★★★☆☆ We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read, by Caroline M. Yoachim
** Ware spoilers ** Massively parallel insects
We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read
Caroline M. Yoachim
** Ware spoilers ** Massively parallel insects
Caroline M. Yoachim's We Will Teach You How to Read, which you can find at Lightspeed magazine. is a finalist for the 2025 Best Short Story Hugo. It's not quite a story in the classical beginning-middle-end sense. In fact, it could have been proposed in the poetry, or even graphic art category. What it definitely is, though, is a lot of effort to read. And when I got to the end, I felt cheated. For that much work, I wanted more than I got.
It purports to be a missive from a species that thinks and communicates very differently from the way we do. Spoiler ahead: I'm going to explain them to you.
I think of them as what you'd get if Nvidia manufactured insects. Nvidia is (as of this writing, 11-June-2025) the second most valuable company in the world by market capitalization. On some days, depending on stock market fluctuations, it is number one. They make video accelerators. A single accelerator board contains dozens or hundreds or thousands of processors that all run in parallel. They are called video accelerators or graphic processing units (GPUs) because they were originally designed to speed up the calculations needed to produce video on the screens of gamers. Eventually people realized that the vast majority of electronic computing power on the planet was in GPUs, and they became central to the training of artificial intelligence models. It is for that reason that on some days Nvidia is the world's most valuable company.
Each of the organisms that purportedly wrote We Will Teach You How to Read has a brain (using the word loosely) that operates like a GPU, thinking in hundreds of parallel streams.
At the same time they have a three-stage life cycle, in which each stage dissolves to serve as the basis for the next stage. Each one can think 3n thoughts in a lifetime, where n is the number it can think in parallel during each stage. So the number of thoughts that can be thought in sequence is only three.
The life-cycle reminded me of insects. Metamorphic insects have a three-stage life cycle: larva, pupa, and adult. (Really, it's four: egg, larva, pupa, adult, but close enough -- the larva is really continuous with the egg.) The larva dissolves away completely, except for the nervous system, to make the pupa, which then builds a new organism -- the adult -- from the juice.
So there you have it. That explanation is, for me at least, much clearer than We Will Teach You How to Read .
"You're missing the whole point!" I hear you shout. No, I'm really not. I got the point. The point is to attempt to convey the 3n way that the notional authors think and communicate in such a way as to make a human sort of feel it. Yes, I did that. I got it.
It's an exercise in deliberate obscurity. That's a thing I never enjoy.