The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate (Hardcover)

~ Ted Chiang (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This curious time-travel novella from Hugo-winner Chiang (Stories of Your Life and Others) is a gracefully told lesson about accepting fate—or, as better suits this medieval Arabian setting, the will of Allah. A Baghdad merchant discovers an alchemical device that can send a traveler back in time 20 years. Despite the alchemist's warning that "what is made cannot be unmade," and three illustrative tales about others' attempts to alter the past, the merchant is determined to return to an earlier time to save his long-dead wife. Half lyrical Arabian Nights legend and half old school cautionary SF tale, this skillfully written story and its theme of insurmountable fate may comfort as many readers as it makes uncomfortable. (July)
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From Booklist

In the manner of the Arabian Nights, Chiang wraps stories within a story, and all of them interrelate to argue that "the past and the future are the same." Not that past and future are identical, but that they stay the same and cannot be altered, even if one could journey back to the former or forward to the latter to change it. In medieval Baghdad, a merchant obtains an audience with the caliph to apprise him of a merchant-alchemist who has created doors between past and future. He relays the tales the door maker told him about a rope maker and a weaver who each ventured through a 20-year-spanning door more than once, and then the tale of the well-to-do man's wife who did the same—all before he imparts his own time-hopping adventure. Eventually, interconnections between the four stories surface, and they boggle the mind, more so, perhaps, than any of the tales of similar effect in Chiang's dazzling Stories of Your Life and Others (2002). Could fantasy be more intelligently exquisite and, ultimately and surprisingly, morally sound than this? Olson, Ray
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 62 pages
• Publisher: Subterranean Press; First Edition edition (July 23, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1596061006
• ISBN-13: 978-1596061002
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,377,085 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Attractive small-presss chapbook, great story, September 6, 2007

By	J. P. Kelley (The Pacific Northwest, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Time travel is not a subject to be undertaken lightly. It has been handled badly by many, but Chiang is more than up to the task. The paradoxes and moral dilemmas involved in this kind of story are explored with sensitivity and depth, and Chiang's characteristic rigor about the science and logic of his stories is in evidence all the way through. This in fact is what sets Chiang's writing apart -- depth of character combined with carefully considered and constructed hard science.

As a book, I think it's quite attractive. Those familiar with book art will recognize and appreciate the quality of the paper and the binding; check out the embossed sun motif on the front cover (under the dust jacket). And the illustrations are nothing short of stunning. Largely atmospheric -- a good thing, in my mind -- they nevertheless manage on occasion to refer to specific details in a subtle way that opens up the story for me and reverberates with it in pleasant and unexpected ways.

It's regrettable that some have mistaken this book for more than it is -- a single, very good story in a limited print run book from a small press interested in books as objects of art.

Finally, I am somewhat mystified by those who criticize Chiang for his output. Given how carefully crafted and well thought out his work is, I am quite content to accept the gift of his writing in a quantity and at a pace that works for him. As if I had any other choice!

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Arabian Nights Meets Time Travel, April 19, 2008

By	CV Rick (Minneapolis, MN, USA) - See all my reviews

Ted Chiang has done it again. His novelette, The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate is another spark of brilliance from a writer whose name is becoming synonymous with "year's best."

This story is time travel meets Arabian Nights. It's a story with a moral imperative about changing the past or affecting the future. The narrator, Fuwaad ibn Abbas, tells the Caliph of Baghdad the story of his own involvement with the Alchemist's Gate by telling him the stories of other people who have gone through that same gate. Each story contributes to the overall narrative, each adds to the beautiful Arabian scenery, from Baghdad to Cairo, and each reveals more capabilities of the gate itself.

In my experience with Chiang's writing, he explores the idea of fatalism from two perspectives: Can one change his fate? and Can one accept his fate? Some of the nested story's protaganists can accept, some cannot, yet the narrator realizes the most important thing about time travel is knowledge not deed. It is that essential truth that is the theme of the story.

I can't recommend it enough.

- CV Rick, April 2008

9 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars this is hardly even a novella, just 60 small pages, July 25, 2007

By	Silea (New York, NY, USA) - See all my reviews (VINE VOICE)

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The story was good, probably worth 4 stars on its own. Not suspenseful, not groundbreaking, but certainly an interesting read.

My main gripe is that i paid a smidge over $13, discounted from a $20 sticker price, for a story that took me about 35 minutes to read. There's nothing in the product description that indicates the tiny size of this book, and i even suspect the product dimensions of being misleading when they suggest the book is 0.7 inches thick. By my visual inspection it seems less than half an inch, including the hardcover.

There seems to be a plague lately of publishing hardcover novellas and charging nearly novel prices for them, and it's frustrating. I'm a staunch advocate of people buying a book instead of just reading it over coffee at the bookstore, but with instances like this, buying it just doesn't make sense for most people.