Stories of Your Life and Others

I had read some of Mr. Chiang's short stories and liked them. This book garnered rave reviews, so I gave it a shot. I found it to be dense, hard to read, and not at all engaging. The title story is written in a way that it bounces between trying to communicate with alien beings by using completely incomprehensible mathematics, and short paragraphs about a daughter who apparently died. I have an average education concerning Math, made it through some upper mathematics, yet found this to be almost pedantic. It has so much potential: either write about your deceased daughter, or write about the breakthrough communications with this alien race...but not both. Sorry - none of the stories grabbed me.

I gave up a decade ago on trying to keep up with the science fiction magazines, so I only recently became aware of Ted Chiang's wide range of ideas and considerable proficiency at communicating them. There are eight stories in this anthology; all of them are at least good and several are excellent. Perhaps the best is the title piece, "Story of Your Life," which is also the only one I had previously read. It's about simultaneity vs. sequentiality and free will vs. predestination, with a strong taste of the sort of notions regarding time that Vonnegut originally made use of in _Slaughterhouse Five_. "Tower of Babylon" is sort of Babylonian science fiction, about the building of a mud-brick tower that takes four months to ascend and which reaches all the way to the vaults of heaven. An intriguing yarn, though the ending is a little weak. "Understand" is an interesting kind of riff on Flowers for Algernon, but with the implications very much updated. "Division by Zero" is about the effect on a woman mathematician who discovers (and proves) that the basic principals of math are quite arbitrary and inconsistent. While it's a good psychological portrait, and also vividly presents some (to me) novel ideas, the math and the character development really have nothing to do with each other. "Seventy-Two Letters" is set in an alternate Victorian London in which nomenclature, the act of bestowing names on things, has become an experimental science. There's a certain Bruce Sterling flavor here, but it's really not at all derivative. "The Evolution of Human Science" is a short-short that originally appeared in NATURE. I'm not sure I got the point of it, frankly, though it has a rather neat twisty ending. "Hell Is the Absence of God" is another terrific tale of an alternate world in which the souls of the deceased can be seen ascending or descending, Hell is often visible just below street level, and miracles are a regular news item. But a visitation by an angel (tracked by CB) is just as likely to kill an innocent bystander with an exploding window as to restore sight to the blind. Moreover, the whole God and salvation thing is entirely happenstantial, arbitrary, and without justice of any kind; a convicted child-killer who sees the Light goes to Heaven after his execution, while the victim of two previous miracles -- the first crippling, the second restorative -- receives a wasted third miracle she doesn't want or need. This is a quietly angry story and, as a thoroughgoing secularist who is frequently ... off by smug santimony, I really enjoyed it. "Liking What You See: A Documentary" is a very thoughtful and insightful examination of the misuse of beauty, of the effects of "lookism," and of the ruthlessness of media advertising. Very nicely done. In all, I have to say that while Chiang doesn't always get it quite right, he's certainly well above the average. I'm definitely going to have to keep up with his future work.

This is some of the best SF being written today. The stories are uniformly good, and some of them are spectacular. Every one of them has an idea at its core, and the ideas will remain with you after you finish reading. That's one of the things that SF is supposed to do (but usually doesn't).I'd compare this book to Greg Egan's _Axiomatic_, another collection of fascinating idea-driven work. Chiang's vision is not as dark as Egan's, and he's not nearly as fixated on the idea of posthumanity, but his breadth is if anything greater. These stories range in type from the classical-SF ("Liking What You See") to charcter pieces ("Stories of Your Life") to alternative but utterly convincing societies ("72 Letters"). No, there are no space battles, no massive technical infodumps, and not a great deal of action here. Don't worry; you probably won't miss it.

Ted Chiang has an innate gift; he has the ability to write wonderfully lyrical stories about real people in situations generally caused or effected by mathematics and language. And that, really, is the theme in all of his work. For the title story, he combines the two subjects to make math and language inextricably linked, meant for each other as if they had been created that way. Mathematics as language also appears in other stories, such as "Understand," about an ordinary man suddenly gaining abnormal powers through a complicated medical procedure. (Not a very good description, granted; but I recommend you read it for yourself. After all, descriptions never really do a written work justice.)Among the standouts here include the beautiful "Division by Zero," a story about a woman who struggles with a relationship that is falling apart, partly because of her own studies--where she has just discovered that all mathematics, no matter how complicated or revolutionary, is obsolete, meaningless; the wonderfully provocative "Story of Your Life" about a woman's encounter with an alien language which forever destroys her perception of time; and "Tower of Babylon," a story that is filled with the "Sense of Wonder" that so many SF fans are now craving--I could feel the singular enormity, the mass of stone and wood and work, and I could feel a distinct sensation of vertigo as the miners climbed the tower to the vault of heaven.All in all, a wonderful collection, certainly worthy of a spot on your SF shelf.

Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life and Others collects all his fiction to date, including one new story. It is an excellent collection. I reread the earlier stories for the first time in a long time -- I was particularly impressed on rereading by "Tower of Babylon", which posits a cosmology in which a Tower of Babel could actually be successfully built. I admit I didn't quite get "Division by Zero", about a woman mathematician driven to despair when she proves that arithmetic is inconsistent. "Understand" is a nice, dark, story about a man who becomes a superman when he undergoes an experimental brain treatment -- and what happens when he finds another superman. Of the later stories, "Story of Your Life" remains my favorite, both very very moving and mind-blowing as well, told in second person successfully (and for good reason). It accomplishes the rare feat of combining an interesting bit of SFnal speculation (concerning aliens who perceive time differently than we do), worth a story on its own merits, with a moving human story (about a woman and her daughter, who dies young), and using the SF ideas to really drive home the human themes. While at the same time maintaining interest as pure SF. I'm fond of saying that there are two types of SF: stories about the science, and stories which use the science to be about people. This is both types in one. "Seventy-Two Letters" has a great central idea, and it does some nice things working out the implications, but the story itself is resolved with too much actiony hugger-mugger. "Hell is the Absence of God" again has a neat central conceit, and is uncompromising in working it out -- but I admit I was confused by the ending. His Nature short-short is a nice speculation on the future of science in a "post-human" world. And the new story, "Liking What You See" (reminiscent (both in central idea and form) of Raphael Carter's "Congenital Agenesis of Gender Ideation"), again takes a neat idea, the development of a means of making people unable to perceive human beauty, and extrapolates the consequences wonderfully. (I did think he cooked his argument a bit by having all the "opponents" of the side he seemed to favor being basically evil.)So far Chiang hasn't been very prolific, but even so, 7 stories of this quality in just over a decade is better than most writers do in a career.

This is not a normal book. It is not just a good book. Ted Chiang's stories stick to you and won't let go.The cover story is an excellent example. After a first reading you will think: "What a great story. What an interesting idea."But your brain will not start to process this story until you are sleeping that night. Then you willl begin to think about whose life the story is about.A week later while you are in a business meeting or making love your mind will drift and you will have a new insight.A month later you will begin to think seriously about what you have learned from this wonderful tale.Then it will become the story of _your_ life.Chiang's writings are fine art that imho will be remembered long after all of us are gone.He is that good.If you buy one book this year, this is the one.