects should... I could go on forever. I worship the ground he walks on. With that said, trying to compare the two would be like trying to compare apples and oranges. Films and prose are two separate mediums. Some things which work well in one don't work in the other. It's like the difference between 2001 the film vs. 2001 the book - perhaps my favorite example since they were simultaneously written and directed as counterparts to each other (as opposed to one being based on the other, as is usually the case).

teekert 1y ago

Nitpick (and overall I agree with tfa): "In Exhalation, thermodynamics appear to work differently". I'd say it works the same, but in a very simplified universe, so it gives you a much better understanding of the concept. Which is again, pretty genius. Oh and "I think he doesn’t understand the power of this singularity-level technology he just introduced." <- I think he does, but this take would make for a much more boring and less powerful story. Not addressed in tfa but there is one story where writing is first introduced in a society, and before that they had 2 concepts of truth: "The real truth" and "What all parties find convenient". So powerful, I think we do this more that we think, see also that story about that guy that needs coming to terms with his own memory. Read Ted Chiang people. Any new book of his is an insta-buy for me. I think Greg Egan is up there with Ted Chiang btw, his stories are much longer but still have this high level of scientific and thoroughly structured imagination.

adaml_623 1y ago

I feel the author of the article shows extraordinary hubris in writing, "his lack of output being tragic for a generational talent".

jimmcslim 1y ago
Maybe, but I did come to the article hoping to learn that he had just published another collection of short stories, but alas not.
nyeah 1y ago
I could interpret that sentiment as "it's a terrible shame we don't have more Chiang to read". In that interpretation I don't see article-author-hubris.

sriku 1y ago

"story of your life" isn't quite about sapir-whorf but more about the lagrangian view of the world (as opposed to the Hamiltonian). That is difficult to convey in a movie and so the sapir-whorf part got emphasized there. Also Exhalation is a beautiful story that captures the fact that all life and intelligence lives in the space between low entropy and high entropy. So it's not different thermodynamics. But overall I align with the sense of admiration the OP has for Ted Chiang. He explores "what if" scenarios with such mastery I feel like I had a dip in a fresh water pool after a read. Another of my favs (including the title itself) is "Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom".

nyeah 1y ago
Hi, Sriku. Um, is your dissertation available anywhere? I'm an electronic music amateur. Mostly a four-on-the-floor guy but interested in breaking out of that a bit. I'm reasonably mathy. Folks please be gentle with the downvotes. I tried an email but can't seem to make it work!
- pkd 1y ago
  If you look at his LinkedIn he lists his thesis title, and googling that will bring you to it, hosted on his site.
  - nyeah 1y ago
    Found it, thanks!

ndsipa_pomu 1y ago

For anyone that wants a quick taste of Ted's writing, I heartily recommend having a read of The Great Silence as it's available here: https://electricliterature.com/the-great-silence-by-ted-chiang/ https://electricliterature.com/the-great-silence-by-ted-chia... The last line always gets me.

stared 1y ago
I it the same story as I keep sending as a taster for Ted Chiang.
kraussvonespy 1y ago
Oof. Things got awfully dusty in here thinking about The Great Silence. It's a very short piece with huge emotional impact.
- jermberj 1y ago
  Something that hit me hard about this one is the purported full quote from Alex ends with "See you tomorrow." Given the context of Chiang's story, leaving this off just adds to the gut punch for me.

bananapub 1y ago

Greg Egan is someone who also does this, and does it prolifically and for the ~thirty years.

alkyon 1y ago

The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate is by far my favourite of all Chiang's stories. It is always great intellectual pleasure to read them, however sometimes I find his writing style a bit dry and I don't get so involved emotionally as with Philip K. Dick's stories for instance.

stared 1y ago

I have a slightly different reading on Ted Chiang's approach to free will. As I see it, free will is a perspective - not something true or false, just looking at things from a certain angle. Knowledge of future is another one - and it is incompatible with free will. You can choose, you can know the future, but not both.

cantor_S_drug 1y ago
I think free will should be understood as a game of repeated prisoner's dilemma game. Where we have to tweak our choices of whether to choose vanilla or chocolate based on our past experiences. Free will emerges in this repeated version but then determinism can creep in there too.

kbuchanan 1y ago

Thanks for this. I'd never heard of Chiang, and now I've bought my first book!

kridsdale1 1y ago
I feel joy for your impending joy.
LinchZhang 1y ago
I'm so glad my review had an effect on people! I hope the book can bring you half as much joy as it brought me <3 <3 <3

lll-o-lll 1y ago

Is this an ai written article? > In Exhalation, thermodynamics appear to work differently The whole point of this story is to explain thermodynamics (or entropy). He wrote a little note! I can’t begin to believe this was written by a human who’s really read Chiang.

