Ted Chiang: The Secret Third Thing

I really like Ted Chiang’s writing. [ed. me too!]

I think he's probably the best science fiction short story writer alive, and possibly the best short story writer, period. [ed. well...]

I've read every one of his stories at least twice, and The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate more like seven times. I’ve noticed many of his readers, including some of his most positive reviewers, miss one key point or another of his works, and thus don't fully appreciate his genius.

This review covers what he does extremely well, especially unique elements that other science fiction writers have not done as well, or at all.

He Writes “True” Science Fiction

Science fiction critics often divide the genre into:

• "hard" science fiction: aka engineering fiction, stories built on scientifically accurate extrapolations of real physics and technology (think Arthur C. Clarke)

• "soft" science fiction: aka science fantasy, which uses scientific trappings as window dressing for character-driven or sociological stories (think Star Wars).

Ted Chiang has written stories plausibly categorized as either, but more excitingly, many of his stories are neither. He often writes what I think of as true science fiction, where the principles of science themselves are meaningfully different from our world, but still internally consistent.

In Omphalos, Young Earth Creationism is empirically true. Astronomers can only see light from stars 6,000 light-years away. Fossilized trees have centers with no rings. The first God-created humans lack belly buttons. The scientists in that story keep discovering multiple independent lines of evidence that converge on creationism: because in that universe, they're simply correct.

In Seventy-Two Letters, technology springs from Jewish Kabbalah. Golems and divine names drive industrial progress in a steampunk world.

Excitingly, he does this not just with natural sciences but social sciences as well. In Story of Your Life, strong Sapir-Whorf (the idea that language significantly constrains thought) isn't a largely discredited linguistic hypothesis, but the key to navigating First Contact with alien minds that experience past and future as equally present.

This comes up in his other stories as well:

• In Division By Zero, mathematics itself is broken from within.

• In Hell Is the Absence of God, divine intervention is empirically observable and follows consistent rules

Many of his readers, even in their otherwise rave reviews, miss this. Multiple reviewers complain about how the science in his stories are “unrealistic” (e.g. strong Sapir-Whorf is “discredited”). They expect hard science fiction; Chiang is doing something different. Chiang creates different universes with internally self-consistent scientific laws, using science fiction and alternative science as a vehicle for exploring philosophical progress and human relationships.

Technology is Often Good

Science fiction writers used to like technology. For some reason, this has become increasingly uncommon, even passé. Doubly so for Western writers, and quadruply so for Western, literary, “humanist” writers.

Now it’s hip and trendy to think of every new technology as the Torment Nexus. Most science fiction today feels like Black Mirror, which ran 7 seasons with exactly one happy ending.

Chiang bucks this trend. Joyce Carol Oates:

It is both a surprise and a relief to encounter fiction that [...] ask[s] anew philosophical questions that have been posed repeatedly through millennia to no avail. Chiang’s materialist universe is a secular place, in which God, if there is one, belongs to the phenomenal realm of scientific investigation and usually has no particular interest in humankind. But it is also a place in which the natural inquisitiveness of our species leads us to ever more astonishing truths, and an alliance with technological advances is likely to enhance us, not diminish us. Human curiosity, for Chiang, is a nearly divine engine of progress.

In the hands of a lesser (or perhaps just more pessimistic) writer, many of the technologies and ideas Chiang explores will have an accursed quality to them, a monkey’s paw that curls into delivering a future much worse than a more innocent, pastoral past. Chiang resists those cliches. In The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling, memory augmentation technology allows the narrator to understand his own self-deceptions, and work towards becoming a better person and reconciling with loved ones and even himself. In Liking What You See: A Documentary, a technology that gives users acquired face-blindness allows the main characters to meditate on the nature of human beauty and the shallowness inherent in privileging the beautiful.

Even in situations where the story is overall tragic, like when the characters are faced with existential crisis (in the individual sense), or existential catastrophe (in the world-ending sense), technology isn't the villain but the vehicle for understanding unbearable truths (whether about the world or about ourselves).

Chiang consistently shows us the potential of technology to help us become more human, and have a deeper appreciation for the world and our place in it.

The Lived Experience of Compatibilism

“Compatibilism is a philosophical stance that reconciles free will with determinism. It argues that free will, understood as the ability to act according to one's desires, is compatible with the idea that all events, including human actions, are causally determined by prior events. Essentially, compatibilists believe that even if our choices are predetermined, we can still be considered free and morally responsible if those choices are a result of our own internal states, like desires and intentions.” 

Does that make sense to you? I’m not sure it does to me. In practice, compatibilism says something like “free will in the normal, pretheoretic sense of the term, doesn’t exist. Your choices still meaningfully matter nonetheless. You can’t meaningfully get out of the bind philosophically. What you can do, however, is make peace with it.” [...]

In Story of Your Life [SPOILERS], the narrator learns an atemporal alien language and begins experiencing past and future as equally real. It takes her some time to make peace with it, but eventually she fully accepts the truth of determinism. She understands that life is full of tragedy, including that her daughter will die young, but life is full of beauty too. With both regret and awe, she sets forth on the path that she was destined to take.

This is compatibilism from the inside. In both stories, the characters discover they cannot change what will happen, but this knowledge transforms how they experience what must happen: with forgiveness, acceptance, and even joy.

As a friend of mine puts it, “he treats philosophical ideas as lived experiences.”The mathematician in Division by Zero doesn't just intellectually understand that mathematics is broken; she experiences it as a personal catastrophe, on par with (and concurrent with) her marriage's collapse. In Lifecycle of Software Objects, the “we are the parents of our mind-children” metaphor for building sentient AI systems becomes quite literal.

by Linch, The Linchpin |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Ted Chiang is truly one of the best science fiction writers out there today, and a great essayist too  (I'm also a Neal Stephenson fan). Check out this MetaFilter site: The sublime science fiction of Ted Chiang, which includes most of his stories in full (but please buy his books; you'll look smart and discerning to your friends!). A couple favorites that left a lasting impression on me: Lifecycle of Software Objects; and Understand.]

Gen Z and Men Who Yearn

The internet is abuzz with talk of male yearning. Of course, there’s no reason the phrase should mean anything to you unless you’re chronically online. But as a woman born in 1997—right on the cusp of the Millennial/Zoomer generational divide—who writes about culture for a living, I’ve not been able to overlook the latest cultural trend: men who yearn.

 

I started noticing this increasingly often in the last couple of years. According to Google Trends analytics, I’m not the only one. In 2023, a post on X by an account with very few followers garnered 3.5 million views. It read: “What makes a man attractive is not his stupid face but his stupendous yearning and agonizing longing for one woman and one woman alone.” Searches for “male yearning” and similar terms first spiked at the end of 2024 and have been growing consistently since. Last year, many mainstream magazines with a predominantly female readership put out articles on the topic. On TikTok, the most popular social media platform among Gen Z and younger millennials, videos about #menwhoyearn consistently get hundreds of thousands of likes.

For a generation that is marked by a noticeable gender split on political beliefs as well as by ever declining marriage rates, it would seem that young women still retain a desire for a specific vision of manhood. But what exactly is that vision?

As I wrote for Public Discourse recently, many young women have turned to “romantasy,” a literary genre blending fantasy settings with romantic plots, as a way to express their desire for marriage. While some novels in the genre are relatively harmless, many teach women to confuse abuse with love, often romanticizing forced marriage, as well as suggesting that male violence is evidence of commitment. This is hardly surprising, since so many of us zoomers and younger millennials are children of divorce and have grown up without a model of a healthy marriage. Many of these novels also feature very graphic sex scenes; but again, this is largely unsurprising given that we live in a pornographic culture and that women largely favor written over visual forms of pornography.

