This story can be found in the Fall 2013 issue of Subterranean Press at http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2013/the_truth_of_fact_the_truth_of_feeling_by_ted_chiang

I like Ted Chiang. I think he has a beautiful way with prose and that his word choice often borders on magical. That said, I did not like this story.

Before I get into my very specific problems with "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling," let me cover the things I did like.

As in all Chiang works I have seen, the prose is fluid and often lyrical. This tale was easy to read, to follow, and to enjoy on that level.

Also, I very much enjoyed some of the concepts of the piece. It combined the exploration of memory and experience as both synergistic and deeply fallible with the rising trends of both personal reporting (blogs, social media, etc) and the proliferation of video recording (cell phones) in a way that was both intriguing and vaguely unsettling.

However, the story, perhaps deliberately given the subject matter, felt very much like reading someone's diary. There was very little dramatization or character interaction. For me this made it very hard to care on an emotional level about anything happening in the narrative because I inherently removed from the emotional core of it.

In fact, I was removed on multiple levels. The structure was that the narrator (who proves to be deeply unreliable) is talking in this blog-like format about a story he is writing about a new technology. This is doubly-distancing as the format is not only inherently expository, but the narrator himself is removed from his own emotions as well.

On a meta level, this kind of writing exercise is fascinating. The format plays into the concept and the first-person telling by the narrator reveals as much in what is left out by what is included. Intellectually, it is clever and interesting.

But, as a story in its own right, it fell flat. While the ideas in the structure are smart, they do not make for a satisfying reading experience. Instead, at least for me, the characters came across as two-dimensional and the situations flat.

Yes, the concept of the technology was interesting, and the explorations of its positives and negatives well-done. But, to me the story lacked heart and tension and drama. All the things I read to find.

At the end, while I was left with a lot to think about, I felt very little.