OgsyedIE 1y ago
That is a very odd error to make and I hope the author has merely misremembered the content of the story but I carried out a short test and the results are not promising for full human authorship. Prompting "Which Ted Chiang story depicts a universe where thermodynamics works differently" led to hallucinating that Exhalation is the answer (instead of correctly stating that no story does this) with high logprobs by GPT 4.5, 4.1, o3, Claude 4 and DeepSeek R1. Only GPT 5 and Claude 4.1 gave correct answers repeatedly (on repeated sampling in their case instead of logprobs).
- LinchZhang 1y ago
  This seems like a weird way to check if something's AI? a) Like presumably AIs are much more likely to make mistakes of a certain form if there are more such mistakes in the training data (or similar ones) b) to figure out whether something's written by AI you want to figure out if AI can independently generate it rather than heavily be tricked to make a specific mistake.
  - OgsyedIE 1y ago
    I'd previously read the story myself about a decade ago and it stuck in my mind because I quite enjoyed the autosurgery scene so all I was checking was whether it was a mistake AI commonly makes. If you're wondering about the apparently unusual depth of checking logprobs across different versions, I have a pre-existing applet for that which was built for checking some categories of press releases in my industry.
    - LinchZhang 1y ago

lxgr 1y ago

> I’ve noticed many of his readers, including some of his most positive reviewers, miss one key point or another of his works, and thus don't fully appreciate his genius. Wow, thanks for enlightening the unwashed masses of Ted Chiang fans.

motohagiography 1y ago

It seems like this was written by someone who does not read literary fiction. It was defeined by this higher order portraiture of truth, and the effect that emerges from the whole piece. It's a full composition, where like classical music, you really need to hear the whole thing and not just a few bars or a riff. Chiang is great. I think of him as the last good writer, as reviewers seemed to stop acknowledging anything good after his Exhalations, which was just before the culture was fully consumed by spasms. Maybe there is an opportunity, where AI will polarize the market for fiction, and the best stuff becomes a super valuable and rarefied pleasure against a backdrop of formulaic genre fiction and AI slop?

FrustratedMonky 1y ago

"strong Sapir-Whorf (the idea that language significantly constrains thought) isn't a largely discredited linguistic hypothesis" I didn't know this was discredited? Is it? I thought this was still being studied.

benji-york 1y ago

If you like that style of scifi, you may also like Adrian Tchaikovsky's work.

frm88 1y ago
Seconded. Not all of it, though. Particularly the trilogies fade in quality and precision of ideas/writing when compared to the standalones. Cage of Souls is one of his latest standalones and it blew me away.

skipants 1y ago

I'm enjoying this article. One nitpick is that Black Mirror is usually dystopian in its view of technology but there has been more than 1 happy ending. The author probably only has San Junipero fresh in their mind. https://screenrant.com/black-mirror-happy-ending-episodes/ https://screenrant.com/black-mirror-happy-ending-episodes/

janeerie 1y ago
I don't know how one could classify USS Callister and Black Museum as having happy endings! The fates of the bad guys in those episodes are so horrible they still haunt me. Doesn't make it any better that they are bad guys!

nyeah 1y ago

Comparing to old sci fi. (For anyone who still cares!) Chiang can be pitched as today's Stanislaw Lem. (And maybe a modern PK Dick but with much less insanity.) I'm thinking especially of His Master's Voice, which is my favorite Lem story and maybe his most Chiangian. Very cerebral and great storytelling. The Chiang story where the mathematician discovers the horrible truth that 1+1=3 while her husband discovers he doesn't love her is ... I think Lem (or Dick) would be proud to have pulled that off. Note: someone else commented that Chiang often seems dryer than PK Dick, which can make C feel like more work to read. Maybe that might be true sometimes :). But maybe it's only on the surface. If that makes sense. Chiang is condensed. Dick is ... not condensed.

