One of my favorite authors.  And now he proves he could be writing for Harpers… a science fiction story in the style of an extended essay.  And you learn more about how to think about the technology of writing than reading Jack Goody’s impenetrable prose.  Oddly, few reviewers mention that the Tiv are a real people, written about extensively, most well known by the anthropologists Laura and Paul Bohannan.

People consult their lifelogs for a variety of reasons—everything from reliving favorite moments to tracking down the cause of allergic reactions—but only intermittently; no one wants to spend all their time formulating queries and sifting through the results. Lifelogs are the most complete photo album imaginable, but like most photo albums, they lie dormant except on special occasions. Now Whetstone aims to change all of that; they claim Remem’s algorithms can search the entire haystack by the time you’ve finished saying “needle.”

via The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling by Ted Chiang — Subterranean Press.