Ted Chiang is one of the greats! Every story in this collection is fantastic. Chiang builds incredible, well-connected worlds and populates them with real people. That excellent writing is the rocket fuel behind his ideas.

If you take a mostly-discarded idea — like Kabbalah golems, a tower to heaven, God’s omnipotence, etc — extrapolate it into the present, weave its implications into politics, geography, culture, put some interesting characters into that world, make them navigate the consequences of the original idea, and draw the thing to a satisfying conclusion — then that’s a Ted Chiang story. It’s not half thought experiment, half story. It’s 100% thought experiment, 100% story. The thought experiment is fully dissolved into the story. This is a very hard thing to do, and it represents the apotheosis of the science fiction writer’s craft.

That may have been a bit hyperbolic. These are good stories. They make you think. And, unlike many sci fi stories, they make you think about real things.

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