It arrived a few weeks ago, and I feel I made the right choice. I mulled over which edition to buy for a little while, but eventually my desire to own a piece of true Chiang memorabilia – and the weak dollar – conspired to make me order the limited edition. Knowing exactly what it had in its hands, Subterranean sold two versions of the novel one was a cloth-bound hardback trade edition, which is now sold out, and the other was a limited edition edition of 200 copies, at $45. At sixty pages, I would disagree with that classification, but all the same, it was a new story. Published by Subterranean Press, a specialist in limited-run books, the collection is Ted’s first ‘novel’. This year, a new collection finally emerged, called The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate. This was a sad state of affairs for his fans, who were left hanging following his 2001 short story ‘Hell is the Absence of God’, which won pretty much every award available. Until this year, Ted had published only had one collection, Stories of Your Life and Others. Some of the stories have more of a scientific spin than others, and it probably eases the cognitive dissonance of journalists to call him a sci-fi writer, but if that were the case, it would only be so much as Margaret Atwood or Cormac McCarthy could be described as the same in other words, they’ve all written sci-fi, but not as most people would know it. Of course, this has nothing to do with the quality of his writing, which contains such beautifully-wrought ideas and language that they remind me of Borges and Murakami put together. I’m not entirely sure what Ted does with his time, since over the course of seventeen years, he’s written fewer than a dozen short stories, the sum of which would easily fit into a typical novel. One of my favourite authors is Ted Chiang.
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