（外文电子版资料）Ted Chiang - Tower of Babylon.pdf

Ted Chiang, I am told, is a modest and self-effacing young man, but this trait evidently does not incline him toward modest and self-effacing subjects. The last story of his I read, "Division by Zero," roundly announces the death of what we're accustomed to calling mathematics. In the Nebula-winning novelette you're about to experience, some postdiluvian miners break into heaven's anteroom. What will Chiang do for an encore? A transcript of God's first press conference, complete with equations? Born and raised in Port Jefferson, New York, Chiang holds a degree in computer science from Brown University. In 1989 he attended the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop, a program that has incubated and hatched more of today's functioning SFWA members than all its rivals combined. Since gracing the pages of Omni with "Tower of Babylon," Chiang has enjoyed sales to Asimov's and Full Spectrum 3 (source of "Division by Zero"). "The inspiration for this story came during a conversation with a friend," Chiang tells us, "when he mentioned the version of the Tower of Babel myth he'd been taught in Hebrew school. I knew only the Old Testament account, and it had never made a big impression on me. But in the full-length version, the tower is so tall that it takes a year to climb; when a man falls to his death, no one mourns, but when a brick is dropped, the workers at the top weep because it will take a year to replace it. "I suppose the original storyteller was questioning the morality of the project. For me, however, the tale conjured up images of a fantastic city in the sky, reminiscent of Magritte's Castle in the Pyrenees. I was astonished at the audacity, the chutzpah of the person who had imagined such a thing. "Readers have commented on the science-fictional way this story extrapolates from a primitive world view. I must admit I didn't notice that aspect of the story while writing it. (Perhaps because I was acutely aware of how many scientific laws I