The “male yearning” trend is different, so much so that it took me by surprise. It’s somehow more wholesome. The fictional male characters most often referenced in TikTok videos about male yearning may be tall, dark, and handsome, like romantasy protagonists, but unlike in the romantasy storylines they tend to exercise restraint in their longing for the female protagonist. Where male desire in romantasy is about quick consummation, this kind of “male yearning” tends to be about acts of service, patience, and a slow-burn romance instead.

The most cited examples of fictional “men who yearn” are not always obvious. Some fit the brooding stereotype that one also finds in romantasy. For example, TikTok is full of edits of Pride and Prejudice’s Mr. Darcy—as played by Matthew MacFadyen in the 2005 film adaptation—“flexing” his hand in frustration as he silently yearns for Elizabeth Bennet. And of course, the internet went absolutely crazy last year over the character of Conrad Fisher when season three of the adaptation of Jenny Han’s The Summer I Turned Pretty was released. Emotionally withdrawn in his longing, Conrad has often been described by fans of the show as the young adult novel version of Jane Austen’s Mr. Darcy. Yet other yearning men don’t brood. Loyal to a fault and notoriously good with kids, Steve “always the babysitter” Harrington from the popular sci-fi show Stranger Things has become the object of admiration in hundreds of thousands of videos and posts made by young women.

To be clear, I’m not praising women of my generation for publicly fawning over a man, real or fictional. Some of this content borders on objectification, the very objectification of which we so often—and rightly—accuse men. This phenomenon is, nonetheless, a sign of a much healthier kind of desire than what we find in the discourse around romantasy.

The common denominator among these male characters is their willingness to accept a life of service to their loved ones...

These men exercise selflessness. They serve without expecting anything in return. They embody a healthy version of masculinity in that they use their strength not to subdue, but to support those who are more vulnerable than they are.

But how can the smutty romantasy trend coexist with this ubiquitous desire for men who respect, provide, and protect? And secondly, if data show us that young people are getting married less, why are young women consuming fiction that shows marriage, kids, and commitment as goods rather than impediments?

The first question is perhaps easier to answer. While it is overwhelmingly obvious that women—rather than men—engage with both the romantasy trend and the men-who-yearn discourse, the age range of said women overlaps only partially. Generally speaking, Gen Zers prefer to see less sex depicted in fiction than do their millennial counterparts. Romantasy reading stats, as I discussed in my previous article, point to the fact that millennials are a substantial chunk of consumers, even though the themes and plotlines of romantasy novels ostensibly target young adults.

Since I wrote that article, for example, the gay hockey romance show Heated Rivalry (yes, I’m afraid that is the title) has skyrocketed to international success. I’m given to understand that it features prolonged sex scenes, and yet most viewers are women, with millennials being a high proportion. This may seem an anomaly at first. But the book by Rachel Reid on which the show is based was released in 2019, the same year that the extremely graphic, water-cooler show par excellence Game of Thrones came to an end. By that point, millennial women had been subjected to an entire decade of adulthood of explicit content in film and TV.

I am afraid women have become somewhat desensitized. Millennial and older Gen Z women especially have, for decades, been told that they should feel no moral qualms about being both consumers and products of explicit sexual content.

Yet younger zoomers are beginning to differ from their millennial counterparts. Anecdotally, as an older zoomer myself, I’ve seen the generational divide happen right in front of my eyes. My high school peers who were just one or two years older than I have a significantly different attitude toward, and experience of, sex and relationships than my sister-in-law who is only five years younger than I. What’s surprising is not that Gen Zers are consuming smut, but that they are not consuming it at higher rates than millennials, who, now in their thirties and forties, you may expect to have progressed to a more mature view of sex and marriage.

That simply hasn’t happened. I’m hardly the first to point out that millennials are a generation marked by arrested development. They are not getting married; they’re not having kids. Some of this is explained by factors outside their control (rising house prices, etc.), but some factors are cultural. Millennials grew up engaging fully in hookup culture. Their consumption of graphic fictional content is but a reflection of their consumerist attitude toward love and relationships.

Younger Gen Z women are also not getting married, but the difference is that they are, on average, more averse than millennials to both casual sex in their own lives and depictions of sexual activity on the screen. The Marriage Foundation has spoken of a “collapse” in early marriage, “with only 4% of women and 2% of men born in 1998 marrying before age 25, marking a historical low.” But this collapse is not due exclusively or even primarily to a preference for cohabitation. The Institute for Family Studies has recently reported that Gen Z is not only marrying later and less frequently: they are also cohabiting less and having less sex overall. Essentially, zoomer women are increasingly retreating from interaction of any kind with the opposite sex, a phenomenon that is now often described as involuntary celibacy.

As well as this, recent reports suggest that Gen Z men and women want to see less explicit sexual content in films and TV shows, preferring depictions of non-sexual intimacy, whether that is deep friendship or a romantic bond. Finally, an article by Wendy Wang, also for the Institute for Family Studies, argues that, while Gen Z women are generally more egalitarian than previous generations in their attitudes toward relationships between men and women, there is one role that they still want men to play: to protect.

by Beatrice Scudeler, Public Discourse | Read more:
Image: FlixPix/Alarmy

by Tom Gauld, My Jetpack |  Read more:

Consider the Sister

Amy Wallace has spent two decades guarding the human her brother was—against a world that prefers David Foster Wallace as a puzzle.

Early on Saturday mornings, Amy Wallace would be yanked out of bed by her big brother, David. He was determined not to miss the start of the cartoons. At their home in Urbana, Illinois, the siblings situated themselves in front of the television and waited for the color bars to turn to The Road Runner Show, David eager, impatient, full of energy. Eventually, he would splay out on the carpet and Amy would sit behind him on the couch. More than 50 years later, Amy is still haunted by the sensory experience of that couch. It was pea-green and scratchy, yet she dutifully—and gladly—sat there as part of their sibling ritual.

 

Their mother, Sally Foster, described the scene this way: Amy spent her mornings watching David watch TV. But that’s not quite right.

“Watching television with David was an interactive experience,” Amy says. The two children weren’t content with what was on offer. Often, they would invent new dialogue for the characters extemporaneously.

“That was one of our hobbies,” Amy says. “We just thought, whoever’s writing this, it could be so much more interesting.”

David identified as the Road Runner and told Amy she was his Wile E. Coyote. He had the speed, the tools—and the upper hand. She was left with only her wits to try to keep up with him, but of course she never could. The lot of Wile E. Coyote was to follow the Road Runner hopelessly, never to catch up.

It was hard work being David Foster Wallace’s little sister. It still is. The job of preserving the memory of her brother as a complex, vibrant, often joyful person has fallen to her. It’s been nearly 20 years since his death by suicide, and while the legend of DFW the writer has grown, the story of the human has been flattened to the stereotype of a tortured artist who came to a tragic end.

Amy, who lives in Arizona, is now the only living member of the nuclear Foster Wallace family. James (a philosophy professor) and Sally (an English professor) moved from Urbana to Arizona in 2012. James died in July 2019, and Sally died just over a year later in July 2020.

The grief over the deaths of her brother and then her parents is a constant companion.

