Understand by Ted Chiang

[lightreads]

Understand by Ted Chiang

Nota Bien: BBC radio did an audio recording of this, which you can find on Youtube. Otherwise, I’m not sure it’s in print.

3/5. A man is given an experimental drug to regrow his damaged brain after he is oxygen deprived for an hour. It makes him smarter. And smarter. And smarter.

An early Chiang novelette. 1991 early. It’s trying to do this philosophical debate thing where our narrator encounters another superman like himself and they argue over what they can and should be doing with their gifts. But frankly that part is not interesting to me.

What is interesting, and what is so nicely Chiang, is that this novelette really gets intelligence. It starts out with the same old crap – the narrator can remember long numbers and recite them reversed – and I was like “oh here we go, another person mistakes memory for intelligence.” They are really not the same thing. And then suddenly he’s good at computers, and I was like siiiiigh. But then he keeps getting smarter, and his kind of smart changes to be about perceiving patterns, then intuiting understanding, then interrogating that intuition. I loved the details about needing to invent a new language that could not be spoken or written, but only expressed in thought. So few people are apparently capable of writing about intelligence in a way that I actually recognize and believe.

There are a lot of great details like that, and they really make up for some weird style choices that I do not get.

Woo, I got through that without talking about Flowers for Algernon. I win.

Comments

[teafeather]

Is this available from BARD?

[lightreads]

Nope. Unless its in some year's best collection somewhere, but I don't think so. See note up top.

[jesse_the_k]

I was holding my breath for the Algernon reference.

*Sprinkles*

[readerjane]

I haven't read Understand, but I remember reading Chiang's short story, Tower of Babylon, and being struck by his respect for his pre-historical characters' intelligence.

They were starting off with different cosmological assumptions than we have. And they had fewer whiz-bang technological tools for observing the universe. But they were intelligent: our generation has no monopoly on either reason or credulity. I loved watching the protagonist work through his observations, testing hypotheses and adjusting his ideas to match what he saw.

I like the idea that our ancestors were capable of great intellectual feats. It's a lot more reassuring idea than "we know better than everyone who has gone before us."

[lightreads]

I do rec his collection, Stories of Your Life and Others. I know it was recently re-released because of the Arrival movie. Might be under a new name, though. That has "Tower of Babylon" (which also really stuck with me) and a lot of other good stuff, like "Seventy Two Letters," which is a bit like Tower in that it's about people being clever and curious in a universe like but also significantly not like ours. I'm really hoping the movie's success means he'll get a second collection or a broader platform to keep his stuff in print. I still haven't gotten my hands on everything of his, and I've tried.

[yunitsa]

This is actually in Stories of Your Life and Others (right after "Tower of Babylon"), at least the Kindle edition I have! I thought it sounded familiar.

[lightreads]

Is it? Either it's not in the edition I read years ago, or I completely blocked it out. Because not a word of this was familiar. Though that collection definitely got re-released, so maybe they added things? Idek.

[rivkat]

Thanks for letting me know about this! It sounds very up my alley.