This was one of the books I read on a very tight time frame in 2021. I started reading the book soon after finding out that Denis Villeneuve was going
This was one of the books I read on a very tight time frame in 2021. I started reading the book soon after finding out that Denis Villeneuve was going to direct a movie adaptation of the book. Villeneuve is the mastermind behind Arrival (2016), a movie simultaneously infuriating (for the way it muddles the key question in Chiang's short story on which it is based) and exquisite (for the beautiful scenes showing the creatures from elsewhere, the protagonists, and the last 1/3rd of the movie which I have watched several times). I wanted to watch Dune after having read the book because I believed that watching it without much of a background would probably be wasteful: It would be just like any other science fiction movie and my common reaction to sci-fi that I am not invested in is: "Oh, that is cool."
This was a surprisingly dense book to read. There are a lot of concepts which Herbert introduces almost offhand. Like the way in which he mentions "Mentats" or when he talks about the Padishah Emperor. There is very little explanation about who these characters/things/organisms are and why the reader should care about them. This goes on for about the first fifth of the book. After that, things slowly start to make more sense. The words and concepts that are repeatedly referred to start to make more sense. The book is also structured in an interesting way which keeps the reader on their toes: Each chapter begins with a quote from the emperor's daughter, who is also a historian of the world. This is as much exposition as we really get throughout the book. The chapters begin at different places and have a lot of interconnection, which required some referencing back. (I did not clearly remember the plotting of the first fifth because I was focusing on making sense of the plot's movement and I had to keep referring back to the main events from that time.)
The glossary at the end of the book defines many of the terms which are used throughout the book. I recommend reading this documentary after you have read the novel though. Figuring out what things are and what the author is really talking about is a major part of the quest of this book. Taking this part out might make the experience much worse.
There were many management parables within the text. The prose is mostly bland, and there is nothing particularly noteworthy. There are however some instances in which Herbert excels at describing the characters' marvel at some technology. The acid trips that Usul goes through after ingesting some sort of drug are not very interesting, and even as stream of consciousness, they are hard to get through.
I would say that this is a great read if you want hard-core sci-fi which lets you enjoy the story without too much philosophy getting in the way. Most of the book just introduces new characters, and except for the final third, the whole book is a setup for the new series that Herbert started with this book.
For me, reading the book before watching the movie was a great decision. I watched the movie with people who did not know anything about the series or the sci-fi basis of this series. They thoroughly enjoyed the movie as entertainment with occasional parables. However, I also had a few friends who were not that into the idea of the movie because it also took the same approach as the book and did not explain much. (Indeed, very little is said about what the Mentat even is, in the movie. And people are unable to search for it in the intermission (if your country has these) because the word is never mentioned in the movie.) I absolutely loved the movie. The picturization of the various beings and things in the book was perfect: The Sandworm (or "Shai Hulud"), the floating orbs of light which are following people around (Why do we not have something like this already?), mentats, the large machines which mine spice, the desert and the spice itself. Everything was perfectly imagined. I went into the cinema with excitement and curiosity, because knowing the general contours of the story, the only thing I was concentrating on was the picturization. The initial scene, "Herald of the Change," is my absolute favorite. Villeneuve outdid himself with this and I can not wait for the next movie to be released.
Villeneuve is going to make two movies based on this book. The first movie is already released and the second one is forthcoming. I do not plan to read the next part of this series unless there is going to be a movie adaptation for that too and it will be made by the same team. For now, the likelihood of a third movie in this franchise seems bleak.
Ted Chiang is a path breaking philosopher and fiction writer. I started saying that after reading his short story "Story of Your Life." His second book, "Exhalation", is a collection of short stories from 2019. It covers an even wider range of topics than his first collection. Chiang has the ability to zoom out of the present moment and write about human nature without providing solutions or trying to pose arguments about complex questions; instead, his writing makes the reader think about what they would do in that situation, and that is the primary method he uses to engage the reader in a discussion. This ability to inhabit someone else' life for a period of time is the reason I read fiction, and the characters in this collection are put in situations where you want to be riddled by the dilemmas and struggles that they are facing. The striking aspect of Chiang's short stories is the amount of time that one remembers their premise and key questions for. The key questions in a handful of his short stories have remained with me despite having last read them 3 years ago.
