The Lifecycle of Software Objects, by Ted Chiang

For those who are interested, and this should be everyone, Subterranean Online has just published Ted Chiang's novella "The Lifecycle of Software Objects".

Chiang is not prolific and every time he publishes his stories tend to be one of the best published in a given year.  So, you'll want to go read this.

Honestly, though, this is one of the few times I've been disappointed in one of Chiang's stories.  There's supposed to be heart in the story, but Chiang left me feeling a bit cold towards the characters and that situation - which is never a good thing for me as a reader.  This is why I haven't talked about the story all year.  I had no idea what to really say.   Elizabeth Bear loved it, though. You can probably find scads of other positive reviews all over the place. 

Bear writes,

This is a descriptive work of science fiction, rather than a strongly plot-driven one. It’s meditative and thoughtful, and it does not offer tidy closure or resolution: just a series of ever-more-complicated questions.

I think this may be one of my issues, that more descriptive works challenge my reader-brain in ways that I just not tend to enjoy so much.

So why point out a story I didn't overly like? 

Dude, it's a new Ted Chiang.  Even when I don't like it, it's impressive and worth noting.  You don't want to miss new Ted Chiang that is offered online for free.  Besides, what the hell do I know?

New Ted Chiang!

Folks, SubPress is publishing a new Ted Chiang novella.

The last time they did that, they gave is "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate".

This time, "The Lifecycle of Software Objects". This is all you need to know.

But, if you really need to know more (and you don't, the words "Ted" and "Chiang" are enough), here is the product description:

What’s the best way to create artificial intelligence? In 1950, Alan Turing wrote, “Many people think that a very abstract activity, like the playing of chess, would be best. It can also be maintained that it is best to provide the machine with the best sense organs that money can buy, and then teach it to understand and speak English. This process could follow the normal teaching of a child. Things would be pointed out and named, etc. Again I do not know what the right answer is, but I think both approaches should be tried.”

The first approach has been tried many times in both science fiction and reality. In this new novella, at over 30,000 words, his longest work to date, Ted Chiang offers a detailed imagining of how the second approach might work within the contemporary landscape of startup companies, massively-multiplayer online gaming, and open-source software. It’s a story of two people and the artificial intelligences they helped create, following them for more than a decade as they deal with the upgrades and obsolescence that are inevitable in the world of software. At the same time, it’s an examination of the difference between processing power and intelligence, and of what it means to have a real relationship with an artificial entity.

I don't know about you, but I'll be pre-ordering this one.

Ted Chiang's "Exhalation" available

I was hoping this would happen and it did.

Ted Chiang's Hugo nominated story "Exhalation" is now available for free online reading.

Thanks to Jonathan Strahan for the heads up on that.

2008 Hugo Award Winners

Thanks Larry for the list (and to David Anthony Durham for the heads up about MRK's Campbell!):

Best Novel:
The Yiddish Policeman's Union, by Michael Chabon

Best Novella:
"All Seated on the Ground", by Connie Willis

Best Novelette:
"The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate", by Ted Chiang

Best Short Story:
"Tideline", by Elizabeth Bear

John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer
Mary Robinette Kowal


Excitement!!! Seriously, I couldn't be happier for Mary Robinette Kowal right now. I love her short fiction and I've had the opportunity to advance read some of her stories and she's just awesome (and rather nice over e-mail, I might add). I want to see pictures of the official Campbell Tiara. I believe both Bear and John Scalzi have previously worn it. :)

Further Excitement! Elizabeth Bear wins a Hugo! Bear's fiction is also awesome, and rather nice in person. That this isn't the story of Bear's I would have chosen for a Hugo does nothing to lessen my happiness that Bear's getting to put "Hugo Winner" next to her name.

Can't say I'm too surprised about Ted Chiang's win. Great story, as one would expect from Chiang.

Some folks don't like Connie Willis, but obviously the Hugo voters do. I thought the story was delightful.

Never finished the Chabon novel, but not surprised about that one. It's been winning everything else, so why not this one, too?

Oh, and John Scalzi beat some chap named Langford for Fan Writer. I read an Ansible column once and didn't see what the big deal was.

Folks I like won, that makes me happy. A couple of stories I liked one, that makes me almost as happy as seeing people I like win.

