This week – a new suggestion from Saint Shut-the-Fuck-up-Friday: short stories from the collection Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang.
Please read at least one of these. Preferably two for the sake of wider discussion. All three if you’re enjoying yourself and/or feel ambitious. Our Saint has provided “tasting notes”:
Tower of Babylon—This is the shortest of the three selections. Tasting notes include wine, sweat, conflicting definitions of hubris, and fine-quality copper ingots.
Seventy-Two Letters—This is the longest of the three selections. Textural notes include rich clay under the fingernails; the prickle of the skin when science blurs into magic; the fragile onionskin of anarchist zines; porcelain still warm from your cup of tea.
Hell is the Absence of God—This one is middle-length, and when your Saint tried to write playful scent notes for it… they couldn’t. So they offer this: they’ve read this short story at three different spiritually-distinct points in their life and while it’s never stopped being horrifying, they observed a newfound sense of peace during this last reading that wasn’t present a decade earlier. (They consider this story a form of exposure therapy.) Your Saint doesn’t know if Chiang intended this piece as horror, but it’s one of the few pieces of literature they’ve read that managed to induce nausea. (For those who might benefit from such content warnings—discussion of suicide, death of a spouse, semi-graphic descriptions of injury. If you grew up in a particularly devout Christian context, this may stir up some long-dormant brain weasels.)
Further comments from Saint Shut-the-Fuck-Up-Friday:
If you’ve not read Ted Chiang previously, he’s often described as a spiritual successor to Borges. While your Saint (to their embarrassment) hasn’t read enough Borges to assess that opinion, they deeply enjoy how Chiang frequently places historical scientific theories and different pieces of theology into a mason jar and shakes that jar until they fight or fuck their way into leaving behind squalling, implacable Mysticism. (One might argue that religious texts—particularly etiological myths—are themselves an older attempt at scientific theory, and your Saint suspects we might get into that on Wednesday night!)
