Wow.

A couple of days ago, I gave John le Carré a “wow” for A Perfect Spy; today I’m giving Ted Chiang a “wow” for pretty much his entire output.

Here’s what I know about Ted Chiang. He’s a science fiction writer. He writes short fiction (his longest published piece is a novella). He knocks my socks off.

He’s written three books: Stories of Your Life and Other Stories, The Lifecycle of Software Objects, and The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate. I’ve read the latter two, and about half of the first, it’s all been smart, moving, deeply, deeply human, and a little bit geeky (in the best possible sense of the term). He has a knack for taking a single scientific or technical idea, extrapolating from it, and then writing a story about the idea involving living, breathing human beings. The story isn’t simply an idea story with good characters; it isn’t simply a character story with good ideas. The two facets of the story build on each and require each other.

I suppose I had better give some examples, though I have to be careful: I don’t want to tell you too much, I simply want you to go read.

“Division by Zero” is about mathematics, and the early 20th century quest to prove that mathematics is complete and consistent. Kurt Gödel showed that it wasn’t complete, and that it couldn’t be proved to be consistent. In Chiang’s story, a mathematician proves that math isn’t even consistent, with drastic effects on herself and her family.

In the Nebula-winning “Tower of Babylon”, Chiang shows us the real Tower of Babylon…but in Chiang’s version, the universe really is as described in Genesis. There is the earth below and the firmament above, and the sun, moon, and stars whirling in between. The Tower has nearly reached the firmament…and our story follows the miners who have been hired to ascend the tower and dig a path through the firmament to heaven beyond. It’s a genuine science fiction story; it’s set in another world with different rules, but it plays fair with those rules. And it has truly important things to say about the relationship between God and His creation. (I have no idea what Chiang’s views on religion are, by the way.)

In the Hugo-winning “The Lifecycle of Software Objects”, he posits a company that build “digients”, software constructs that live in a virtual world called Digital Earth. They are designed to mimic human consciousness, indeed seem to genuinely learn, grow, and love. What does it mean for software objects to be conscious? What does it mean to be human? I have philosophical reasons to think that software objects cannot be truly conscious even in principle…but if they were, would they be human? And would digient morality be the same as human morality?

Julie has mentioned Ted Chiang several times; the first time I was interested, and went to Amazon to look for his book Stories of Your Life and Other Stories, and nearly choked. His books are published by a small press in limited editions, and can easily run hundreds of dollars. I said, “He might be good, but he’s not that good.” But he came up again recently, and I looked again…and all of Chiang’s work is available at reasonable prices in Kindle format. Woohoo! And you know…now that I’ve read most of his work, maybe he is that good.