“Nearly every morning of my life, as a fully grown adult woman living a full adult life, I wake up and I’m back in my childhood bed,” she says. “My mom is making breakfast and David’s in his bedroom and it’s so vivid. Then I open my eyes and it’s like nope, that’s all gone.”

Amy’s own children are adults now. She says her eldest is now a writer as well. (Amy asked me not to describe them, to preserve their privacy.) They were old enough to have strong memories of their uncle, and they bear a strong physical resemblance to him. David’s death was a very public wound for a mostly private family.

In 2001, David published a piece of fiction about a man grappling with suicidal ideation. He wrote, in part: “I apologized for whatever pain my suicide and the fraudulence and/or inability to love that had precipitated it might cause” his family. To some extent, he foresaw the shadow he would cast.

Years after David’s death, their father asked Amy to write a book about him from her perspective. He asked her to make sure the people who raised him got a say in his memory, too.

Amy decided a book would be too invasive—but she came to understand that she had a responsibility to talk about her brother beyond the legend that was partly of his own fashioning. She has given radio interviews, appeared at a conference dedicated to David’s work, and has spoken to me at length about the person who teased her, protected her, alienated and embraced her, and eventually broke her heart.

“I do feel that it's kind of incumbent on me to let the world know what a very normal person he was,” Amy says. “And that he was mostly happy, generous—and extremely funny.”

*****

Amy has a knack for making you feel, very quickly, like you too knew this brotherly version of David, knew the sincerity of his often oddly shaped affection.

My own connection with Amy came as the result of my insecurity around David’s work, not the sort of deep, life-defining fanaticism that one often encounters in the cult of DFW. Generally, I have viewed his work the way I have at times felt about Salvador Dalí—we’re all humans with the same general set of blood, guts, and brains. How could these people pull so much more out of themselves than the rest of us?

In many ways, this envy has stood in the way of my own appreciation of David’s writing. It’s great, profound, and will never be repeated. But how did he know so many words? What’s the deal with that syntax? Why do I write in plain, gray English while his work hits my eyes like Technicolor?

In April 2025, I emailed Amy out of the blue. Here is what I said:

“I'm hoping that you might be willing to be interviewed about your mother and let me learn more about her life and work. I have always had a hard time getting past my envy of your brother's vocabulary, and I felt a little bit better about it when I read a bit about Sally.

“So, naturally, my curiosity turned to her and her life. I'd love to write a real feature piece about Sally.”

Amy and I spoke at length over the following weeks. She suggested I buy a copy of her mother’s textbook Practically Painless English. I read it on the subway and felt immediate clarity upon reading just the first few pages.

In a section about verbs, Sally laid out an exercise:

1. Please circle each verb you find in these sentences.
2. The fox moaned and groaned when the chicken escaped.
3. I baked a cake for Mongo, but he turned bright green after he ate some.
4.George is upset because his father thinks he lied about the cherry tree.
5. Florence sneaked out of her room, tiptoed down the stairs, and dynamited the refrigerator.
6. The big fish kept out of trouble because he shut his mouth and stayed in school.

Practically Painless English isn’t just a textbook for people who want to learn to speak proper English. It’s a guide to using language with personality. If Strunk and White offer a guide to frictionless diction, Practically Painless English demonstrates how to stand out within a traditional framework. I probably would have been a much more interesting writer if I’d been raised by a parent who felt so strongly that storytelling should contain detail, whimsy, and flair. Then I realized that Amy was raised by just such a parent, too.

Eventually, months after our first conversation, I reached out to Amy again. This time my curiosity turned to her and her life. I asked her if I could write a real feature piece about her.

In the course of subjecting Amy to many, many hours of conversations about herself, her brother, and my own writing life and hangups about it, I found someone who is as entertaining as she is earnest. Scrutiny around David’s upbringing is inevitably scrutiny of her own upbringing, though hardly any of those critics care to understand her experience—or even know she exists.

She carries that family trait of delighting in absurdity. She hasn’t deified or demonized her brother despite the persistent desire in the literary community to do one or the other. One afternoon, as she was detailing how David watched television, she described just how long she had to sit with him on Saturday mornings before the start of their cartoons.

“Well, no one ever accused your brother of brevity,” I responded, anxiously. I wondered where the line was between respecting the memory of someone and treating them like they were a real person whose peculiarities were worthy of note.

“Or patience,” she said, upping the ante and putting me at ease. “He bounced off the walls in those days.”

One of the ways that Amy protects her brother’s humanity is by showing how his anxieties seemed to travel through a prism and shoot out at unexpected angles. The gloomier results are well known, but there could be humor, too, in the fears provoked not just by his anxiety but by his own ethic of deep care.

She recalls David had an obsession with sharks—which she believes stems from a book called Shark Attack that lived in the bathroom they shared for a portion of their childhood.

Many years later, Amy went to study abroad in Australia. The water was warm there, and she was enjoying herself at the beach regularly after spending her childhood in the landlocked Midwest. Back in the United States, though, David kept thinking about the sharks. He sent letters reminding his sister how to spot them in open water. There was money, too, because he was distraught at the idea that she might wind up short on resources while out on her own. Amy was fine, but David was determined to protect her, in his own way.

“He’d sign off his letters to me with a picture of a shark fin,” Amy says. “Then there’d be a little stick figure. Oh my god, it was great.”

Amy says the last time she and her family spent significant time with David was on a vacation to Stinson Beach.

“When any of us were in the water, he'd be standing on the deck with binoculars scanning for fins,” she recalls. “He was so terrified of sharks and he didn't stick a toe in the water.”

Before he was the most revered and studied contemporary American author, DFW was just someone’s older brother. Amy didn’t see him as DFW, the public character. But she can talk at length about the person she grew up with.

by Lindsey Adler, The Small Bow | Read more:
Image: Road Runner Show/dreamstime

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Diabolic Realism

If you made it through the 3,600 pages of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle (Min kamp, in the Norwegian), its conclusion could only inspire mixed feelings. Book Six — also known as “the Hitler one” due to its three hundred pages on the life of the dictator whose manifesto gave Knausgaard his title — records the precise moment (7:07 a.m., on September 2, 2011) that Karl Ove brought it to a close. “The novel is finally finished,” he writes. “In two hours Linda will be coming here, I will hug her and tell her I’ve finished, and I will never do anything like this to her and our children again.” They will go to a literature festival, where he will endure an interview and then his wife will, too, since her own book has just come out. “Afterwards we will catch the train to Malmö, where we will get in the car and drive back to our house, and the whole way I will revel in, truly revel in, the thought that I am no longer a writer.”

Beyond the physical relief of putting down the carpal-tunnel-inducing final tome (1,157 pages in all), you might have sighed with despair at the thought of post-Struggle existence. After all, you’d spent countless hours swimming through Karl Ove’s mind, seeing through his eyes as he smoked, chugged coffee, “trudged” through various forms of bad weather, tried to write and then wrote and wrote and wrote, took care of his children, felt ashamed of taking care of his children, painfully recalled his father’s drunken misbehavior and his own, fretted over his sexual imperfections and moral indiscretions, agonized about his overwhelming shyness but also his glaring narcissism, stared at himself in various reflections, and, on two occasions, sliced up his face with broken glass. How will I fill my time, you might have wondered, if not by reading Knausgaard? And if he was renouncing the vocation he struggled so hard to claim, what had it all been for?

