Nipping over to Amazon I discover that the Kindle edition, once only $4.99, is … gone, without a trace. Fast-forward to the first week of class, when an email arrives from a student informing me that the only copies of Lifecycle he can find are hundreds and hundreds of dollars on eBay. But there was a modestly priced Kindle edition available, and that’s what I listed on my syllabus. The four hundred original copies had become collector’s items. One small problem: published in a limited edition by Subterranean Press in 2010, the book was already out of print. The book was a good fit for a course on the human and the nonhuman, especially in the semester when Arrival, a film based on another Chiang story, was due to hit theaters. Eventually, invoking a Citizens United–like legal precedent, individual digients incorporate themselves to claim the legal status of people. The title notwithstanding (Chiang earns his living as a technical writer) the book is a science fiction novella set in a near future when artificial digital life forms-digients-are cultivated and commodified as human companions. Last summer I decided to assign Ted Chiang’s The Lifecycle of Software Objects in the graduate course I was getting ready to teach.
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