Ranges from good to wonderful.

http://livredor.livejournal.com/232923.html

review on Big Dumb Object

Finished 28 May 2005.

Wow. This is an mind-expanding collection of stories. I’m reading it as part of my ongoing quest for “linguistics science fiction”. One story in particular, “Story of your life” fits in with the linguistic theme. But all of the stories are absolutely incredible.

All the stories describe worlds that are almost parallel universes to the world that we know – with a little twist. For example, the first story, “Tower of Babel”, takes the familiar Biblical story and asks, “What if the Tower wasn’t destroyed by God? What if they built it up and up into the firmament of heaven? What would they find?” The denouement is pretty stunning.

Another favourite story of mine (having read the collection just once!) is “Seventy-two Letters”. It’s set around the time of the Industrial Revolution – but the ingenious automated machines built during the Revolution are not powered by steam or built with gears, but are golems animated by the creative power of Hebrew letters, a Kabbalistic idea. Despite this key difference, events run in parallel to our world, forcing people to confront issues similar to cloning, birth control, machines taking over jobs from humans, etc. And it’s stunningly clever.

All the stories are pretty good, but those are the two I enjoyed the most. “Story of your life” is pretty interesting for linguists, it describes the process of conducting a “monolingual discovery procedure” into a language. That is, “deciphering” an unknown language without the help of a common language or even an interpreter. I haven’t done any field linguistics, but it seems he thinks it can be done much faster than would be true in real life. But that’s not really the main point of the story. The point is, everyone knows that learning a new language is supposed to be mind-expanding. And it is. But what about learning an alien language? How mind-expanding would that be?

Well, that’s all I’m going to say about them. I don’t want to spoil the stories for anyone who may come across this review. But I highly, highly, highly recommend it. I’m so glad I borrowed this from the library. And I’ll be on the lookout for a copy of my own.

Wow. The first story alone makes this collection worthwhile. The rest do a fine job too.

Hyped by the Boing Boing folks, bought it for my brother, he loved it, and now I’m borrowing his copy.