![]() Identify markers of “scientificity” in the text.Ĥ. ![]() ![]() Think of other textual sequences that confused you. Think of particular textual sequences that you really liked. Feel free to share any comments or questions below this post.ġ. As you read, keep the following guiding questions in mind and use them to focus your perception and analysis of the story. Our discussion of the novella, as with most of the discussions in the course, is heavily text-based and close reading oriented. Here, Chiang bypasses tired, wide-eyed treatments of this hypothesis, and instead constructs a story of considerable and poignant cumulative power, not least because of the ingenious way he structures his narrative to reflect the protagonist’s altered mind, putting forth questions of predetermination and free will, in the face of the ultimate knowledge, that of one’s life. An early, notorious example of it is 1984‘s Newspeak, and further along masters of linguistically-focused SF such as Samuel Delany have employed it, in his book Babel-17, as well as China Mieville in Embassytown, where language not only determines the mind but intoxicates it. Behind the scenes, a linguistic theory beloved of the SF genre is at work: the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, that language determines the mind. Furthermore, the parallels between the two disciplines are made to resonate within the structure of the story, complementing each other thematically. At the surface, scientific work and discussion, in physics and linguistics, constitute a large part of the plot. The scientific method also features prominently in the story. None of these tropes is treated the way most of us are used to seeing them: the reasons for the alien’s visit are left unclear to the very end, the military’s role is downplayed, and even the meaningful “contact” between the main character’s way of perceiving reality and that of the aliens takes place through writing, a sort of self-induced meditative trance state, rewiring the mind. The most obvious, of course, is Alien First Contact, but also Linguistics, Military Paranoia, the vagaries of perception beyond mere chronology and causality, or in other words, a form of Clairvoyance. This novella works through a number of well-known SF tropes, constructing/contrasting them in an innovative manner. His return repeated the success of his debut, and he won the Nebula Award again in 1999, with his first piece out of retirement, Story of Your Life. Over the course of the next year or so, he garnered more and more accolades, until he fell silent for 7 years, until 1998. ![]() 1967) established himself as a writer of massive promise with his very first published story, Tower of Babylon, which won him the 1990 Nebula Award. ![]()
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