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| "This colossal anthology covers the return of sf to themes based in the hard sciences. . . . A very satisfactory overview of a major portion of contemporary sf and a sterling achievement by Tor and the Hartwell-Cramer team."
Booklist
From Paul McAuley's tale of runaway technology ("Gene Wars") to Gregory Benford's story of evolution and murder ("Immersion"), the 41 stories in this annotated anthology provide a strong argument for the revival of hard sf as a major force in the genre in the 1990s. Library Journal |
Ted Chiang: Understand
Ted Chiang (1967- ) is a technical writer who occasionally writes short SF that is then usually nominated for, or the winner of, awards. He is a private person whose short bio goes like this: "Ted Chiang was born in Port Jefferson, New York and currently lives in Bellevue, Washington. Of his nonfiction, written in his capacity as a technical writer, perhaps the most popular is the C++ Tutorial packaged with certain versions of Microsoft's C++ compiler. He reads some comics, enjoys going to the movies, and watches television more than is good for him." He has published five SF stories, all of which are distinctive and highly accomplished. Stories of Your Life and Others, his collected fiction thus far, was published in 2002.
Chiang says, "SF needn't have anything to do with science, but to the extent that a work of SF reflects science, it's hard SF. And reflecting science doesn't necessarily mean consistency with a certain set of facts; more essentially, it means consistency with a certain strategy for understanding the universe. Science seeks a type of explanation different from those sought by art or religion, an explanation where objective measurement takes precedence over subjective experience. And though hard SF can take many different forms, it always describes people looking for or working with that type of explanation."
"Understand," published in Asimov's, takes on the grand themes of posthumanity, hyperintelligence, and the Internet as an extension of the mind. The obvious literary ancestor of this story is Daniel Keyes' "Flowers for Algernon," as if Chiang looked at the premise and asked "What if the protagonist just kept getting smarter? What would happen if the process had no natural limits and did not reverse itself? What then?" His answer is that the emergent superhuman becomes like a political superpower. It is interesting to compare and contrast this story to Greg Egan's explorations of intelligence and personality in "Reasons to Be Cheerful" -- both Egan's and Chiang's stories are concerned with futuristic treatments for neurological damage with striking results.