that implore her to be as tenacious in her search
I finished Speaking Tongues yesterday at lunch. Very good stuff.
I’ve always enjoyed McDonald’s work, and this collection of short fiction is no exception. His writing is very literate and quite philosophical, but is always firmly rooted in science fiction tropes and does, I think, a very good job treading the fine line between those two. It’s hard to summarize all of the stories, but they all shared a common theme, that of asking what it means to be a human, or more accurately what it means to be a person.
For example, one story (the eponymous story) just consists of interviews with various people — an artificially intelligent construct, a religious woman, a high-ranking official in some non-specific totalitarian Orwellian state, and a schizophrenic man. They all, in their own way, discuss the manner in which what a person experiences affects the way that person acts. The AI, whom we meet first, discusses this in the most frank terms, explaining that he feels that he doesn’t think because, “All I know, ultimately, is what I’m told.”. The religious woman discusses how she was recently feeling bad because she wasn’t properly submitting to the will of her husband, but she’s feeling better now because the preacher “ministered” to her, and now she fully understands that she has to obey completely God and her husband. The Orwellian leader exhorts his citizens to practice only “right thoughts” and never to give in to the temptation of “wrong thinking”, and the schizophrenic just babbles, but with enough information thrown in to give you a good idea of why he might be the way he is. It loses something in the retelling, but it’s a very thought-provoking piece, and I think pretty representative of the rest of the work, if not in subject matter or structure, at least in the level in inventiveness and the kind of philosophy.
Anyways, I’m now reading the second of Elizabeth Boyer’s fantasy series, The Elves and the Otterskin.