The collection has 9 short stories of varying length. The shortest story is only 4 pages, while the longest one is nearly 100 pages. To review this collection without giving away spoilers, I will focus on the recurring themes and the various ways in which Chiang approaches them.
1 Capitalism
In "The Lifecycle of Software Objects," one of the problems faced by the platform that hosts virtual pets is that people don't spend enough money on it once the initial craze fades. This tanks profits. But the platform still has a small group of "dedicated users" who are always around and very attached to their pets. (Remember IRC?)
Any "rational organization" would simply stop the platform once it stops making a profit. Or they would find some way to make-up for the deficit: Tiered services, advertisements. However, who wants virtual pets that show ads and recommend products to their owners every 3 minutes?
This is the problem that is being faced by many organizations today. Platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Goodreads offer free services, which are very useful. But they do not make enough of a profit to justify their own existence. And so, they have been infused with elements that no one likes and that infusion significantly degrades the experience of everyone who uses the platforms. This drives away even those users who think the platform is useful; worsening the doom loop. The network effect has been a key way to keep users using the product despite a deterioration in the UX through advertisements.
Towards the end of the story, the virtual pets have to engage in questionable activities to sustain themselves. This is what platforms are already doing and will continue to have to do in the long-term, if they are survive.
2 Time
As in his previous collection, Chiang is obsessed with our experience of time and the possibilities that prescience or time travel would introduce. Chiang's writing has been a huge influence in my thinking about anxiety, excitement, and uncertainty, emotions which are byproducts of not being able to time travel and not being prescient.
In the story "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate," the author poses a question that has been stuck in my head since I read it: If you could travel in time, would you travel to the past or go into the future? And would you travel within your lifetime or would you go outside of it to find out how things turned out for everyone?
Needless to say, there is no "right" answer here. Chiang doesn't expect us or his characters to have a "right" answer. They think about this question and arrive at different answers depending on their position in life. Personally, I have found myself primarily wanting to travel to the future. Sometimes it is to the very end of my own life, to find out what happens and feel less anxious about the present. On other occasions, I don't want to travel into the future at all, because I am eagerly looking forward to those experiences.
As a bonus, he provides an analogy for loans and credit: You are stealing from your future self.
3 Freewill
In the story "What's Expected Of Us," the author deals with his obsession over freewill. He does so more directly than he did in his previous collection. The story is a warning and it is incredibly brief: only 4 pages. The brevity of the warning is disorienting and scary because the thing that it warns of has consequences of colossal proportions.
In Chiang's view, the age-old philosophical question about whether we have freewill or not is not worth thinking about because our belief that we have freewill is essential to our continued survival. It is our sole motivation. If there is no freewill, the story posits that a third of everyone will lose the motivation to do anything and consequently, stop feeding themselves. That is how key our conception of having freewill is, for our continued survival.
Through the certainty that is projected in this story, I felt that Chiang had finally found a resolution for his freewill obsession. I guess we will find out if that is the case when he comes out with his next piece of work.
4 Conditioning
"What's Expected Of Us" touches on the effects of losing a conditioning element that we have become used to. Namely, our belief that we have freewill.
"Dacey's Patent Automatic Nanny" is an amusing story about a little boy who responds only to machines, after being taken care of by a mechanical nanny for a long time.
In the story "Omphalos," Chiang reassures us that thinking about philosophical question such as "Who created us?", "What is the meaning of life?" is unnecessary because we can be fulfilled by our own lives and we don't need to look outside ourselves. However, we are conditioned to look to the majority for approval and breaking out of this shell and looking for fulfillment independently of external input is a method to answer (or, realize that we don't need to answer) these philosophical questions.
The effect of being conditioned or losing some conditioning is different in each of the three cases, in turn devastating, amusing, and enriching!
5 Memory
The TV show Black Mirror introduced us to the disadvantages of having a documented record of everything that we have ever done. What if we could record the accurate truth in one part of the world and continue as usual in another part, and then, compare the experiences of each community? Chiang tries to answer this through the story "The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling." In it, a tool that can maintain a "life log" is put on a parallel track with the introduction of writing into an oral culture. (What does not exist now but will become available in the future is put on a parallel track with the anthropological knowledge that human beings migrated from being a predominantly oral culture, to one which believed in recording knowledge on parchment.)
