A Fan's Playground

A collection of short stories by a renowned sff author. I've read a few Chiang stories before, but this was my first time reading a bunch of his work at once and my overwhelming impression is that he's very good at writing a very specific type of story and that type of story is mostly not my thing.

Chiang's stories are all "here is an idea, let's see all the ways we can use a narrative to explore the full implications of the idea," and characters are used solely as props for the narrative explorations rather than as full people worth being interested in. And I must say he's really good at coming up with interesting implications for his ideas and conveying them in a narrative!

But the thing about writing this sort of story is that it turns out that if I don't particularly care about the idea then I don't particularly care about the story, and at their worst the stories read like an essay with a thin veneer of storytelling. And even if I DO like a story I don't CARE about it, I'm just like "hmm how interesting" and then move on, because I'm not drawn in emotionally.

Occasionally Chiang does manage to integrate a character arc a little more fully into the idea he's exploring, stories where the idea and the human interest combine and affect each other. These are the strongest stories imo. "Stories of Your Life" is one of these, and it's rightly one of his better known stories - the one the film Arrival is based on, not that I've seen the movie. But I actually had a bit of a Feeling at the end of the story, and it's the only story of the bunch to manage that. It's about a linguist working to decipher the language of an alien species, and the way that her experience with the aliens affects her experience of her life, though also of course about exploring ideas around what language is and what it does.

I'd say the other strongest story in the collection is the last one, "Liking What You See: A Documentary." Although that MIGHT be just because I found it the most compelling idea to explore amongst them all It's about being able to turn off people's ability to see some humans as more beautiful than other humans, and what that would mean for a society.

Anyway. Not sure I'll bother to seek out more of Chiang's work specifically. He's very talented, for sure, but for the most part his works are aimed at a different kind of reader than me.

(Okay no I am going to probably read more of his work, apparently his book Exhalations includes a story about time travel and the Thousand and One Nights, so I need to read that story.)

Time for the Hugo nominated novelettes! As a whole, I ended up liking the options in this category much more than what was in the short stories this year.

Here's my thoughts on each of the 6 novelettes. I'm listing them in the order for which I will vote for them, top to bottom choices.

Emergency Skin, by N.K. Jemisin

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Omphalos, by Ted Chiang

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The Archronology of Love, by Caroline M. Yoachim

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Away With the Wolves, by Sarah Gailey

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The Blur in the Corner of Your Eye, by Sarah Pinsker

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For He Can Creep, by Siobhan Carroll

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