Group Reading Experiment

I'm going to keep this post on top for a week while I try a reading experiment.  Scroll down to the next post if you've already read this.

WARNING:  The comments section contains SPOILERS - don't read the comments until after you've read the story.

One of the things I'm passionate about is a good story, told well. And being able to discuss great fiction is another one of my interests.  So often I read a book or story and then tell other people about it; unfortunately most people haven't read what I've read so it becomes a monologue. 

Here's a story we can read together and discuss within this comment thread, on other blogs and in the comments of the other blogs.  If we get enough people interested - reading the same story - perhaps this can become a regular segment or a recurring meme.

The story is THE MERCHANT AND THE ALCHEMIST'S GATE by Ted Chiang.  He's a really good writer and even though I told him he ought to just kill himself once at a convention, I do enjoy his stories enormously.  This one has been nominated for both the Hugo and the Nebula awards.  I'm not going to comment on it right now, I'd like to see if some of you will read it or listen to it first.

Here is a link to the audio podcast of the complete story  The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate.  (You can play it directly or right-click save it and put it on your mp3 player.)

You can also read it here for free.  The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate.

Now I'll be sending out a few emails asking for participation, instead of publicly tagging people.  If you don't get an email from me, please join in anyway - post it on your blog, or just read it and comment.  This could be fun - - like a short story club for us cool kids.

- rick, fan

Comments

[a rose is a rose]

i'm in

[jane]

Rick I meant to print the story yesterday at work but forgot (have no printer at home). When is this assignment due?

[Lyda Morehouse]

I read the story. What I've always liked about Chiang's work is his ability to envoke a particular time and place. This story reads like something out of Arabian Nights.

Anyway, I'm ready to talk about it!

Edit by Rick: Here is Lyda's post about this group reading.

[CV Rick]

I agree that it's like an Arabian Nights story - the setting, Baghdad and Cairo and the feel, like it's a more tolerant time. What struck me was that besides it being a morality tale - a theme story where you can't change the past or truly influence the predestined, was the twist at the end - the reason he's telling this story and to whom. That twist I just didn't see coming.

I loved this tale and even though it felt wandering, meandering at times, it really did keep everything moving toward a solid conclusion. I haven't read the others in the Hugo Novelette category, but this one is certainly deserving of being on the ballot.

[CV Rick]

Jane, as you can see, the discussion has begun.

[Brandon Sigrist]

I'd read this when it came out in F&SF, but had forgotten how good it was. Thanks for the inspiration to re-read.

The Riyana story shows a masterful sense of humor and counter-point. Just when his excellent string of morality tales is in danger of being too focused on the pure, Chiang adds this saucy and clever heroine. Her story is also the shortest, has the most complex use of the gate, and yet the reader gets it instantly.

Four stories for the price of one, and Chiang makes it look effortless.

[CV Rick]

effortless . . . yes. I wonder how much work he really puts into these great stories.

[kuri]

I downloaded the MP3, but as soon as it got good -- when Bashaarat started putting his arm through the small Gate -- I thought, "I can read a lot faster than this guy can talk, and I wanna know what happens!" so I turned it off and read it. I guess I just don't have the patience for audiobooks -- at least not when I have a choice.

But yeah, obviously I liked it. I especially liked two of the same things you did: the Arabian Nights tone and the morality tale aspect. The flowery language at the beginning did a lot to set the tone; I thought it was very successful.

The climax confused me, though. SPOLIERS HERE (Maybe you should put a warning at the end of your post telling people not to read the comments until after they've read the story?)

The nurse who tended Najya told older Fuwaad that she swore to deliver Najya's last words to him. If older Fuwaad hadn't been there, doesn't that mean that she would have told younger Fuwaad when he came home a week later? And wouldn't that have spared Fuwaad 20 years of suffering (but also 20 years of good works in attempted atonement)? I don't see the author addressing that -- is that a plot hole, or did he maybe address it too subtly for me to catch?

[CV Rick]

The way I took it was that Fuwaad being there was part of history - that the past and the future can't be changed by the gate, but only understood better. So he was always there to receive the message and to keep it from his younger self. His redemption didn't come until later in life after his atonement, making his act of mercy before the king.

as he said, "My journey to the past had changed nothing, but what I had learned had changed everything, and I understood that it could not have been otherwise. If our lives are tales that Allah tells, then we are the audience as well as the players, and it is by living these tales that we receive their lessons."