The idea is poignant: Writing is a reliable way to document events, whereas stories are unreliable. Both of them have a purpose. Unreliable memory is not inferior to reliable memory. In fact, unreliable memory is good as it allows us to filter out the things that we don't want to remember. It allows us to tell our story with key milestones that might be misremembered without any malice, because these versions fit better into the larger arc of our life. (A mishap in our past might have put us on the path to a future success. Once we have experienced both the mishap and the success, it is comforting to think of the mishap as a force which was driving us towards the success we did achieve, rather than as an obstacle which prevented us from achieving something else.)
If every experience you ever have is perfectly documented, it becomes impossible to engage in this self-deception. Knowing what happened accurately does not tell you what change it produced in you. It muddles the process of thinking of yourself as someone who has changed, as someone who has overcome hurdles.
This story made me think about my journaling habit. Was it healthy to have a journal which documented contemporaneously the problems that I was facing? I concluded that since I give myself the physical space to write only 3-4 sentences each day and ensure that the journal is not searchable, my unreliable memory is not hindered by this reliable recounting of what happened.
6 Truth
In the story "The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling," Chiang theorizes that there are two types of truths: What is right and what is precise. What is right is based on principles, it is not a lie if the right thing doesn't match what happened in reality, it is simply the way that you experience something yourself. Whereas what is precise is factual, it describes what really happened and must be attested to by witnesses (other than the principals in an event). In cases where the documented record is incomplete, it will be impossible to find out the precise truth. But this should not hamper us from learning from the incident because we will still know what was right.
7 Parenting
In this collection, the story that I liked the most was "The Lifecycle of Software Objects." It is a story about virtual pets that fleshes out the far far future. If you are attached to a virtual pet (i.e. a software object) and then that virtual pet comes to inhabit a humanoid robot, what are your responsibilities towards it? For example, Can you pause the program for a period of time, in an effort to protect your pet from something bad? Or is this unthinkable?
Whatever Chiang says in this story is applicable to parenting. The protagonist struggles with the same kind of dilemma that parents probably struggle with: How do you raise children so that they can be a good person without telling them exactly what to do at each point in life?
Surprisingly, in this story, I saw a side of Chiang's writing that I have not experienced before. He writes touching dialogue; reminiscent of the things children ask their parents when they are very young.
Later on, after she's brought the mascots back from the playground to Blue Gamma's island, Jax tells her about his conversation with Tibo. "Tell him about fun we do time he gone. Tell him about field trip zoo fun fun." "Was he sad he missed it?" "No he instead argue. He said field trip was mall not zoo. But that trip last month." "That's because Tibo was suspended the whole time he's been gone," Ana explains, "so he thinks last month's trip was yesterday." "I say that," says Jax, surprising her with his understanding, "but he not believe. He argue until Marco and Lolly too tell him. Then he sad."
…
"No," says Jax. He stops and walks back to her avatar. "Don't want play." "What? Sure you do." "No playing. Want job." Ana laughs. "What? Why do you want to get a job?" "Get money." She realizes that Jax isn't happy when he says this; his mood is glum. More seriously, she asks him, "What do you need money for?" "Don't need. Give you." "Why do you want to give me money?" "You need," he says, matter-of-factly. "Did I say I need money? When?" "Last week ask why you play with other digients instead me. You said people pay you play with them. If have money, can pay you. Then you play with me more." "Oh, Jax." She's momentarily at a loss for words. "That's very sweet of you."
…
None of the digients was raised on bedtime stories, so text doesn't fascinate them the way it does human children, but their general curiosity–along with the praise of their owners–motivates them to explore the uses that text can be put to.
– Ted Chiang in "The Lifecycle of Software Objects"
The broken English of the virtual pets here is very similar to the way children talk when they are learning a language. It is the most endearing section of the story.
He even sneaks in a reference to the Alignment Problem faced by people who are building artificial intelligence systems:
You won't believe what my Natasha did today! We were at the playground, and another digient hurt himself when he fell and was crying. Natasha gave him a hug to make him feel better, and I praised her to high heaven. Next thing I know, she pushes over another digient to make him cry, hugs him, and looks to me for praise!
– Ted Chiang in "The Lifecycle of Software Objects"
8 Conclusion
This short story collection is well worth the few hours that you would spend reading it, and the several hours after that, which you would spend thinking about the themes and subjects that Chiang broaches.
