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Seventy Two Letters
Aug. 18th, 2009 07:25 pmSo people love Ted Chiang's work, and that's fine. I have certainly enjoyed those of his stories that I have read, including his 2000 Sidewise-winning short Seventy Two Letters (available free online, linked from his Wikipedia article). That being said, I re-read it recently and it struck me as... well, very Michael Crichtony (or sideways-Crichtony, as the case may be). There's an excellent speculative premise*, extrapolated brilliantly, draped over a skeleton of a plot and populated with paper-thin stock characters spouting what is at times painfully wooden dialogue.
I think that the first time I read I was too caught up in the "gee-whiz!" to notice, but now that I look at it again... once you get past the gee-whiz, and dig beneath the delicious alternate history crust... there just isn't much there.
One school of criticism says that in order for a genre fiction to be any good, it still has to be good even after you strip away the genre elements. Crap with ray guns or unicorns bolted on (or ray guns AND unicorns bolted on) is still crap, or so proponents of that school claim, and the only thing worse is ray guns or unicorns with crap bolted on. I like to call that a "LOOK HOW COOL MY DRAGONS ARE!" story, though today you might replace dragons with vampires.
Seventy Two Words fails on that level rather spectacularly, as it is most definitely a great speculative hook with some perfunctory story attached. Despite that, I still like it a lot.
Here's the question: can something still be a good science fiction story if it's excellent science fiction, but a terrible story? In other words, is it possible that Chiang's dragon in this story is SO FUCKING COOL!!! that it can make up for all the story's deficiencies?
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*What if the physical sciences sprang from gnostic/kabbalistic sorcery instead of alchemy? What if the name of the thing really was the thing?
You know, now that I think of it I wish someone (me, for example) had brought this story up at the "Is Darwin Too Good For SF" panel at ReaderCon this year, since it excellently postulates an extremely non-Darwinian model of evolution.
I think that the first time I read I was too caught up in the "gee-whiz!" to notice, but now that I look at it again... once you get past the gee-whiz, and dig beneath the delicious alternate history crust... there just isn't much there.
One school of criticism says that in order for a genre fiction to be any good, it still has to be good even after you strip away the genre elements. Crap with ray guns or unicorns bolted on (or ray guns AND unicorns bolted on) is still crap, or so proponents of that school claim, and the only thing worse is ray guns or unicorns with crap bolted on. I like to call that a "LOOK HOW COOL MY DRAGONS ARE!" story, though today you might replace dragons with vampires.
Seventy Two Words fails on that level rather spectacularly, as it is most definitely a great speculative hook with some perfunctory story attached. Despite that, I still like it a lot.
Here's the question: can something still be a good science fiction story if it's excellent science fiction, but a terrible story? In other words, is it possible that Chiang's dragon in this story is SO FUCKING COOL!!! that it can make up for all the story's deficiencies?
-----
*What if the physical sciences sprang from gnostic/kabbalistic sorcery instead of alchemy? What if the name of the thing really was the thing?
You know, now that I think of it I wish someone (me, for example) had brought this story up at the "Is Darwin Too Good For SF" panel at ReaderCon this year, since it excellently postulates an extremely non-Darwinian model of evolution.
