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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   2835 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 22, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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So, what are you reading?

I'm picking up Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth. It has been on the backlog for years.

Paper I'm reading: Dombrink's The Touchables: Vice and Police Corruption in the 1980's.

I found Ted Chiang's most recent collection of short fiction Exhalation in a book sale the other day. I've never read anything by him, but I thoroughly enjoyed the film Arrival which was adapted from one of his short stories, so I thought I'd check it out.

The hype is warranted. The first story I read, on Tuesday afternoon, was "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling", which does exactly what hard sci-fi is supposed to do: tells an engaging story and gets you thinking. I've mentioned this story to three people since reading it. It does something very clever by contrasting a fairly conventional Black Mirror-esque "imagine the impact this near-future technology will have on our society" story, with a parallel narrative about a nineteenth-century missionary in Nigeria introducing literacy to the natives, illustrating all the profound, non-trivial and non-obvious impacts that the written word had on their culture (and human culture in general). For me it did a wonderful job of puncturing the parochialism and small-mindedness of Black Mirror-style sci-fi: writers in this genre have no trouble speculating on the scary effects of near-future technologies (or real technologies invented since, say, 1995), but essentially take for granted every technology invented prior to 1995. Chiang is making the rhetorical point that "yes, near-future technologies will have profound impacts on our society and individual psychology - but also this has been going on forever."

I don't like to read an entire collection of short stories in one go, so after reading three stories in the Chiang collection, I started my second read of Private Citizens by Tony Tulathimutte. It's just as funny and engaging as I remembered, and I can't wait for his second book to be released.

Did your collection include Hell is the Absence of God? I thought it was particularly good, especially in the context of books like Unsong.

Is this supposed to be a Christian fable or a cosmic horror story?

I have heard it was written because Chiang thought the book of Job was a cop-out. So…yes.

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