The premise of this book is really good. And the first part of the book is very well executed. In most places in the first half, all I really wanted tThe premise of this book is really good. And the first part of the book is very well executed. In most places in the first half, all I really wanted to read about was what Mike was thinking and what he was feeling about the world as he was looking as a third person and so on. But the author just throws all this super-normal discussion of law and money in your face, and in any other novel, it would be a great narrative, but in this book it builds the tension A LOT!
Eventually, we do get a complete Mike perspective on everything that is happening around him. How he's able to do the things he does, what he thinks about the way humans behave, and so on. So, that part is very good. There's the epic fight in the middle and then the second half of the book begins.
Now, this is where the book starts getting weird. Mike was at a cusp, and it demanded action and he made the right choice. But that also meant that he went from being a cute little half-Human half-Martian-minded nestling to a Martian adult in human form - a super-hero basically, but a cynical one at that. His way of thinking about the world is completely different, and it's not at all surprising that the more we look at the world he creates for himself, the weirder and weirder it gets. It flaunts every single principle that humans regard as important and polite and sane.
The book has an ending which is somewhat predictable (what will happen-wise). I was guessing it would go that way around 75% and you will be unable to not think it. There are just some dialogues and things he says in there that force you to think that.
I look forward to re-reading some of the parts in which Mike discusses his findings about the human race. Everything around it was good once, but I wouldn't re-read it....more
I now don't think the ideas that come up in the TV show are Black Mirror are that absurd anymore. This book is my first sci-fi book in almost 2 years.I now don't think the ideas that come up in the TV show are Black Mirror are that absurd anymore. This book is my first sci-fi book in almost 2 years. It was marvelous!
There are 8 stories of varying lengths here.
1. Tower of Babylon (Build a tower from ground to heaven: I didn't completely get this one) 2. Understand (Enhanced intelligence = Lucy!) 3. Division by Zero (arithmetic inconsistency!) 4. Story of Your Life (Arrival: this is the most touching story in this collection) 5. Seventy-Two Letters (Names, automatons and euonyms: this one is the strangest) 6. The Evolution of Human Science (is Interpretation of an advanced species' scientific discoveries a worthwhile use of human time?) 7. Hell is the Absence of God (Hell = Mortal Plane - God; Angels visit often and it's a completely different world altogether) 8. Liking What You See: A Documentary (Let us all get Calli: This was my favorite)
Story of Your Life's movie adaptation has made me slightly biased throughout, but I absolutely love stories 4, 5, 7 and 8. They are all about characters who are painstakingly written to be no different from the average human being, yet they live in a different world where all the rules are different and the world itself is topsy-turvy. I have several pages of notes from this book. A few follow:
From Understand:
It wouldn’t be transcribed in the form of words arranged linearly, but as a giant ideogram, to be absorbed as a whole. Such an ideogram could convey, more deliberately than a picture, what a thousand words cannot. The intricacy of each ideogram would be commensurate with the amount of information contained; I amuse myself with the notion of a colossal ideogram that describes the entire universe.
(This is a reference to the language that the Heptapods use, I think)
From Division by Zero:
So much of mathematics had no practical application; it existed solely as a formal theory, studied for it's intellectual beauty. But that couldn’t last; a self-contradictory theory was so pointless that most mathematicians would drop it in disgust.
(Having had a course of Real Analysis this semester, I certainly empathise with this statement of hers!)
Physical entities were not greater or less than one another, not similar or dissimilar; they simply were, they existed. Mathematics was totally independent.
(This last one is a view I share with Renee)
From Story of Your Life:
I can’t believe that you, a grown woman taller than me and beautiful enough to make my heart ache, will be the same girl I used to lift off the ground so you could reach the drinking fountain, the same girl who used to trundle out of my bedroom draped in a dress and hat and four scarves from my closet.
It’ll be when you first learn to walk that I get daily demonstrations of the asymmetry in our relationship. You’ll be incessantly running off somewhere, and each time you walk into a door frame or scrape your knee, the pain feels like it’s my own.
(Louise is a great parent!)
what kind of worldview did the heptapods have, that they would consider Fermat’s principle the simplest explanation of light refraction? What kind of perception made a minimum or maximum readily apparent to them?