Thoughts on Hugo Nominees 2008: Novelettes

"The Cambist and Lord Iron: a Fairytale of Economics" by Daniel Abraham (Logorrhea ed. by John Klima)
"The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" by Ted Chiang (F&SF Sept. 2007)
"Dark Integers" by Greg Egan (Asimov's Oct./Nov. 2007)
"Glory" by Greg Egan (The New Space Opera, ed. by Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan)
"Finisterra" by David Moles (F&SF Dec. 2007)


I previously reviewed “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate" here, and really, I don't know quite what to say other than Ted Chiang is an outstanding writer and storyteller and this is a great story.

“Glory” was originally published in The New Space Opera, an anthology I apparently did not love as much as a goodly number of other people. The story opens with several pages of description of what is occurring to some antimatter needle, or something. Honestly, I didn’t get exactly what was happening or what the implications were. What I knew is that I was already turned off from “Glory”. This opening allows some sort of distant travel to be possible (distant meaning to far flung galaxies otherwise impossible to reach). “Glory” is chock full of too much SF technology and narration about technology, and this is the sort of thing that makes my eyes glaze over. Once we got past this initial eye glazing, however, Greg Egan began to tell a fairly interesting story about uncovering history on an alien world. Well, that’s not –exactly- what “Glory” is about, but it is as good an abstraction as any. “Glory” is an odd blend of overwhelmingly dull detail (mathematics cubes? Really?) and discovery. I don’t think the blend works nearly as well as this nomination suggests.

Greg Egan’s other nominated story is “Dark Integers”, a warfare via mathematics story. Yeah. Really. It’s different. I’ll grant Egan that much, but this is the sort of thing I’ve stopped reading Stross novels for. Too much technical detail, not enough humanity. Though, in the case of Egan there is a good deal more humanity than found in a techy Stross novel. Early on we are unclear on exactly how this works, but there is an incursion across borders by some unknown math program and flags are raised, hackles are up. The only ones who can be trusted not to screw up the investigation are three people who have formed their little secret society of sorts. Egan does something here, he makes the math talk somewhat interesting. I could care less about the plot, but the discussion of math as weapon somehow comes across as natural and real, rather than abstract. Beyond that, Greg Egan’s two nominated stories here fail to impress. They are competent and workmanlike, and some SF readers clearly delight in Egan’s fiction, but between “Glory” and “Dark Integers”, I’m not one of them. The best I can say is that there is a core of a good story here, but Egan doesn’t quite hit it.

You hope for the story from which you expect little and get much in return, the story that has a title which is makes no sense and turns you off from the story right away. “Finisterra”. Break down the title and the best I can come up with is “finis” “terra”. The end of earth. This is before I’ve read the story, by the way. I expected little from David Moles’ “Finisterra”. That’s what I got. 3 pages and I struggle. Not to make sense of the text, but rather to care. Moles writes descriptive prose, hitting details in Spanish and perhaps Arabic, and he evokes a multi-cultural, almost alien landscape. Or, skyscape, as the case may be. 6 pages and it’s official. I wouldn’t have bought this story. If this came out of a slush pile, the rejection slip would have gone out. It’s just a matter of taste and this story doesn’t suit me. I’m sure there is great descriptions, some action (things were thinking about heating up), and a good story, but Moles didn’t hit me in such a way that I wanted to keep reading.

Proving that you can’t truly judge a story by its title, we come to “The Cambist and Lord Iron: A Fairy Tale of Economics” by Daniel Abraham. A cambist is a person who is an expert in knowing exchange rates and the value of stuff. Lord Iron is that extravagantly wealthy individual with debased and decadent tastes who only seems to exist in fantasy stories, though I’m sure there is a real life counterpart somewhere. Olaf, a cambist, has no personal life outside of his job. One day, Lord Iron, on a capricious whim, challenges Olaf to exchange exceedingly rare currency. If Olaf fails to provide an accurate exchange rate, Lord Iron will destroy Olaf’s life and career. Because he can. Thus begins a series of three encounters between the Olaf, the cambist, and Lord Iron. Each meeting is for greater and greater stakes with increasingly difficult challenges of assigning value. Rather than being a dull story about the value of things, “The Cambist and Lord Iron” is a smoothly written story with an interesting intellectual challenge for Olaf (and in turn the reader, if we want to think about the challenge before Olaf figures it out). Moreover, I liked “The Cambist and Lord Iron” enough that I intend to go find a copy of Logorrhea (the anthology the story is from), and also go read the novels of Daniel Abraham.



The favorite for this category has to be “The Merchant and the Alchemists Gate” from Ted Chiang. It won the Nebula and I’ll be surprised if it doesn’t win the Hugo. The story really is that good, as one would expect from Chiang. I expect it to win.

If it doesn’t, I’d be quite happy if Daniel Abraham won for “The Cambist and Lord Iron: A Fairy Tale of Economics”. Besides being the only other story in this category worth a damn, it’s quite good.


