“‘Invented’ goes to ‘people,’ of course, because people invent things. It just took too long to explain in her stammering speech. She stuck to the strings themselves, not the overall design, which troubled her because the overall design was just as important. “Then for ‘plastic,’” Miri said, a little desperately, “the first string leads to ‘invented.’ It has to, you see, because ‘toy’ led to ‘pretend.’” She tried to think of a way to explain that the fact that the little strings were one place off from each other was part of the whole design, echoed in the inversion she was going to make of the same words between substrings two and three, but that was too hard to explain. “Then a shooting star is really a meteor, and you have to make the string go real now because before you made it pretend, so the end of the first string, four little strings down, is ‘meteor.’” To make the pattern work.” So many words was hard work Miri wished she didn’t have to explain so hard.

A toy is for ‘pretend,’ and one thing we pretend is that a shooting star is a real star, so you can put ‘shooting star’ next in the first string. See, a ‘doll’ is a ‘toy’-the first string goes from doll to toy. In this excerpt, the character Miri is trying to explain her thought process to her tutor: Here's the first introduction of thought strings, seemingly intended to underscore that the 'Supers' are operating on a more 'galaxy brain' level, presumably with a larger mental stage than the 7 ± 2 entities that baseline humans can represent. While that makes sense in context, it does make it particularly hard to read.) Introduction of Strings (Note: in the excerpts below, I've edited the text to remove a stylistic stammer that Kress gives the 'Supers' to emphasize their foreignness to more traditional humans, and their difficulty using linear speech. To me, this is an interesting lens when considering how to represent connected ideas in Tools for Thought. Kress introduces a way of thinking of networks of ideas as thought strings, and the characters eventually develop software to render these into multidimensional string globes and create mappings between different people's thought networks to convey ideas more deeply than through the limitations of linear language. These sections discuss the struggles of a group of genetically engineered superhumans to try to organize their thoughts and communicate efficiently with each other.

(The parts in question are in Books 3 and 4 of the novel, rather than in the original novella.) Trellick Thought Strings in 'Beggars in Spain'įor future reference, here are some excerpts from Nancy Kress's novel Beggars in Spain.

Beggars in spain