This is a compendium of science fiction stories, a genre in which it is difficult to find a written format that exceeds its cinematographic projection. This is because the idea/plot together with its imaginary context/world can be easily evoked, pretty much always with greater emphasis, by movies.
However brilliant, for example, Philip K. Dick may be (and he is superlatively so), the merit of his works does not necessarily reside in his language, and for this reason it can be duplicated and amplified by the precise art of cinema itself -at least with current media-.
With that impromptu thesis I do not intend to lecture you, but as you consider this proposition, think about the story Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and its transposition, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner; even take a second to think of his short story The Minority Report and Spielberg’s Minority Report. Well, in this compendium of the new Master of Science Fiction, Ted Chiang, there is a story that counts as literature. Let’s choose one of his stories, the story The merchant and the alchemist’s door is pure joy, since the author manages to embed a story of travel in time in a past that the reader will find very dear, recognizable: it has the texture and flavour of the Tales of The One Thousand and One Night, no less. It is indeed a science fiction story that tastes of history of literature, of the passion to narrate. Sand and time. Desert and eternity. I loved it.