Previous Thoughts
Novels
Novellas
Short Stories
John W. Campbell Award

Thoughts on Nebula Nominees 2008: Novelettes

"The Fiddler of Bayou Teche" - Delia Sherman (Coyote Road, Jul07)
"Pol Pot's Beautiful Daughter (Fantasy)" - Geoff Ryman (F&SF, Nov06)
"The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs Of North Park After the Change" - Kij Johnson (Coyote Road, Jul07)
"Safeguard" - Nancy Kress (Asimov's, Jan07)
"The Children's Crusade" - Robin Wayne Bailey (Heroes in Training, Sep07)
"The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" - Ted Chiang (F&SF, Sep07)
"Child, Maiden, Mother, Crone" - Terry Bramlett (Jim Baen's Universe 7, June 2007)


I have very mixed feelings about the nominees in the Novelette category. On one hand we have “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” by Ted Chiang. This is an outstanding story and is rightfully nominated, should probably win, and deserves to be held up as one of the best stories of this or perhaps any other year. On the other hand we have “Pol Pot’s Beautiful Daughter (Fantasy)”, by Geoff Ryman. I am not sure I can quite properly express how much I did not like this story. I first read it last year when it was nominated for the Hugo, and this year it was nominated for a Nebula. One would think that this means the story is good and well regarded. Perhaps. It is a frustrating read and one which offers no satisfaction for the reader, or at least for this reader. Both stories are from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Next up are the two from The Coyote Road, an anthology of trickster tales. I wrote about these two recently and what I said then still stands. “The Fiddler of Bayou Teche” left me cold while “The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs of North Park After the Change”, despite the overlong title, was a very moving story and involved human and animal characters I could find a way to identify with. I get that being able to identify with the characters is not necessarily a mark of good writing, and I am sure Delia Sherman’s story involved skillful writing, but the best stories are the ones that make the reader care and continue to think about the story long after we’ve reached “The End”. Kij Johnson’s story was successful at that. Delia Sherman’s story was not.

The next pairing is “Safeguard” by Nancy Kress and “The Children’s Crusade” by Robin Wayne Bailey. “The Children’s Crusade” comes out of the Heroes in Training anthology edited by Jim Hines and Martin Greenberg. All the stories in the anthology deal with, in one way or another, young people taking their first steps to being heroes. “The Children’s Crusade” starts in Iraq with a young Muslim boy tired of terrorism takes a stand. We learn later than the boy can teleport, and he has friend from Israel also tired of the violence adults do to children. Together, they try to find a place of peace in the world and when they don’t find it, they decide to make their own. “The Children’s Crusade” is a story which could easily find a place in a non-genre publication, even with the teleporting (hey, if The Time Traveler’s Wife isn’t considered SF by the general public...) and is a moving story of children fed up with being targets of wars they have no part of. In his introduction to the anthology Jim Hines stated that this story made him cheer for the kids. While I would not go quite that far, it is worth a read. “Safeguard” takes the flip side of this. The government of the United States has discovered that some terrorist cells have genetically engineered children to be weapons of terror. The United States has four children completely isolated in something of a bio-dome. The four children only know of this as the real world. Flipping between viewpoints of the children and of Katherine Taney, the only woman the children know and an advisor to officials of the United States, “Safeguard” tells of a bleak future where there is little hope and where children can be weapons. Of the two I prefer “The Children’s Crusade”, though “Safeguard” has echoes of a possible future where the unspeakable can be real.

The final story is “Child, Maiden, Mother, Crone”, by Terry Bramlett. I was apprehensive about this one, I think due to the format of the seasons, but the story of a former musician turned farmer meeting a girl who would grow and age with the seasons (hence the title) really pulled me in. Its worth checking out. I'd like to read more from Bramlett.


If I had to vote for a winner in this category, and as a Non Member of the SFWA, I can’t, I would probably vote for “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” by Ted Chiang. I marveled at the story when I read the Subterranean publication in hard cover, and with Ted Chiang’s name on the story we know it’s going to be something good. The story lives up to the expectation and to whatever hype there is.

With that said, if I had a second choice or if we could ignore the elephant in the room named Ted Chiang, my second favorite story from this set is “The Evolution of Trickster Stories...” by Kij Johnson. I can’t tell if it is the dogs, or if it that the story is just that good, but Kij Johnson had me at hello.

Preliminary Nebula Ballot: F&SF stories available online

John Joseph Adams provides a link to the 7 stories from Fantasy and Science Fiction nominated for the Nebula. Adams mentions they will only be up a limited time, so it's time to check them out!

