Mice, unite! Put your Viking helmets on and revolt against the unjust tyranny you live under! Or something like that.
Saturday was pretty quiet. I read Stories of Your Life And Others by Ted Chiang. This is a collection of short sci-fi stories, some more interesting than others. “Understand” looked like it was going somewhere, but dissolved at the end. “Division by Zero” is about a mathematician who finds a proof that arithmetic is not internally self-consistent. It tries very hard to relate her disappointment and the pain and anomie she feels because of this in terms people can relate to, but it comes up short. Maybe someone who knew more about math than I do would understand that story better.
“Story of Your Life”, though, fires on all cylinders. Here, the protagonist is a linguist who’s in charge of trying to communicate with aliens. In the course of learning their complex language, she becomes able to see the future in startling clarity, and somehow that plot works and makes sense in the context of the story. “Seventy-Two Letters” is much more like pure fun. It’s set in a Victorian England where golems work and several odd theories about life that were discarded before 1800 are actually true, and the protagonist must use this skewed science to try to avert a looming crisis.
The last story, “Liking What You See: A Documentary”, is a much more transparent what-if. Suppose people could have a reversible procedure done that made them almost indifferent to other people’s physical beauty. What would that do to the social landscape? Would some communities make this procedure mandatory for everyone? The college students in the story act in pretty realistic ways. It’s easy to say that the procedure in the story is a fictional analogue of “political correctness”, or university speech codes, or something like that. But most of the characters with power in this story appear to want to use this new technology to gain power over people, or make more money, which is probably sadly typical.
Anyway: Stories of Your Life And Others is probably the best short-story collection I’ve read in the last 2 years. Also, at least one wholesaler out there is selling guinea pig meat, though it’s not clear from the website whether you can get small quantities, in retail, shipped to your door.