But of course Knausgaard didn’t stop writing. In fact, just the opposite. My Struggle was released in Norway between 2009 and 2011; by the time the final installment of this Viking longship of a novel invaded the English-speaking world, in 2018, Knausgaard had already published five more books in his native country... 

Now the cycle continues with The School of Night (2023/2026), a bildungsroman about a young Norwegian photographer and the Faustian bargain that catapults him to artistic greatness. So far, we’re at 2,512 pages and counting. Two more tomes have already been published in Norway; Knausgaard told a Norwegian newspaper that the seventh will be the last, because, incredibly, “there is so much else I want to write.”

An attentive Struggler will identify bits and pieces that Knausgaard recycles in these novels: the aphrodisiac qualities of prawns, or a grandfather’s antisemitic quip, or the frequent appearance of hospitals and mental institutions. There is typically Knausgaardian attention paid to the precise color of piss (sometimes, like Knausgaard’s father’s, disturbingly dark) and the unevenly shared burdens of domestic life; much Pepsi Max is slurped, significant time is spent brooding on verandas, and the destructive desire for just one more drink is often satisfied. Narrators resemble Karl Ove at various points in My Struggle, like the alcoholic literature professor and aspiring novelist whose mentally unstable wife is hospitalized, as Linda was in Book Two; The School of Night’s young artist maps onto student Karl Ove in Book Five.

Yet the Star series is in many ways My Struggle’s opposite. Rather than the unrelenting voice of one man, we get an array of perspectives, and some of the most compelling characters are women. Whereas My Struggle somehow keeps you engaged despite its apparent formlessness, with little plot beyond the shaggy shape of an actual life, the Star series is structured around a series of more or less suspenseful mysteries. But the most obvious difference is the weirdness. While Knausgaard continues to beguile us with his trademark hyperrealist style, predictably observant down to the coffee granules dissolving inside a mug, what happens in these new novels transcends the real. One of the narrators — Egil, a trust-funded documentarian turned religious searcher who composes an essay on death that constitutes the last fifty or so pages of The Morning Star — helpfully informs us that the titular phrase is not just a literal translation of Lucifer, the name of the fallen angel who rebels against God, but also one of the ways Jesus describes himself. And the dark corners of these novels are illuminated by a gleam equal parts demonic and divine: hordes of crabs scuttle their way inland, a Sasquatch-like beast emerges from the woods and seemingly possesses an escaped mental patient, dreams start changing, dead bodies stop arriving at mortuaries, and people who should be dead seem somehow to keep living.

The struggle of My Struggle is, at heart, about what to believe in the face of death when religion is not an option, ideology has failed, and there’s nothing more than the life you’ve got. “Attaching meaning to the world is peculiar only to man,” Knausgaard writes in Book Six. “We are the givers of meaning, and this is not only our own responsibility but also our obligation.” Knausgaard sought a form that would not just describe but enact the process by which meaning is made in secular life. But in the Star books, secular lives — and seemingly mortality itself — are disrupted by the new star; characters and readers alike wonder whether it’s a sign to be interpreted or simply a phenomenon to be explained. Knausgaard widens his frame to encompass not just the banal and everyday, but the cosmic. He tries, in other words, to reenchant the secular world, and the secular novel, dramatizing a search for meaning beyond the self and beyond realism. But like his characters, we’re left wondering what it all means.

by Max Norman, The Drift |  Read more:

Image: Maki Yamaguchi

[ed. Like with Proust... two books and I'm good.]

The Murderer

via:

Accepting Wallace

David Foster Wallace was a genius, now let me convince you to read him.

It was a dark day for literature when David Foster Wallace took his life in 2008, at the age of 46. Wallace was hands-down the most talented American writer of his generation. Arguably he was one of the most striking and original prose stylists of the past century. And yet he’s never really been a household name, unless you live in an unusually highbrow household. He had enormous gifts, but an equally enormous propensity to get in his own way. Maybe that’s why America’s Wallace industry has been busier since his death than it was during his life. The man himself is no longer around to impose his artistic standards, which were both fanatically strict and strangely self-sabotaging.

In his lifetime Wallace published two novels, three story collections, and two volumes of non-fiction, along with sundry minor works. Since his death, his oeuvre has gone on growing. In 2009, his publishers had a hit with This is Water, a jazzed-up version of a commencement address Wallace delivered in 2005. The Pale King, the big unfinished novel he was working on at the time of his death, was published in 2011. A volume of previously uncollected essays appeared in 2012. So did D. T. Max’s biography, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story. In 2015 Jason Segel played Wallace in the movie The End of the Tour.

The latest addition to the Wallace canon is a hundred-page novella called Something to Do with Paying Attention. Actually, the text of the book isn’t new. Readers who made it past the middle of The Pale King – admittedly not a large cohort – will find they’ve read this novella before. It first appeared as The Pale King’s 22nd chapter, in the form of a memoir composed by one of that novel’s countless narrators.

Now it’s been re-issued as a stand-alone book, in a bid to solve a perennial Wallace problem: that of providing newcomers with a way into his work. “For someone who has never read Wallace,” the book’s publisher, Sarah McNally, writes in her preface, “this little book … is a perfect place to start.”

I’m not sure McNally is right about that. Removed from the bustling context of The Pale King, the story feels like an uncharacteristically minor-key performance. Newbies who start here are liable to wonder what all the fuss is about.

Still, McNally is right to feel that Wallace’s reputation is due for a booster shot. This is doubly true in Australia, where Wallace is criminally under-appreciated. His books have never sold well here, and this new one doesn’t even have an Aussie distributor.

If this novella isn’t the perfect introduction to Wallace, then what is? The awkward fact, which McNally hints at but doesn’t dare to mention aloud, is that Wallace never produced a wholly satisfactory book. Unfortunately, he wasn’t his own best critic or curator. He had a maddening tendency to barricade his gorgeous prose behind needless entanglements of textual barbed wire.

This has always presented his fans with a challenge. If you love his stuff – as I do – then how do you spread the word about it? Even his best books can’t be recommended without a caveat or two: read this bit, but don’t hesitate to skip or skim that one.

What makes the Wallace problem so vexing is that his best stuff really was incredibly good. When he was on song, Wallace produced sentences that made his most gifted contemporaries feel like quitting on the spot.

Here he is covering a tennis match between Pete Sampras and Mark Philippoussis. “Sampras, poor-postured and chestless, smiling shyly at the ground, his powder-blue shorts swimming down around his knees, looks a little like a kid wearing his father’s clothes.”

How’s that for a word-picture? And how’s this for a cruel but fair evocation of The Poo? “The malevolent but cyborgian Philippoussis hasn’t betrayed anything like an actual facial expression yet.” Between points he likes to “dance a little in place – perhaps to remind himself that he can indeed move if he needs to.”

Wallace’s journalism showcased his superb ability to register the world in front of his eyes. In the best passages of his fiction, he did something even trickier. In the same deft style, he registered the world inside his head. He could catch a thought in flight. Here’s one of the narrators of The Pale King, sitting on an infernally hot bus:

The sun began shortly to broil the bus’s rear and port side. The air-conditioning was more like a vague gesture toward the abstract idea of air-conditioning. There was a horrific piece of graffiti incised with knife or leather punch in the plastic of the seatback in front of me, which I looked at twice and then made a point of never looking directly at again. The bus had a lavatory in the wayback rear, which no one ever made any attempt to use, and I remember consciously deciding to trust that the passengers had good reason for not using it instead of venturing in and discovering that reason for myself.

