I was just linked to "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" on LJ; I will probably read it.
I think I missed the fact that the solution at the end of "Seventy-Two Letters" is a metaphor for DNA; I was totally fixated on the social ramifications of nomenclature. But as a story, purely technically, it was brilliantly done, and the conceit itself and the worldbuilding Chiang puts under it are brilliant too.
I liked "Hell is the Absence of God", though…I don't know, I was basically completely unmoved by the characters, and the ending didn't seem surprising to me, really, though again I liked the worldbuilding. I really didn't like the narrator of "Division By Zero," and I didn't like his wife either. I could totally be brought to feel emotional distress at math being untrue, since I do love mathematics, but that's not the way a story would have to go about posing that conceit, for me.
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I think I missed the fact that the solution at the end of "Seventy-Two Letters" is a metaphor for DNA; I was totally fixated on the social ramifications of nomenclature. But as a story, purely technically, it was brilliantly done, and the conceit itself and the worldbuilding Chiang puts under it are brilliant too.
I liked "Hell is the Absence of God", though…I don't know, I was basically completely unmoved by the characters, and the ending didn't seem surprising to me, really, though again I liked the worldbuilding. I really didn't like the narrator of "Division By Zero," and I didn't like his wife either. I could totally be brought to feel emotional distress at math being untrue, since I do love mathematics, but that's not the way a story would have to go about posing that conceit, for me.