Gwern Branwen

And I thought to myself, if I could be like any writer, any writer at all, I would not mind being Borges.

Yeah, I think when I was a kid, I did not understand that essay.

But I think I understand it now.

Ted Chiang's Story of Your Life comes to mind.

I completely blew understanding it the first time that I read it.

I had to get a lot more context where I could actually go back and understand what his point was.

Jean Wolfe's Suzanne Delage story was also a complete mystery to me.

It took like 14 years to actually understand it.

But I'm very proud of that one specifically.

That was a very recent one.

Yeah, so Jean Wolfe's Suzanne Delage is a very, very short story about this guy remembering not meeting a woman in his local town and thinking, oh, that's kind of strange.

That's the whole story.

Nobody has any idea what it means, even though we're told that it means something.

And Gene Wolfe, the author, is a genius writer, but nobody could figure it out for like 40 years.

Last year, I figured it out.

It turns out it's actually a subtle retelling of Dracula, where Dracula invades the town and steals the woman from him.

He's been brainwashed by Dracula in a very Bram Stoker way to forget it all.

And every single part of the story is told by what's not said in the narrator's recollection.

It's incredible.

It's the only story I know which is so convincingly written by what's not in it.