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  1. Lightspeed Magazine8/7/1214 min
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    Lightspeed Magazine
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    • deephdave
      Top reader of all timeScout
      3 years ago

      Wonderful short story by Ken Liu about fictional alien species' unique styles of reading and writing.

      The Tull-Toks claim that everything in the universe can be read. Each star is a living text, where the massive convection currents of superheated gas tell an epic drama, with the starspots serving as punctuation, the coronal loops extended figures of speech, and the flares emphatic passages that ring true in the deep silence of cold space. Each planet contains a poem, written out in the bleak, jagged, staccato rhythm of bare rocky cores or the lyrical, lingering, rich rhymes—both masculine and feminine—of swirling gas giants. And then there are the planets with life, constructed like intricate jeweled clockwork, containing a multitude of self-referential literary devices that echo and re-echo without end.

      1. Update (8/12/2021):

        PS: You can read all the short stories by Ken Liu here Ken Liu - Lightspeed Magazine