Notice how the sentence about the feeble air-conditioning can hardly be bothered being a proper sentence. Wallace’s very syntax feels heat-affected. And notice how the narrator doesn’t just not look at the graffito again. He makes a point of not looking at it again. This is how thought moves, and Wallace had a supreme ability to follow its twists and turns in language.

The word genius isn’t out of place for Wallace. He could go on like this for page after page, spraying out jaw-dropping sentences seemingly at will. His intelligence was vast, and his writing let you all the way into it. His verbal talent was on a par with James Joyce’s. But he was a Joyce for our time. His best prose was slangy, hyper-modern, tech-savvy, and laugh-out-loud funny.

Alas, Wallace had something else in common with Joyce. Maybe because he could produce breathtaking prose without really trying, he also felt a restless urge to overegg the pudding, by conducting formal experiments that seemed positively designed to shut readers out. “Just how much reader-annoyance are you shooting for here exactly?” said his sister Amy, when vetting one of Wallace’s manuscripts. This is the lingering question about Wallace. What was the deal with the reader-annoyance?

One answer is that he lacked discipline. The guy just didn’t know how to stop himself. His best-known novel, Infinite Jest, was 1100 pages long, and included a hundred pages of minutely printed endnotes. As Max reveals in his biography, the novel’s draft was 600 pages longer. Wallace’s editor had to fight him tooth and nail to reduce the book to the width of a mere housebrick.

Wallace’s running battles with editors are a motif of Max’s biography. When commissioned to write magazine articles, Wallace routinely handed in unfeasibly massive, manically brilliant drafts that were as long as small books, and riddled with post-modern interpolations (subheadings, upside-down text, footnotes, footnotes to footnotes).

“The biggest challenge to editing Dave’s non-fiction,” said one of his editors, “was in striking a balance between the magazine’s needs and his instinctual impulse to not give a f--- about the magazine’s needs.” [...]

Wallace was a complicated man whose life was darkened by the shadows of depression and addiction. His friend and fellow novelist Jonathan Franzen called him “a lifelong prisoner on the island of himself”. Writing fiction, Franzen said, “was his way off the island”, his way of connecting with others.

But after years of wrestling with The Pale King, Wallace became desperately blocked – “bored with his old tricks”, as Franzen put it, “and unable to muster enough excitement about his new novel to find a way forward with it”. Far from getting him off the island, his convoluted final book left him comprehensively marooned.

While Wallace was alive, one barracked for him to produce the masterpiece that would do full justice to his talents. Now that he’s gone, we must make do with his existing works and reconcile ourselves to the fact that his excesses were part of his essence. Without the reader-annoyance, Wallace wouldn’t be Wallace.

by David Free, Sydney Morning Herald |  Read more:

Image: Alarmy

[ed. A bit dated but still relevant (ie. high annoyance factor but well worth it). As for a good starting point:]

***

"As for the best place to start, I think the answer lies in his non-fiction. Try his scintillating essay about a bad luxury cruise, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, which appears in the collection of the same name. If that doesn’t make you fall in love with Wallace, nothing will."

[ed. More here: 25 Great Articles and Essays by David Foster Wallace (Electric Typwriter). Like this one: F/X Porn (about Terminator movies).]

Go Ahead and Use AI. It Will Only Help Me Dominate You.

Recently there has been a lot of commentary of the following type:

BAD WRITER [touchily]: “Actually, I do use AI to help me write.”

Okay. That checks out. Carry on.

Want to use AI as a Valuable Part of Your Writing Process? Want to use it to “generate pushback on my column thesis” and be “more comprehensible” and “craft unique angles” and offer “positive and negative feedback” and “scale the quantity” of your “output?”

Knock yourself out.

You have my blessing.

Hey buddy— go for it!

Some in the “real writer” community find this sort of rampant outsourcing of the writing process to AI to be distressing. Not me. Would I do it myself? No. I have self-respect. But I want to tell you, my friends, that you have my full support for all of it. Want to throw your dashed-off notes into ChatGPT and have it spit a draft back at you and then edit that and call it your own? Want to toss a few hastily written headlines at Claude and have it generate the outline of your piece? Want to dump your entire career archives into a chatbot and then order it to replicate your own voice so you don’t have to?

Do you, a grown man, a successful professional writer who has received a book deal paying you real US currency, want to use AI for the purpose of “making sure the book matches [your own] writing style”[???]? Guess what, brother: I support you. I affirm you. I am right here offering you a classic thumbs-up gesture of affirmation.

“Whoa, a writer who I have never regarded as particularly inventive is using AI? I am surprised and disappointed.” There’s a sentence I would never utter. Instead, I would accept the news of your AI use with total equanimity, nodding almost imperceptibly to indicate that this is not something worth raising my eyebrows over.

No, I will not be joining in the chorus of condemnation. On the contrary. If you are a professional writer, I want you to use AI. Because this industry is competitive. I’ll take any advantage I can get. And if you want to make your writing suck, that’s all the better for me. One less person outshining me.

The tepid, conformist nature of your AI-assisted prose will only make my unexpected bons mots stand out more sharply. While you lean on a technological crutch of grammatical mediocrity to drag your essays over the finish line, I’ll be metaphorically zipping past you on my “magic carpet” of words emerging directly from my own declining and unpredictable brain. Over time, the intellectual box into which AI has seduced your creative process will suffocate you, leaving your bereft readers little choice but to drift into my subscription base.

You’ll be all, “Politics in America is divided—but it doesn’t have to be. Let’s discuss how to bridge the partisan divide.” Your sense of joy at the possibilities of the English language will have been so eroded that you won’t even understand why that sucks shit. Meanwhile I’ll be dropping some wild similes you could never even imagine. “Politics is like a sea slug.” What?? How?? Readers will flock to me to find out. Too bad your AI editor struck that line from your piece as “indecipherable.”

You and your friend “Claude” wouldn’t last two seconds in my cipher.

Maybe you read the studies about how AI use causes “cognitive surrender” that slowly destroys your ability to think critically about the linguistic cud that the machine is serving you. Or about how it causes “cognitive foreclosure” that prevents you from ever developing the skills to critique AI output even if you wanted to. Maybe these studies give you pause, when you think about introducing these inscrutable tools of mental paralysis into your own creative process.

Don’t worry about it!

Life is hard enough already. You’re busy. You have lots of things to do—laundry, making lunch, and more. The last thing you need is a bunch of jealous (Brooklyn hipster) writers lecturing you about how this magical productivity booster is somehow “bad” for you. Those are probably the same haters who told you to stop doing so much crystal meth. Some people can’t stand to see you succeed!

I just checked a calendar—it’s 2026. AI is here to stay and you might as well beat the rush by using it more and more, right? Right. In the name of efficiency, it just makes sense for you to turn over ever greater portions of your thought process to this seductive helper, never stopping to ask yourself what it is costing you. You are a nice person and your job (writing) deserves to be easy. There, there. Allow yourself to sink into the warm opiate of cerebral ease. This is better. Yes. This is much better.

By all means—proceed.

And then, when you have settled into this comfortable pattern, sit back and watch me unsheath my massive, work-hardened intellect, built to staggering strength through a daily regimen of thinking about stuff. I think you’ll find that your panicked efforts to resist my onslaught will prove unsuccessful, hampered as you are by atrophied muscles of the mind. Ask your AI companion for some final words of comfort. The hour of your doom draws near.

