P.E.’s Reviews > Exhalation > Status Update

What's Expected of Us
3☆

'The immediate problem is that Predictors demonstrate that there's no such thing as free will.

[...]

Some people, realizing that their choices don't matter, refuse to make any choices at all. Like a legion of Bartleby the scriveners, they no longer engage in spontaneous action.'


Voir aussi :
Story of Your Life — Ted Chiang
Division by Zero — Ted Chiang
The Stanley Parable

Exhalation
5☆

"Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so"


Voir aussi :

Stories of Your Life and Others — Ted Chiang (quantité de nouvelles qui partent d'un postulat audacieux !)

The Fish of Lijiang — Chen Qiufan (in Invisible Planets, tr. Ken Liu)

Le Monde sans fin — J.-M. Jancovici, C. Blain

The Devil in the Belfry — E. A. Poe

'Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so.'

'[...] through the act of reading my words, the patterns that form your thoughts become an imitation of the patterns that once formed mine. And in that way I live again, through you.'

'It cheers me to imagine that the air that once powered me could power others, to believe that the breath that enables me to engrave these words could one day flow through someone else's body. I do not delude myself into thinking that this would be a way for me to live again, because I am not that air, I am the pattern that it assumed, temporarily. The pattern that is me [and the world in which I live]would be gone.'

'I was an everted person, with my tiny, fragmented body situated at the center of my own distended brain. It was in this unlikely configuration that I began to explore myself.'

"The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate"
3,5☆


Voir aussi :
Les 1001 Nuits
Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse — Jan Potocki
Reflection — Gu Shi (in "Broken Stars", tr. Ken Liu)
Story of Your Life — Ted Chiang
Tant que le café est encore chaud — T. Kawaguchi