Wayne Daniels wrote:
>
> If you haven't already, you ought to get hold of a copy of David
> Hartwell's 4th Years Best SF anthology. There are good things there,
> as always, but the best by far IMHO is a tale by Ted Chiang (hitherto
> unknown to me) called, "Story of Your Life". It's a remarkable attempt
> to deal with something most sf simply passes over or avoids: the
> problem of how one would communicate with alien life forms that were
> structured, both physically and cognitively, in a radically different
> way. The story contains a great deal of linguistics, physics, and
> philosophy, all well integrated, as well as, interlaced with the main
> narrative, strange, achronic passages, full of disconcerting verb
> combinations, addressed by the narrator to her deceased daughter. This
> too is resolved at the conclusion. It's the most ambitious (and
> successful) piece of sf writing I've come across in a long time (Greg
> Egan apart).
Chiang's "Story of Your Life" was originally published in Patrick
Nielsen Hayden's Starlight 2 and is currently a Hugo nominee and winner
of this year's Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. I believe it was also
included in Gardner Dozois's Best of Year Anthology as well. Well worth
the read.
Starlight had a second Hugo nominee (Robert Charles Wilson's "Divided by
Infinity") and a World Fantasy nominee (Ellen Kushner's "The Death of
the Duke") as well. When I read it, I noted the Wilson and the Chiang
and predicted they would make the award nomination lists.
Steven
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