I will crush you with ease.

by Hamilton Nolan, How Things Work |  Read more:

Image: Getty

[ed. Haha...yep. : ) See also: Who Goes AI? (with respect to Dorothy Thompson's 'Who Goes Nazi', gracefully acknowledged by the author).]

‘Project Hail Mary’ Adds to a Winning Streak for Originality at the Movies

Franchise movies have been the dominant currency in Hollywood for years, but, lately, the upside of originality has been hard to miss.

A week after “One Battle After Another,” “Sinners” and “KPop Demon Hunters” all triumphed at the Academy Awards, Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s “Project Hail Mary” notched the biggest nonfranchise opening weekend since “Oppenheimer.” In the first three months of 2026, the two biggest hits in theaters are it and the Pixar original “Hoppers.”

All of these successes came at considerable expense. “Project Hail Mary,” based on the Andy Weir bestseller, cost close to $200 million to make. But its $80.5 million debut vindicated Amazon MGM’s big bet, and gave the studio its largest box-office hit yet.

“They made a tremendous investment, and it’s going to pay off,” Lord said in an interview alongside Miller last week. “How exciting to reward the people that took a shot.”

“Project Hail Mary,” despite its title, isn’t anyone’s idea of a long shot. It stars one of the most widely liked actors in Ryan Gosling. Its source material, Weir’s novel, is beloved. And it trades on much of the same science-first sci-fi appeal of 2015’s best picture-nominated “The Martian,” from an earlier book by Weir. Lord and Miller, the filmmakers of the “Spider-Verse” movies and “The Lego Movie,” have a long track record of success with both audiences and critics.

But the recent run for originality — at the Oscars and the multiplex — suggests audiences may be more eager for something different from the same old. At the least, the potentially cascading rewards of an original hit are freshly apparent at a time when a lot of big bets — like the $130 million-plus that Paul Thomas Anderson’s best picture winner “One Battle After Another” cost Warner Bros. to make — have paid off so massively.

“People go to the movies to see a new experience,” Miller said. “They don’t go to see a thing they’ve already seen. Originality has value, especially as AI gets into the picture. The value that we can bring as filmmakers is to bring something that can’t be AI because it hasn’t been thought of before.

“So it’s good business.”

Franchise domination

Franchises have hardly been displaced. They will, no doubt, largely control the box office for the rest of year, beginning with Universal’s “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” next month, followed by anticipated releases like “Toy Story 5,” “Avengers: Doomsday” and “Dune: Part Three.” Last week, the 11th “Spider-Man” movie this century, Sony Pictures’ “Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” set a new trailer record with 718.6 million views in its first 24 hours.

So, yes, franchises still very much rule the day. But waves upon waves of sequels, reboots and remakes have made the few big-budget originals that manage to get made all the more singular.

“If we don’t continue to do originals, we’re going to run out of stuff,” Pete Docter, Pixar chief creative officer, earlier told The Los Angeles Times.

Since its founding, Pixar has clung to a belief that original movies are part of its mission, though that quest has grown more arduous in recent years. During the pandemic, “Soul,” “Luca” and “Turning Red” were diverted to Disney+. “Elemental” seemed like a disappointment at first but it just needed time to catch hold, eventually collecting $496 million.

“Hoppers,” directed by Daniel Chong, is hoping to follow that trajectory. So far, in three weeks of release, it’s grossed $242.6 million worldwide for The Walt Disney Co. — good business, to be sure, but a far cry from the pace of the 2024 blockbuster sequel “Inside Out 2.” It grossed $1.7 billion.

Such economics are tough for original movies to compete with, plus nonfranchise films take more effort, and money, to market. For a $200 million movie, marketing costs can come to nearly rival production budgets. [...]

An ambitious marketing campaign also accompanied “Project Hail Mary.” Gosling was everywhere from hosting “Saturday Night Live” to doing the “La La Land” dance with his alien co-star, Rocky. But the movie always rested on the appeal of the comic sensibilities of its filmmakers, Weir’s book and Gosling.

“We’re all united by the fact that we’ve spent the last two decades having people ask us: What genre is this?” says Drew Goddard, who scripted both “The Martian” and “Project Hail Mary.” “We’re constantly hard to classify because we love existing in those strange places. We like drama, we like comedy. We like heartbreak, we like terror. We like silliness.”

Streaming economics change the calculus

In matching broad-appeal material with the right filmmakers and stars, “Project Hail Mary” relied on not just old-school studio moviemaking but the sometimes overlooked lessons of “Barbenheimer.” Both Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” and Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” showed what can happen when the right filmmakers are given free rein on a big canvas. There is a definite downside, though. Warner Bros.’ “The Bride!” by Maggie Gyllenhaal seemed like a compelling, filmmaker-driven concept, but its losses might approach $100 million.

Aside from having Gosling in common, “Project Hail Mary” also shared the producer of “Barbie” in Amy Pascal. Before the studio’s acquisition by Amazon, it was greenlit by then-MGM chiefs Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy. They later moved on to Warner Bros., where they made both “One Battle After Another” and Ryan Coogler’s much-celebrated “Sinners” ($370 million in ticket sales against a budget of $90 million).

As much as Amazon’s $8.5 billion purchase of MGM was motivated by capturing some of the richest IP in movies, James Bond, it’s also true that studios can establish themselves with homegrown hits. The opening for “Project Hail Mary” was Amazon MGM’s biggest ever.

In fact, three of the biggest original hits of the past year have come from streaming companies: Apple with “F1,” Netflix with “KPop Demon Hunters” and Amazon with “Project Hail Mary.” For these studios, box-office performance is only part of the win; Netflix didn’t even publicly record the chart-topping theatrical weekend of “KPop Demon Hunters.”

These companies are sometimes willing to take greater risks because breaking even in theatrical isn’t the end-all, be-all goal. Driving attention to their streaming platforms is just as vital. “KPop” was developed and produced by Sony Pictures, but, sensing the potentially perilous road to opening it theatrically, the company sold it to Netflix. There, it became the streamer’s most-watched movie ever.

“It shouldn’t be lost on anyone that three of the biggest original hits over the past year have come from the biggest streamers: Netflix, Amazon and Apple,” says Paul Dergarabedian, head of marketplace trends for Comscore. “What the streamers are finding is that they can parlay their small-screen successes into the big screen, and vice versa.”

As much as franchises will soon take back the multiplex, several high-profile movies will try to continue the winning streak for original films, among them Steven Spielberg’s “Disclosure Day,” Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s “Digger,” J.J. Abrams’ “The Great Beyond” and, if you count one of world’s oldest stories, “The Odyssey,” by Nolan.

by Jake Coyle, AP/ST |  Read more:

Image: Evan Agostini/Invision/AP
[ed. It's not rocket science. But in this case it is... and it sells. See also: Seattle teacher inspired ‘Project Hail Mary’ director Christopher Miller (ST); and Beyond the Science: Why Rocky is the Beating Heart of the Project Hail Mary Movie (NCC).]

A.I. Is Writing Fiction. Publishers Are Unprepared.

For months, speculation has been building online that a buzzy horror novel, “Shy Girl,” was written with the help of A.I.

The novel, about a desperate young woman who is held hostage by a man she met online and forced to live as his pet, was self-published in February 2025. The book quickly found an audience among horror fans, and Hachette published it in the United Kingdom last fall and planned to release it in the United States this spring, billing it as “an unapologetic, visceral revenge horror novel.”