This last sentence is the hook of this story. There are several other things that come after this. Like how Heptapods understand minimums and maximums and integration and differentiation, but never understand the simple concept of Geometry, coordinates, algebra or most importantly velocity.
There’s no ‘correct’ interpretation; both are equally valid. But you can’t see both at the same time. Similarly, knowledge of the future was incompatible with free will. What made it possible for me to exercise freedom of choice also made it impossible for me to know the future. Conversely, now that I know the future, I would never act contrary to that future, including telling others what I know: those who know the future don’t talk about it. Those who’ve read the Book of Ages never admit to it.
Knowing the future doesn’t make you want to change it, it simply makes you want to enact the future with more urgency. Like performing in a play. Chiang outdoes himself in this story.
From Seventy-Two Letters:
The assassin chuckled. ‘Men are no different from your automata; slip a bloke a piece of paper with the proper figures on it, and he’ll do your bidding.’ The room grew light as the man lit an oil lamp.
From the final story, Liking What You See:
Every study on this issue turns up the same results: looks help people get ahead. We can’t help but think of good-looking people as more competent, more honest, more deserving than others. None of it’s true, but their looks still give us that impression.
I have 17 pages of notes from this book. I am not kidding when I say that I have had to severely cut down on the things I think are beautifully expressed in this book....more
It's pretty hard to believe that I was able to read a new Crichton in 2017. It's been 8 years since he died, and I had definitely not believed that I It's pretty hard to believe that I was able to read a new Crichton in 2017. It's been 8 years since he died, and I had definitely not believed that I would be able to read a NEW book. Perhaps a re-read of an older book like Airframe or The Great Train Robbery, but not a new book. And still, here we are.
This book is typical Crichton. The typical philosophical paragraphs about man, nature, dinosaurs and their extinction. The typical growth of a character from infantile William Johnson to the guy who can pull Marlin by is neck and pin him up against the wall with affected ease. It's all such great nostalgia, and such a great story to read.
One particular part that really stood out, in this book, as something that I had probably never read before in a Crichton was this telegraph that WJ sends to his parents.
Dear Father Sorry I wrecked yacht. Remember pet squirrel summer 71. Mother's fever after Edward born. Headmaster Ellis Warning at Exeter. I am TRULY ALIVE and you are causing great trouble. Send money and inform sheriff Your loving son Pinky
This immediately set me thinking about what I would have said in a telegraph of this kind, if ever I had to send a telegraph of this sort to the people closest to me. Perhaps you should too, it's an interesting exercise....more
Oh, this book is GOOOOOD! The first few chapters describing everything, and this enormous cylindrical object, the visualization of which occupied me fOh, this book is GOOOOOD! The first few chapters describing everything, and this enormous cylindrical object, the visualization of which occupied me for the most part of the book until they go in. And when they go in!
The species that exists to collect information is pretty dope though. Yeah, pretty dope!
I wish the sequels had been as good as this book, or better. Alas, I was disappointed. The next book was a real disappointment....more
This is 150 pages of scary, gift-wrapped in ponies, pastel colors, happy narratives and broken thoughts (whose completion is left solely to the indulgThis is 150 pages of scary, gift-wrapped in ponies, pastel colors, happy narratives and broken thoughts (whose completion is left solely to the indulgent reader: Butterscotch always interrupts!)
I am tempted to make a comparison between this book and 1984. They both have the same skeptics who finally end up accepting the system, either through coercion or fear or because of the lack of other options. They both end up in a world where nothing goes unseen or unheard. Big Brother was a demi-God, he couldn't see what you were thinking. Princess Celestia is a proper GOD. She's omnipotent, omniscient and visually overpowering.
I don't think that this version of the apocalypse is anywhere on the horizon. It's an interesting concept. But fearing it would be just as rational as fearing that a country would suddenly become one of the three powers in 1984. The consistency of this A.I character is just much more believable than the ones shown in a million Hollywood movies (VIKI in I, Robot; Tet in Oblivion; ARIA in Eagle Eye).
These A.I characters had some sort of weakness in the physical world that makes them vulnerable. Transcendence went the extra mile and made the weakness emotional. I firmly believe that an A.I character would stick to the values we tell it to stick to when we write it, which is why I think this book is much closer to what fiction should carry.
Oh, also, this book satisfied my values through friendship and ponies....more
Loading...
