Books III

Is this all I have left? I made you wait six months for just two more books? And not even highly significant ones, at that! Anyways, proceed:

19. Exhalation (Chiang)

My introduction to Ted Chiang was the title story of this collection: 'Exhalation' is a modern classic, surely one of the best 'neuro-sci-fi' stories ever written. A friend sent it to me, someone had copy-pasted the whole thing into a forum post somewhere. I read it, bought the book, read it many more times. It's everything I like about science fiction, written in the way I try to write when I make my own poor attempts. And that's just the one story! So I read the rest of the collection, and I got Chiang's other collection - 'Stories of your life, and others' - and now I'm a big Ted Chiang fan, ready to wait another 15 years till he releases another book..

Anyways: Exhalation the book has several other stories that resonated with me; the story of The Merchant is excellent, and Omphalos is very good. Weirdly, compared to his first collection - where I'd say every story is gripping and infinitely re-readable (favorites would have to be 'Tower of Bablyon', and 'Seventy-two Letters') - Exhalation has a few duds, and the novelette that occupies the central third ('Lifecycle of Software Objects') was a bit of a strain on my short-story expectations. Yet there are two more stories that I thought were just beyond excellent: 'The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling', which I thought about for months after reading, and which I've written a little about in this very journal; and 'Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom', another one of those stories where I can't stop thinking I wish I had written this, because of the ingeniousness of the ideas and construction - and it also has one of the very best, most effective edge-of-the-seat last-second twists I've ever read.

I also really like that Chiang chooses to write, at the end of these two collections, little explanations for how he came to write each story. So you get not only a book of stories, but a window on the thoughts of the story-writer, which for me, at least, only deepens the impact of the stories themselves.

20. Foundation’s Edge (Asimov)

Between the ages of, oh, 15 and 20, I probably read 30 books by Isaac Asimov - who probably wrote 500 books in his lifetime. Most of what I read were his popular science summaries (where, supposedly, he would spend a week reading almanacs and textbooks and review articles and whatnot, and then spend another week cranking out an entire book on what he had just learned, written with a convincing air of actual expertise). I also read a lot of robot novels, books of short stories, and eventually, Foundation and Empire books (in fact, I think I never did read all the Empire books.. someday, maybe).

I didn't "finish" Foundation until a decade later, though. In my postdoc in Boston, in that first year - alone, before Jingping moved up to join me - I read a lot of books. Among these were the Foundation prequels and the sequels - all I'd read were the 'original trilogy', which were themselves almost just chained short-story collections. The later books were real novels with central protagonists and space opera quests, very different from the older ones, but still very enjoyable. Anyways, Foundation's Edge is the first of the 'sequel' books, where he starts trying to put together all his Robot, Foundation, and Empire books into a single unifying universe, and it's just packed with fun ideas. A couple of these ideas stuck with me permanently:

First, a very brief one that just occupies a page or two: the hero acquires a state-of-the-art spaceship. He enters and finds that it has no controls, just a single touch panel - he touches it, and zip his conscious experience expands to include the ship itself. He feels its hull as an extension of his skin; the ship's sensors are added to his sensory experience; he perceives his own body from a 3d perspective, seen from every direction. He can control the ship as though it were a part of him (as he is a part of it).

Second, later in the book, the concept of "shared minds" becomes a central plot point; that there are people whose minds are part of a larger supermind. A sci fi staple, sure, and Asimov doesn't delve very deeply into it, but enough that it really made you wonder just what it must be like for these people. Are they individuals? Don't they seem to be, despite in a real sense not being as such?

Anyways, if you've read a lot of Isaac Asimov, you realize that while he's known for robots and spaceships and psychohistory, his books and stories are actually full of what you might call "mental science fiction" - speculative ideas about how mind and feeling can mix and merge and connect, both to other minds and to other presumably non-mental objects. I was struck enough by this realization that a few years later, I recruited a philosopher friend to help me write a chapter for a collection on the 'Philosophy of Foundation' - philosophy articles on the Foundation books, most of which were focused in one way or another on psychohistory or personhood or etc (philosophy of economics! philosophy of ethics! yada yada). Our article was the only one picking out the weird ways in which Asimove genuinely connected with the philosophy of mind.