The magic of the gate is in understanding one's own life better by seeing it from a different perspective.

[Lyda Morehouse]

Re: The plot hole... I may have misread the story (I was reading pretty fast there at the end), but my understanding was that Fuwaad never makes it back to the Year Gate nor runs into his younger self. So the information never had a chance to return to the "now."

Anyway, I hear we have a first question: "The story I have to tell is truly a strange one, and were the entirety to be tattooed at the corner of one's eye, the marvel of its presentation would not exceed that of the events recounted, for it is a warning to those who would be warned and a lesson to those who would learn."

As an opening, does that hook work? For me it did and yet it didn't really present any of the conflict or the characters. It's a flavor line, a setting or mood . . . and yet it made me sit up and take notice.

Why is that?

-----

Well, I'm going to start with the first point of disagreement. While I was the first to admit that I liked the "Arabian Nights" tone of the piece, I'm not sure the opening worked for me. If the name Ted Chiang didn't appear as the by-line and Rick, whose taste in fiction I trust deeply, hadn't recommended it, I'm not sure I'd have read much further than the opening.

In fact, I kind of rolled my eyes and then metaphorically held my breath and waited for the cool -- which I agree with kuri started the moment we see the Seconds Gate.

[CV Rick]

I agree that the seconds gate was really cool. Why do you think Ted eschewed the story-opening conventions (tight opening, conflict set-up, all words toward the plot) in favor of his mood-setting metaphor? And how many people did he lose by doing that?

[Lyda Morehouse]

Yeah, why not start at the achemist's shop?

[CV Rick]

Well, if he did that, then we don't understand that he's talking to someone - pleading his case for the twist at the end.

[Cele]

Okay I am actually forgoing posting this on my blog, I'm just going to join in the dialogue here.

I found it a fascinating story on several levels. I've not actively read Sci-fi in years but his sense of vision and his expression quickly drew me into the story. To continue on Lyda as a hook line the opening sentence didn't work for me. I had to go back and read it several times. Before realizing I was trying to get to much out of it in meaning.

As in many stories I especially like the ending that is left open, leaving the reader to ponder the possiblities. We know from the beginning of the third story that he does indeed find his way back to the Bagdad gate because he goes back intime through the Cairo gate. But what takes place between his story telling and his way back to the gate is left for us to ponder past the end.

While offering posit that we are all predestined, showing in his story that we are all predestined, he offers a ray of hope that can only be found in how each of us handle a gift, offer up that gift, and use that gift to make or break who we are. And finally that it is the path we take to get where we are. That path makes who we are, and that it is wealth of character, and wealth of love and relationships that makes us wealthy, not a wealth of material riches.

Thanks Rick, I'm enjoying the dialogue

[Cele]

I'm sorry, I just remembered this... I did have a problem with the whole time travel paradox issue in this story. But after I suspended it, nada problem.

[kuri]

I understood that older Fuwaad being there was the reason younger Fuwaad never knew Najya's last words, and that there was no way to change that. That was one of the givens of the story -- trying to change the past made the past, which led to the present that the characters knew. "The path makes who we are," as Cele put it. I get that.

What I meant was, why didn't Chiang explicitly connect the dots of Fuwaad's ah-ha moment? Why didn't he have him say, for example, "Now I understand why..."? Did he overlook it, or would it have been too heavy-handed, or...?

[kuri]

Looking back, I think I liked the opening better because I listened to it. Reading it, it didn't grab me at all. I looked at the first paragraph a couple of times and put it off until later. It was only when I listened to it that I found it atmospheric.

[Lyda Morehouse]

It's really interesting to hear that the opening lines "hooked" better on audio than it did on paper, in text. I could see that actually. I find that poetic language is often like that for me. I like to hear poetry more than I like to read it.

[Lyda Morehouse]

Can I admit something? I didn't really *get* the "surprise" twist at the end. Honestly, I didn't need the frame at all. There were plenty of stories within stories.

