Blog | Eric Hendel

The most striking quality of the stories appearing in Ted Chiang's anthology Arrival (which was originally published in 2002 under the title Stories of Your Life and Others ) is the author's ability to use fiction as a rhetorical device. By saying this I don't mean that Chiang's work is comprised only of messages which he seeks to impart upon his audience, or even that his stories explicitly take the form of moral/ethical parables aimed at demonstrating some kind of lesson to his readers. Rather, it's more that throughout this collection, Chiang produces fiction which often strives to explore the tension that exists between two or more subtly contradictory ideas, examining various perspectives on his subjects through the medium of narrative. Via stories as diverse as a very contemporary-minded retelling of a biblical parable, an alien first-contact story that touches on themes of predestination and free will, and a fictional documentary about the ethics of limiti...

Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor (Review)

(Cover Artist: Dan Funderburgh ) Occasionally, I'll read a book whose ending completely alters the nature of the story that preceded it, and which as a result requires that I fundamentally rethink my opinion of how that story functions. While this is almost always a good thing (since it means that I have a ton to think about when it comes to discussing that novel), it also makes writing a review of that book difficult. My ultimate opinion of the novel revolves, in the end, around events that only become apparent at the book's conclusion, and so I can't really discuss that dimension of the story without destroying the story's effect for future readers. Basically, I can't talk about the book without talking about its ending, but I can't talk about the ending without spoiling what I feel is the entire point of the book. Obviously, Nnedi Okorafor's 2025 novel Death of the Author is this sort of work. Much of Death of the Author is divided between two paral...

Vagabonds by Hao Jingfang (Review)

(Cover Designer: Jonathan Brush ) There's a deliberately unsettling quality to Hao Jingfang's 2016 novel Vagabonds, and I think this derives in part from how the story balances itself between two contrasting genres of fiction. First translated into English by Ken Liu in 2020, Vagabonds follows a woman named Luoying Sloan who voyages to Earth from a far-future martian colony several generations after a deadly interplanetary war. Hoping to bridge the gap between two politically and socially isolated societies, Luoying spends five years studying alongside the "terrans" of Earth, eventually learning to navigate the complicated and politically fraught issues that divide both planets. Normally this would imply that Vagabonds was the story of a protagonist seeking to build unity between two isolated societies, and yet Hao's novel (I should say here that the English edition prints the author's surname first) is not actually the story of Luoy...

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