We've got fiction from Gene Wolfe, Ted Chiang, and Lucius Shepard, among others.

I'll have to check these out. I've read Ted Chiang's story previously, and Geoff Ryman's story, but the other five are new to me.

Stories of Your Life and Others, by Ted Chiang

Stories of Your Life and Others
Ted Chiang
Tor: 2003

After I read the first two stories in this collection I had to write about them, just to mention how good Ted Chiang’s work is. Now that I have finished the collection I know how good Ted Chiang is. Damn good. Stories of Your Life and Others is quite possibly the single best short story collection I have read or hope to read.

This is what the publisher’s website has to say about Chaing:

Ted Chiang's first published story, "Tower of Babylon," won the Nebula Award in 1990. Subsequent stories have won the Asimov's SF Magazine reader poll, a second Nebula Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, and the Sidewise Award for alternate history. He won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1992. Story for story, he is the most honored young writer in modern SF.

Table of Contents
* "Tower of Babylon"
* "Division by Zero"
* "Understand"
* "Story of Your Life"
* "The Evolution of Human Science"
* "Seventy-Two Letters"
* "Hell Is the Absence of God"
* "Liking What You See: A Documentary"

Ted Chiang takes on topics that seem like great starter ideas for a story, but one which you would have no idea how to execute. What if Acts of God really were Acts of God, and judgment happened every day and out in public? Miracles and Affliction were commonplace but we needed support groups for the survivors of the miracles. “Hell is the Absence of God” takes this one. “Story of Your Life” is a mix of past / future and touches on the idea of being able to see your own future like you remember your past...but seen through the filter of an alien first contact, but the story isn’t really about the aliens.

What is truly remarkable about these eight stories is when we reach the end of the story the conclusion feels inevitable, as if it were the only possible way that Chiang could have ended the story. The conclusions feel right. But when we are reading these eight stories we (or maybe just I) have no idea where Chiang is going with this or where he is going to bring us. It is only in retrospect that the endings are inevitable. Not too hot, not too cold, but just right.

This is an outstanding collection of short fiction and should be on the bookshelf of any fan of science fiction or just good writing.

Stories of MY Life

I'm two stories into Ted Chiang's collection Stories of Your Life and Others. If the quality of the first two stories holds up...this will be absolutely essential SF reading. "Tower of Babylon" and "Understand" are superb. "Tower of Babylon" imagines what could happen if a second tower had been built thousands of years after the first (yet in the same technological setting) and this time they might actually make it to heaven and bridge the gap between God and Human. People live on the tower, never having set foot on land, generation after generation builds the tower and it takes days and months to reach near the top. The story does not go where you think it will, but the journey is impressive. "Understand" takes human intelligence and increases it in one man again and again and the narration follows this ever increasing intelligence to the inevitable end.

I wouldn't even write about this until I finished the collection, but it's too good not to bring it up now! Two stories out of Eight. Chiang is a Master.

The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate, by Ted Chiang

The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate
Ted Chiang
Subterranean Press: 2007


This small, limited edition, 60 page hardcover from Ted Chiang is a gem and a treat.

Subterranean's Description:

In medieval Baghdad, a penniless man is brought before the most powerful man in the world, the caliph himself, to tell his story. It begins with a walk in the bazaar, but soon grows into a tale unlike any other told in the caliph's empire. It's a story that includes not just buried treasure and a band of thieves, but also men haunted by their past and others trapped by their future; it includes not just a beloved wife and a veiled seductress, but also long journeys taken by caravan and even longer ones taken with a single step. Above all, it's a story about recognizing the will of Allah and accepting it, no matter what form it takes.

I'm not sure I could give a better and more enticing description than the one on Subterranean Press's listing for this novella. It is a brief story broken into even shorter segments as the penniless man recounts his tale. It is one complete story involving a non intrusive form of time travel and really, it's just a delight to read. If The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate is representative of the sort of short fiction Ted Chiang writes then I have some great reading ahead of me with his short story collection.

For the size of this volume the price tag may be a little steep, but Subterranean puts out suburb volumes of fiction and they truly are limited editions. The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate may only be sixty pages, but they are 60 exquisite pages with quality illustrations throughout the text and a well put together volume of fiction. Really, the description of the story is just about everything you need to know. Chiang tells the story with a smooth and easy style and one which you won't want to stop turning the pages until you've discovered where Chiang takes us next. The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate is a journey, a discovery, and a trip well worth taking.