Earlier this year, Max Spero, the founder and chief executive of Pangram, an A.I. detection program, heard of the claims about “Shy Girl” and decided to run a test of the full text. Its results indicated that the book was 78 percent A.I. generated.

“I’m very confident that this is largely A.I. generated, or very heavily A.I. assisted,” said Spero, who posted his research on X in January.

The Times also analyzed passages from the novel using several A.I. detection tools and found recurring patterns characteristic of A.I. generated text, like gaps in logic, excessive use of melodramatic adjectives and an overreliance on the rule of three.

In the months since “Shy Girl” was released in Britain, more readers voiced their suspicions online that the writer relied on A.I., citing nonsensical metaphors and odd, repetitive phrasing. As a chorus of allegations built online in late January that the novel was A.I. generated, Hachette stayed silent.

In response to questions from The New York Times about the A.I. allegations against “Shy Girl,” Hachette told The Times that its imprint Orbit has canceled plans to release the novel in the United States and that Hachette will discontinue its U.K. edition.

The author of “Shy Girl,” Mia Ballard, who according to her author bio writes poetry and lives in Northern California, has very little social media presence, and doesn’t appear to have addressed the allegations of A.I. use on her feeds. In an email to The Times late on Thursday night, Ballard denied using A.I. to write “Shy Girl,” contending that an acquaintance she hired to edit the self-published version of the novel had used A.I.

The decision to cancel the publication came after a lengthy and thorough analysis, Hachette’s spokeswoman said, noting that the company values human creativity and requires authors to attest that their work is original. Hachette also asks its authors to disclose whether they are using A.I. to the company.

“Shy Girl” appears to be the first commercial novel from a major publishing house to be pulled over evidence of A.I. use. Its cancellation is a sign that A.I. writing is not only appearing in cheap self-published e-books that are flooding Amazon but is seeping into even traditionally published fiction.

The stunning fact that “Shy Girl” got so far into the editorial process, and was even released in the U.K. before publishers thoroughly investigated the claims of A.I. use, is a sign of how unprepared many in the book world are to deal with the rise of A.I. It also signals the dawn of an uncertain new era for the book world, as editors and readers alike are increasingly left wondering whether the prose they are reading was written by a human or a machine. [...]

For now, the most obvious disruptions from A.I. are hitting the self-publishing sphere, where authors say the ecosystem has been flooded with A.I. slop. But some in the industry believe that it’s only a matter of time before more books written with A.I. slip past editors at major houses. The technology has become increasingly widespread — as has the practice of picking up self-published books and rereleasing them through traditional imprints.

“It’s not merely inevitable,” said Thad McIlroy, a publishing industry consultant who has urged publishers to clarify their policies around the technology. “We’re in the midst of it.” [...]

Many publishers don’t explicitly prohibit authors from using A.I. in their book contracts. Instead, they rely on longstanding contractual clauses that require writers to affirm that their work is “original,” which many people in the book business now interpret as effectively banning the use of A.I. for text or image creation.

Publishers are also wary of A.I. content because currently, A.I.-generated text and art can’t be protected by copyright. Still, given the widespread uses for A.I. during research, outlining and other parts of the writing process, there’s little clarity on what constitutes its appropriate use. Many in the industry worry that publishers are leaving themselves vulnerable to scammers — or even writers who believe their A.I. use doesn’t cross any lines.

One problem in regulating authors’ A.I. use is that most corporate publishing houses don’t want to ban it outright. Editors recognize that authors use A.I. in a range of ways short of writing with it. And publishing executives want to ensure that their employees can use the technology for tasks like creating marketing copy, audio narration and translation.

The fact that publishing companies generally haven’t drawn a hard line around A.I. use is sowing confusion about what is permissible. Could a novelist ask A.I. to suggest plot twists, propose an alternate ending or polish a draft and still claim it as original work? At what point does the work stop being human?

by Alexandra Alter, NY Times | Read more:
Image: George Wylesol
[ed. I guess I'm of two minds on this. If the writing eventually becomes so good that it's indiscernable from a human-produced product (or even better) why should it be banned? And, why wouldn't you want to read it? Authors and publishing houses have a right to be concerned, but why should they be treated any differently from other professions (programmers being an example) facing the same threat? Because they occupy a so-called creative space? How long will that last? I can imagine an AI producing very high quality material: fiction, non-fiction, screenplays, poetry, advertising copy, etc. because it can draw upon hundreds of years of examples, criticism, reviews, college courses, awards and whatever else is out there to discern patterns, storylines, jokes, whatever, that have proven to produce the highest impact and success. So what to do? The only thing I can think of is labeling: highlighting what's AI produced and what's not and letting the market decide its worth. Many people might actually prefer AI - along the lines of craft brews vs. Bud Light. Who knows? Another option would involve updating copyright laws, but that would require Congress to actually do something, which as we all know is pretty much a non-starter. Just another example of all the disruption that's been predicted now occurring in real time.]

Verdict: Yes, You Should Go See Project Hail Mary As Soon As Possible

First, in the plainest language, before we get to anything else, Project Hail Mary is a fantastic film. It does right by its source material, and it also easily stands on its own for folks who haven’t read the book. It comes out on March 20, and if you’re a regular Ars Technica reader, you will almost certainly enjoy the crap out of it. Go see it as soon as you can, and see it in a theater where the big visuals will have the most impact.

Next, a word about what “spoiler-free” means here: In this short review, I’ll talk about stuff that happens in the movie’s many, many trailers. If you’re an ultra-purist who is both interested in this film and who has also somehow avoided reading the book and also seeing any of the trailers, bail out now.

Otherwise, read on!

It’s a buddy movie

PHM is, first and foremost, a movie about a schoolteacher who becomes friends with an alien and the joy of that relationship. And because the film is based on an Andy Weir novel, there’s also some problem-solving with science.

What problems? A pretty major one dominates: As we learned back in the first trailer, the Earth’s sun is mysteriously dying, and no one knows why. An assay of our nearby stellar neighbors reveals that those stars all appear to be dying as well—all except for one, Tau Ceti, located just under a dozen light-years away. Why is Tau Ceti seemingly being spared by whatever force is causing the other stars to dim? In what quickly becomes a common refrain, no one knows.

The solution, as presented to us by a mysterious government representative named Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller), is to build an interstellar craft, accelerate it to near the speed of light, and visit Tau Ceti to find out what’s going on. It’s a long-shot mission—a “Hail Mary,” as she puts it.

But why do they send Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling), a middle-school teacher with no immediately apparent qualifications? Why not send a crew of trained astronauts, or top scientists, or both? These questions are eventually addressed—but before they are, poor Grace finds himself stuck at Tau Ceti and plunging headlong into something no one was prepared for: first contact.

Hey, yo, Rocky

Since the trailers go there, we can go there: Grace quickly discovers he’s not Tau Ceti’s only visitor. Another ship, much larger and obviously alien, is already present—seemingly for the same reason. And aboard that ship is Rocky, an extraterrestrial whose design breaks hard from traditional Trek-style humanoids with bumpy foreheads.

Brilliantly realized almost entirely through practical puppetry, Rocky is everything one could ask for in a space-going science friend: he’s inquisitive, he’s funny, and most important of all, he’s friendly. Grace and Rocky quickly work out a shared vocabulary and get down to the business at hand of saving both species’ stars from destruction.