the_af 1y ago
PKD and Chiang -- I hadn't thought of this comparison, but as a fan of both, it rings true. Didn't PKD even write a nightmarish story about god and angels being literally true and punishing the infidel that echoes Chiang's story about "Hell.."? I don't think Chiang is drier than PKD. I think he's a saner PKD, without the tendency to psychedelic ramblings. I say this as an absolute fan of PKD!

overfeed 1y ago

I love Ted Chiang and re-read his stories every few years. Most of author's criticisms arise from their refusal to accept that Chiang's stories are mostly science fantasy[1][2], and not some third option. Most/all of the stories primarily focus on characters and relationships on the macro and micro. In each story, the gimmick(tm) is thoroughly examined and extrapolated in an internally-consistant way, but that is excellent world-building, and independent of genre. 1. As exemplified by Tower of Babylon which wouldn't be out of place in a fantasy anthology. 2. Understand is probably his number 2 "hardest" SF story. The way it is told is closer to a character study on the effects of human super-intelligence (unbelievably authored in 1991). Exhalation is no. 1, and it's focus is still very "soft" SF.

7thaccount 1y ago
Understand was really good IMO.
neilparikh 1y ago
I think you’re using the typical aesthetic definition of fantasy vs. sci-fi. You’re right that under that one, Tower of Babylon would be considered fantasy. Ted Chiang has an alternate definition though, I prefer that one to be honest. His definition is about whether there are certain “special people” to whom the general laws of the universe don’t apply [0]. Under that definition, even what we would colloquially call magic (ex. turning lead to gold) would be called sci-fi, as long as everyone could do it; once you have that, you can do things like mechanize it and make factories to do it at scale, and there’s where you get the interesting second order problems. Under that definition, I think Tower of Babylon is better considered sci-fi, because there are no “special people”. The new rules of the universe also lead interesting second order effects: the tower gets so tall that entire families live in the tower, and people are born and die in the tower [1]. [0] - better explained him here: https://boingboing.net/2010/07/22/ted-chiang-interview.html https://boingboing.net/2010/07/22/ted-chiang-interview.html, see “You have very specific views on the difference between magic and science. Can you talk about that?” [1] - I don’t know if Chiang intended this, but I think you could probably draw a parallel to missionaries to the new world.
- 1y ago

tennysont 1y ago

> The ability to send bits across parallel universes is just insane in terms of economic and experimentation value. For example, pharmaceutical companies can do $100 billion trials for all sorts of novel drugs, and trade the results of this information with their clones in other universes. I remember reading this short story and being obsessed with the consequences. It immediately solves P = NP, and makes guarding secrets way way way harder. This is the first time I've heard someone else mention it. HPMOR had a similar technology (the time turners) and threw up defensive cannon early: > If this worked, Harry could use it to recover any sort of answer that was easy to check but hard to find. He wouldn't have just shown that P=NP once you had a Time-Turner, this trick was more general than that. Harry could use it to find the combinations on combination locks, or passwords of every sort. Maybe even find the entrance to Slytherin's Chamber of Secrets, if Harry could figure out some systematic way of describing all the locations in Hogwarts. It would be an awesome cheat even by Harry's standards of cheating. > Harry took Paper-2 in his trembling hand, and unfolded it. > Paper-2 said in slightly shaky handwriting: > DO NOT MESS WITH TIME I'm a huge SciFi fan, especially Ted Chiang. I perceive his styles to be quite varied and creative. I think that he does a good job of portraying the "awe" of "awe-inspiring discovery".

LinchZhang 1y ago
If you like explorations of the deep impacts of parallel universes which have bridges that lets you transport bits (but not matter), you might enjoy https://brainchip.thecomicseries.com/ https://brainchip.thecomicseries.com/ I like some of Yudkowsky's shorter fiction but I could never get into HPMOR. The writing style just comes across as too smarmy. I know it's intentional but I still can't get past it (I had trouble with Thomas Covenant) as well.