[CV Rick]

The nested stories were complex, I agree. But they all worked for me, even the frame from beginning to end. The reason that one worked for me was that it wrapped up the narrator's tale and convinced me that he truly had received the information to make his life complete. If he never returned to his former time and life, he would live out his days knowing that his wife had died grateful for him and their life together.

As he says, "Would that I had the means to pay you as much as this message is worth to me, because a lifetime of thanks would still leave me in your debt."

It's this conclusion and the 'showing' that he's reconciled his own doubts and regrets behind the knowledge he gained that makes the story really come together as a morality tale.

[CV Rick]

Kuri, I think he was trying to show instead of tell that 'a-ha' moment.

[Sideon]

I'll play along, but like Cele, will post a comment here instead of my own blog.

I agree that the intro was not much a "hook" as it was an immersion into a formal and more stylistic form of narrative, which was unusual and interesting enough to keep me reading. What worked was the series of stories within stories. The "gates" were great metaphors that held time, the literal and figurative, allowing each story their segment within the greater arc of Chiang's storyline. That being said, the whole concept of time was one that I struggled with through the story, because I rarely "get" time traveling stories/movies - I find them frustrating. I admit too that I didn't have an a-ha moment - the artful and stylistic telling meant more to me than resolving the question of what if's of 20 years.

Overall, nothing grabbed me hard and shook me up and made me think "wow!" I haven't read any of the other candidates and frankly I'm not sure what awards it has or hasn't won.

Can any one story represent or showcase the genre of Science Fiction? Maybe, maybe not, but Chiang's story is a nice ride within the genre.

[a rose is a rose]

1) i read the story because rick picked it
2) i started with the audio but soon stopped and switched to the written word. i didn't care for the spoken (in this case) one bit
3) i felt the whole time i was reading it, i needed to diagram it. the time travel parts that is. i wanted to make sure everything would have worked (you know what i mean). that was kind of a bother. i can't WHOLLY blame it on the author though. it may have been a tad of my ocd - ism. i didn't diagram it mind you - but i felt the burning need.
4) #3 being said, i truly did enjoy the stories. i wanted to be by a fire and have someone in a turban tell me tales. on one hand it was annoying, on the other, i loved the weaving of time and tale.
5) i am not being immodest. i usually know the end of books, movies, shows, stories early on. i, like rick, didn't see it coming.
6) not sure if i'd classify this as science fiction. i went back up to the top and i guess YOU never said it was.
7) thank you
8) now if only someone (hint hint) would write a short story about a crazed woman stalking an internet friend with tons of tetris crafting sites

[CV Rick]

Sideon,

Fair enough about not "getting" time travel stories. Often it's hard to keep track of where a character is and now keeping track of "when" a character is adds a level of difficulty.

I haven't read the other candidates either, but perhaps this blog is a good place to do that.

Rose,

I both read the story and listened to it. Different experiences for sure, but I enjoyed them both.

You should've diagrammed it, in a knitted throw. That'd have been something.

I might not have said it was science fiction, but the convention of literature dictates that all time travel stories must be science fiction. It doesn't make complete sense, c'est la vie.

And I think that this story about "a crazed woman stalking an internet friend with tons of tetris crafting sites" is writing itself even as we speak. My saved emails are proof of such storytelling.

[Lyda Morehouse]

Time travel = SF? It's funny you should say so. Over at Wyrdsmiths' blog Eleanor Arnason counted Chaing's story as fantasy.

[CV Rick]

That's fascinating and I suppose valid, Lyda. The time travel isn't explained. Of course only dark and dreary stories are sci-fi. All uplifting light and happy fare with moral undertones is fantasy. Right?

[Janice in GA]

I listened to the story from Starship Sofa. I listened all the way through, and then after thinking about it for a bit, listened to it again, this time for nuance. Then I read it online. Yes, I liked the story. :)

The nesting stories reflect the way the gates worked, I think. I kinda blew by the opening to get to the main story/stories. But I was fascinated by the whole thing.

One thing I wondered: was the setting (Bagdad, etc.) essential to the plot? Could this kind of story have worked well set in another time/place?

[CV Rick]

Janice,

I think the setting appealed to the Arabian Nights mood of the story, but it could've been set anywhere else. I'd be interested in another version, set in Victorian England or sometime before the French Revolution, or even in the American West.

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