On a side note: has anyone read much by the author, Ted Chiang? This IRL book club I'm in has been working through his stories in Exhalation, this being the first of them. Gotta say, I'm getting a bit annoyed by his writing. He's the kind of author that likes to explore cool ideas and concepts, while characters, dialogue, and plot are all inconvenient necessities for his writing which should be avoided when possible. In the other thread ooli mentioned the appeal of the Arabian flair; I was a bit more skeptical of it, really. It's one of those things that feels a bit hokey if you're not taken with it. By now I'm convinced that it was only used to cover up the staleness that he outputs when writing stories. Overall, I did actually like "The Merchant..." though.