Understand by Ted Chiang
Jan. 26th, 2018 10:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lightreadsUnderstand 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.
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.