Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival.
A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Lastly, the original piece, “Liking What You See: A Documentary,” considers, from numerous viewpoints, the freedom to act and react, to like or dislike, other people based on judgments more complex than those deriving solely from appearance.Ĭhiang writes seldom, but his almost unfathomably wonderful stories tick away with the precision of a Swiss watch-and explode in your awareness with shocking, devastating force.Īre we not men? We are-well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).Ī zombie apocalypse is one thing.
And “Hell Is the Absence of God,” the crown jewel of a spectacular assemblage, terrifyingly probes the nature of belief and faith in a world where God, angels, heaven, and hell are all verifiably real and actual.
The short-short “The Evolution of Human Science” first appeared in the prestigious science journal Nature, and ponders what science might become following the advent of incomprehensibly intelligent metahumans. “Seventy-Two Letters,” a sort of compressed novel, combines kabbalistic magic and certain 19th-century scientific doctrines into an entire alternative biology. The narrator of “Story of Your Life” deciphers an alien orthography, thereby acquiring the aliens' nonlinear view of time: she remembers the future as well as the past. In “Division by Zero,” life loses all meaning for a mathematician who discovers a proof that mathematics itself is meaningless. Assuming that “The Tower of Babylon” rose high enough to touch the vault of heaven-what if the builders then attempted to break through, to see what was on the other side? Humans develop godlike intelligence in “Understand,” but, Chiang demonstrates, it isn't just intelligence that makes us human. Of the eight pieces here, seven (1990–2001) are more or less famous the other is original to this volume.
First collection for multiple award-winner Chiang.
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