It’s important at this point to say that although Project Hail Mary shares a considerable amount of heritage with 2015’s The Martian—both are based on novels by Andy Weir, both celebrate engineering as a discipline, and both were adapted for the screen by Drew Goddard—this film is very much not The Martian II, in tone or content. This is, above all else, a buddy movie.

It’s also a relatively long buddy movie, coming in at two hours and 46 minutes—but it doesn’t feel nearly that long. The film has a lot of establishing work to do, and it gets that work out of the way quickly; we run into Rocky about 40 minutes in, and from that point on, the Grace and Rocky show is in full effect.

by Lee Hutchinson, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: Amazon MGM Studios

[ed. Oh man, can't wait. I may have to read the book again just to get ready.]

The Real Story Behind ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’

A Korean War veteran is floundering. His career is an endless bumpy road, and includes work as a teacher, a technical writer for Honeywell, and even a Nevada casino employee. But our ambitious vet also studies philosophy at the Banaras Hindu University in India—and starts to develop his own philosophy of life, an unconventional merging of Eastern and Western currents.

Then comes a mental breakdown that sends him to a psychiatric hospital. Here he undergoes repeated electroshock therapy. He finally emerges a changed person.

But maybe he changed too much—he can hardly remember the person he once was. It’s almost as if his life got cleaved in two at this juncture. His wife leaves him. He holds on to his relationship with his son—but that ends tragically with the son’s murder in San Francisco at age 22.

While working for Honeywell, our aspiring philosopher stays awake from 2 AM to 6 AM in a small apartment above a shoe store in Minneapolis. Here he writes a novel destined to become one of the defining books of the era. But he has to pitch it to 121 editors before he gets a contract and a $3,000 advance.

The editor, J.D. Landis, admitted that he only accepted the novel because this “book forced him to decide what he was in publishing for.” But the author, he insisted, shouldn’t expect to make more than his tiny advance. Then Landis added: “Money isn’t the point with a book like this.”

That’s the story of how Robert Pirsig published of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. But the editor was wrong. The book sold 5 million copies, and for a spell in the 1970s you would see copies everywhere, even in the hands of people who didn’t read novels.

And that was just the start. Robert Redford tried to buy movie rights, but the author said no. Highbrow literary critic George Steiner compared Pirsig to Dostoevsky—which is especially meaningful when you know that Steiner wrote a book on Dostoevsky. The Smithsonian acquired the titular motorcycle for its permanent collection.

The book is simple enough to describe. It tells the story of a 17-day motorcycle trip from Minnesota to California. Along the way, the narrator tries to figure out many things—but especially his own past before his life split in two.

At one point in the novel, Pirsig writes:

“Before the electrodes were attached to his head he’d lost everything tangible: money, property, children; even his rights as a citizen had been taken away from him by order of the court….I will never know all that was in his head at that time, nor will anyone else. What’s left now is just fragments: debris, scattered notes, which can be pieced together but which leave huge areas unexplained.”

The electroshock treatment was done without Pirsig’s consent. That would be illegal nowadays.

In the aftermath, Pirsig felt so disconnected from his past that he included his pre-treatment self as a separate character in the novel. He calls that abandoned part of himself Phaedrus, a name drawn from Plato’s dialogues.

So you can read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance as a dialogue between a man and his past self. Or you can treat it as a travel story or as a philosophical discussion (what Pirsig describes as a chautauqua, a name drawn from a populist adult education movement of the late 1800s). And, yes, it’s also a guide to motorcycle maintenance.

The text actually moves back and forth between all of these. Few novels pay less attention to the rules of fiction than Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. For that reason, it just might be the strangest travel book ever written—because most of the journey happens inside the narrator’s head.

But maybe that’s part of the story too. Pirsig worked as a college writing teacher, and was frustrated by the rules he was expected to impart to his students. He felt that good writing was indefinable. It violated accepted rules, and created its own. The whole process was mysterious.

Solving that mystery of Quality—also called goodness, excellence, or worth—is the main theme of the novel. Indeed, it’s the overarching theme of Pirsig’s entire life’s work. He wrote one more novel after Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the seldom read Lila, and it continues the discussion on quality. And the same topic takes center stage in the posthumous collection of writings published under the title On Quality: An Inquiry into Excellence. [...]

But let’s be honest: Pirsig was a better mystic than philosopher, and the deeper Pirsig digs into his personal notion of Quality, the more interesting—and metaphysical—his thinking becomes. Quality, he insists, can never be defined. He eventually embraces it as a kind of Tao, a force underlying all our experiences—hence resisting empirical analysis. He is now leaving philosophy behind, and perhaps for the better.

So he eventually aligns himself with a profound idea drawn from the ancient Greeks—but not the philosophers. Instead he goes back to the Homeric mythos, five hundred years older than rational philosophy, and discoveres the source of his Quality in the Greek concept of aretḗ, or excellence (sometimes translated as virtue). Aretḗ, Pirsig believes, is more powerful than Aristotelian logic, and closer in spirit to the Hindu dharma.

He quotes a passage from classicist H.D.F. Kitto, which I want to share in its entirety—not only because it is essential to Pirsig’s worldview, but because it’s invaluable to us today. Many are struggling to understand a place for humans in a world of AI and super-smart machines. From a purely rational perspective, the robots can beat us in terms of data generation and analysis. But in a world of aretḗ (or Quality), they fall far short.

This is where Pirsig earns my admiration and loyalty. Some things really are more powerful than logic.

Back in 1952 Kitto anticipated Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance—and provided the missing piece to Pirsig’s worldview—when he wrote:

[If aretḗ refers to a person] it will connote excellence in the ways in which a man can be excellent—morally, intellectually, physically, practically. Thus the hero of the Odyssey is a great fighter, a wily schemer, a ready speaker, a man of stout heart and broad wisdom who knows that he must endure without too much complaining what the gods send; and he can both build and sail a boat, drive a furrow as straight as anyone, beat a young braggart at throwing the discus, challenge the Phaeacian youth at boxing, wrestling or running; flay, skin, cut up and cook an ox, and be moved to tears by a song. He is in fact an excellent all-rounder; he has surpassing arête.

Aretḗ implies a respect for the wholeness or oneness of life, and a consequent dislike of specialization. It implies a contempt for efficiency...or rather a much higher idea of efficiency, an efficiency which exists not in one department of life but in life itself.

We are now at the heart of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. If you read Kitto, you are already prepared for Pirsig—maybe you can even skip the novel. But, much better, you have a game plan for living a human life in the face of encroaching machines.

Pirsig understood this more than fifty years ago. He saw that we made a Faustian bargain when we put rationality ahead of the Good, and data ahead of human excellence. He grasped that science should be subservient to human needs, not the other way around. And the price we’re paying now is much higher than it was back then.

In an extraordinary passage, the narrator of Pirsig’s novel picks up a copy the Tao Te Ching, and recites it aloud—but substituting the word Quality for Tao. This is strange and unprecedented, but hits at the heart of this mystic work from the fourth century BC:

The quality that can be defined is not the Absolute Quality….
The names that can be given it are not Absolute names.
It is the origin of heaven and earth.
When named it is the mother of all things….

He declares: “Quality is the Buddha. Quality is scientific reality. Quality is the goal of Art.”

I worked with many quality control engineers in the business world and often walked with them on the factory floor. I’m sure they would be shocked by Pirsig’s statement that “Quality is the Buddha.” But that’s exactly the kind of journey we’re on in this book.

by Ted Gioia, The Honest Broker |  Read more:

Image: Heritage Preservation Department - MNHS; uncredited book cover