Unaccompanied sonata
by Orson Scott Card · first published 1992
71% recommend14% neutral14% critical
Why HN recommends it
A short story with a haunting, dark treatment of artistic creation and the cost of art. It is a brilliant piece of storytelling that stays with the reader long after the last page.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
This is a short story originally from Maps in a Mirror. Maps in a Mirror: The Short Fiction of Orson Scott Card (Tor, October 1990) Unaccompanied Sonata and Other Stories (story collection, science fiction, Dial, 1980, out of print in U.S., incorporated into Maps in a Mirror)
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There is a short story by Orson Scott Card which has that theme called 'Unaccompanied Sonata'. You can read it here: https://b-ok.cc/book/4395497/b2fb2e
on “GitHub Copilot investigation” ↗> Equally you cannot tell a creator not to create. They will, whether you like it or not. for a much darker take on this, check out orson scott card's "unaccompanied sonata"
on “Profession by Isaac Asimov (1957)” ↗Unaccompanied Sonata is a 1979 short story by Orson Scott Card that takes this to an extreme, and has haunted me since I read it in the eighties.
on “Undergraduate shows that searches within hash tables can be much faster” ↗I recommend the thought-provoking short story, "Unaccompanied Sonata" by Orson Scott Card. It's a story about music craft but it's also a brilliant example of story-telling. Music and writing will change. The markets for both certainly have changed. It seems that music…
on “To become a better writer, read as much as you can” ↗…thing that is most infuriating about OSC is that his stories imply a philosophy completely opposite those he espouses in his political writings. For example, one of my favorite short stories is OSC's Unaccompanied Sonata. The story has a message about the cruelty and ultimate impossibility of making someone deny their core self. http://janlowman.escuelacampoalegre.wikispaces.net/file/view... But then in real life,…
…but there comes a point when you have to do the writing. Indeed, some might say that reading widely simply pollutes your thoughts, so you add less and regurgitate more. (You might catch a sense of "Unaccompanied Sonata" by Orson Scott Card). So I'm setting aside my reading for a while and getting down to writing. When I come back, though, I'd love to see people's experiences in how they split their time between reading…
on “Ask HN: Splitting your time between reading, writing, and programming” ↗You have a number of problems ... There is a short story by Orson Scott Card called "Unaccompanied Sonata". You can read the wikipedia plot summary[0], but in it a composer is prohibited from listening to other music so as to ensure that his ideas are pure, original, and non-derivative. And that's well…
on “Let's create the language of the internet” ↗…does that with adultury; Pastwatch with slavery and cultural imperialism. Even when he's not that provocative, the world just tends to be nasty and not always in a very redeeming way. Kingsmeat and Unaccompanied Sonata may be the worst offenders. Asimov's stories are about reason triumphing over puzzles, and Heinlein's are about facing tough decisions with a bold face. But Card's are about characters who wrestle with…
on “Has sci-fi run out of steam?” ↗