The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate
This story concerns a Baghdad merchant. Mr. Chiang says the story was inspired in part by the work of physicist Kip Thorne. (forward in the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction)
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22recommend
33mentions
30people
2013–2026years
70% recommend30% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Exhalation is really excellent.
It's not really sci-fi but I also really enjoyed The Merchant And The Alchemist's Gate, and the one about the tower of babel, I forget the name at the moment.
- Ted Chiang's "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" does this pretty well. It's a fun read (and short).
- I read Understand by him a really long time ago. I thought it was really good. However at the time I didnt understand the motivation of one of the main characters in it and the ending felt unjustified because of that. Years ago someone posted The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate (pdf) by him on here. That one was a trip. He nailed the atmosphere and cadence of One Thousand and One Nights with a time travel story superimposed on top of it. Or it least that's how I remember it. Thought it was very Sufi in how it was told.
- The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate is SO good. I tear up every time I reread it.
If you haven't already done so, check out The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling.
- The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate is by far my favourite of all Chiang's stories. It is always great intellectual pleasure to read them, however sometimes I find his writing style a bit dry and I don't get so involved emotionally as with Philip K. Dick's stories for instance.
- If you liked that story, you should really read the full anthology, called Exhalation. Ted Chiang is a wonderful writer, and there are a lot of great stories in that book. I think my favorite was The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate.
