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Ted Chiang: The Secret Third Thing

I really like Ted Chiang’s writing.

In Story of Your Life, strong Sapir-Whorf(the idea that language significantly constrains thought) isn't a largely discredited linguistic hypothesis, but the key to navigating First Contact with alien minds that experience past and future as equally present. In the hands of a lesser (or perhaps just more pessimistic) writer, many of the technologies and ideas Chiang explores will have an accursed quality to them, a monkey’s paw that curls into delivering a future much worse than a more innocent, pastoral past. As a friend of mine puts it, “he treats philosophical ideas as lived experiences.”The mathematician in Division by Zero doesn't just intellectually understand that mathematics is broken; she experiences it as a personal catastrophe, on par with (and concurrent with) her marriage's collapse.

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