Stories of Your Life and Others (original 2002; edition 2003)

These are amazing, more than 4 stars, and worth propping open on my steering wheel and glancing down to grab up a thought-ful of words at a time on straighaways and gentle curves.*

As far as I can gather, Ted Chiang is an egghead scientist (technical writer?) who attended a fiction writing workshop and began belting out these incredibly well thought out short stories that have much more science than the typical science fiction. He's won enough awards that he once turned down a Hugo nomination for a story that he felt wasn't just right.

This collection holds 8 of his works. They're all gems with each facet edged razor-shart (I meant "sharp" but I'll leave what I typed, heh) to make you thinkthinkthink, not with difficulty but with wonder. Very much worth reading. At the end, Chiang offers a short explanation on what inspired each story.

"Tower of Babylon" - A different take on the old story and the shape of the world. From a structural engineering perspective, I don't think so.

"Division by Zero" - How the self can shatter when a core belief is proven false. Beautifully combined with a dissolving marriage and mismatch of empathy. Math-y.

"Understand" - Cerebral action movie! Experimental treatments lead to what sounds like more than full brain use and a pursuit of gestalt, of everything. Then he learns he's not alone.

"Story of Your Life" - It jumps between alien contact and a mother's memories about her child. The tense of the writing is odd until you realize that the linguistical (why isn't this a word? it should be and I want to use it) effort to understand the aliens' spoken and written languages is playing with the memories, casting doubt as to whether they're real or the thoughts of the linguist, the mother, as she pictures a child from beginning to death...whoa! I've garbled it terribly, but it's layered and that was one that caught me.

"The Evolution of Human Science" - Very short piece on what it might be like if advances advanced beyond normal understanding.

"Seventy-Two Letters" - Wow. I wish I'd paid better attention in history classes when we covered parthenogenesis and different early theories on reproduction. Set in Victorian times, referring to golems and steampunk-like ideas (I think?), it reminds me a little of the ending of the newer BSG series.

"Hell Is the Absence of God" - The most eloquent instructor I'd ever had who spoke about creation and God in the classroom was a thermodynamics professor. Chiang's story reminds me of him. The world in this story witnesses regular angelic visitations, which bring miracles but also great havoc and often kill more people than benefit. The rules seem arbitrary and unfair. Fascinating.

"Liking What You See: A Documentary" - Argh, another amazing one! Presented as a series of interviews on the political, ethical, and personal impacts if recognition of facial beauty could be flipped off. Also, the advertising industry is the devil.



*Uh, if I was one who would be so irresponsible to do such a thing. ( )

(I've only read the novella, Story of Your Life. Still need to find the other stories in this collection.)

Beautiful writing. Great concepts.

I wonder if it was written with pure functional programming in mind -- the descriptions of the nonlinear writing are very similar to what it's
often like to program functionally (although we still reason about functional programs linerally in the end.. mostly). ( )

Really good chewy thinky stories. ( )

The stories in Chiang’s excellent first collection put the “science” back into science fiction. Chiang is a multiple award-winner with an impressive reputation among genre devotees, but deserves a wider readership. Each story is a classic “what if,” and Chiang seems equally at home writing about miners on top of the Tower of Babylon breaking through the vault of heaven, a linguist who learns the language of a group of aliens whose worldview is subtantially different than our own and finds her relationship with time and free will fundamentally altered as a result, or an alternate Victorian England in which magic is real and golems are household appliances. In each story, the science is complex yet clearly explained, and the events of the story follow naturally from scientific principles.

“Stories of Your Life and Others” is a fine continuation of the tradition of intellectual and philosophical science fiction short stories pioneered by such luminaries as Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke. ( )

Ted Chiang is a genius ( )