Drew > Recent Status Updates

Liking What You See: A Documentary ***** Chiang redeemed himself to me with this final story, the finest one in the collection, in my opinion. The author explores what it would like for people to see everyone without the distraction and prejudices of their relative attractiveness. This new procedure “doesn’t interfere with one’s visual perception, only with the ability to recognize what one sees.”

Hell Is The Absence of God: Nonsensical and bleak. This book is really starting to annoy me. *

The Evolution of Human Science: What does the future hold for ordinary humans when metahumans have far surpassed our ability to understand their discoveries? ***

Seventy-Two Letters: Strange and esoteric, frustrating for me. **

This went off in a strange direction.

Story of Your Life: Two stories told simultaneously, a woman
/mother interacting with an alien species and reminiscing to/about her daughter. This story is an absolutely fascinating discussion on the nature of time, communication, memory, and love. *****

I’m enjoying this novel more than I expected even though I’ve been a robot geek since reading my first Asimov robot story many years ago. The author wraps social commentary about misogyny and what it means to be human in a fascinating novel of friendship and freedom and adventure.

Division by Zero: An impossible and devastating mathematical proof leads to the ultimate test of a relationship. ***

Understand: A first person narrator describes the event that destroyed his brain, then his recovery and enhancement that made him a superhuman with no peers…until he meets another both like and very different from himself, and the inevitable literal battle of wits…to the death.

Tower of Babylon: Hillalum and his band of miners joins a team of men scaling the impossible heights of the Tower of Babylon to penetrate the Vault of Heaven and (spoiler alert) finds that it’s a round trip.

Near the end of Chapter 22, Magistrate Woodward tells his clerk Matthew the story of a young merchant’s enchantment by the song of the nightbird.

…the author had assigned all reflection, peace, and piety to God; to the Devil had been assigned the need of man to go forth and conquer, to break asunder and rework, to question and reach beyond all hope of grasping.