Gwern Branwen

The surface story is just about a bunch of weird aliens who come to Earth.

They have this weird language, which didn't have a sense of time.

The narrator learned to see the future, and then the aliens left.

The first time I read it, it struck me as a kind of stupid ESP story about seeing the future.

Very stupid, boring, kind of standard conventionalism, verbose, and like dragging in much kind of like irrelevant physics.

Only a while after I first read it and was thinking about it did I understand that it was not about time travel or being able to see the future.

It's instead about a totally alien kind of mind that's equally valid in its own way in which you see everything as part of an already determined story heading to a predestined end.

This turned out to be mathematically equivalent and equally powerful as our conventional view of the world.

Events marching one by one to an unknown and changing future.

That was the case where Chang was just writing at too high a level for me to understand.

I pattern matched it to some much more common kind of stupid story.

I think you could definitely spend the rest of your life reading fiction and not benefit whatsoever from it, other than having memorized a lot of trivia about things that people made up.

I tend to be pretty cynical about the benefits of fiction.

Most fiction is not written to make you better in any way.

It's written just to entertain you or exist and to fill up time.

Yeah, but it's extremely little sci-fi in the grand scheme of things, right?

Easily 99% of the sci-fi I read was just completely useless to me.

I could have easily cut it down to 20 novels or short stories, which actually were good enough and insightful enough to actually change my view.

I mean, one volume, for instance, of Blindsight by Peter Watts is worth all 100 Xanth novels or all 500 expanded universe novels of Star Wars.

I would say that the characteristic they have is that they all take non-human intelligence seriously.