Stories of Your Life and Others

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.

(WARNING! I am a science-fiction writer in economic competition with Mr. Chiang. All my gripes must be taken with a grain of salt.)
Eight well-crafted stories with engaging and interesting ideas are marred by weak endings. Each story ends with tepid pessimism.
MILD SPOILERS AHEAD.
First, the "Tower of Babylon" tale engages the reader with solid characterization and a thought-provoking description of what the mighty engineering feat of "building a tower to heaven" would have been like, had the world been flat. It is filled with amusing and authentic touches, like the Egyptian stone-masons brought in to chip through the hard surface of the sky-dome, or the description of how mid-levels of the tower rendered inhospitable by the too-near approach of the fiery sun. But the ending is weak, and the immense tower turns out to have been built in vain.
In "Understand" the super intelligent man is obsessed with finding a perfect expression of linguistic philosophy that will express the universe. The depiction of a mind smarter than any mind of man is wonderfully well-done, and the story is worth reading just for this alone. The super-mind discovers a second super intelligent man. One man wants nothing but to be left alone while he pursues his research, while the other wishes to use his powers to benefit mankind peacefully. Neither one is threatening or interfering with the goals of the other. For no apparent reason, and without any plot-purpose, these two "superior intelligences" both mutually agree that there is no possible way they both can exist, they duel, and one murders the other. What a waste. Maybe they were not so bright after all.
In "Story of your Life" a mother, through the study of an alien language, learns how to see the universe from a timeless point of view. She knows her daughter is going to die in a pointless accident even before the night the daughter is conceived. The mother does nothing, and can do nothing, to prevent the accident, since only those things that are fated to be will be. Precognition is vain.
In "Divide by Zero" all mathematics turns out to be vain.
"Liking What You See: A Documentary" once again, starts with a very interesting science fiction premise: what would the world be like if we could turn off our perception of human beauty? And, once again, the story soon disappoints. A college is debating whether to impose beauty-blindness on all its students. Both sides of the issue are debated. A girl who tries to make herself look nice to win the affection of a boy she loves is rebuffed when the boy turns off his beauty-seeing abilities. The girl realizes it is "unfair" to look better than other people. So her attempts are futile. In the end, an evil conspiracy of (I am not making this up) Big Lipstick Companies successfully prevents widespread implementation of the beauty-blindness plan by (you guessed it) having a particularly attractive spokeswoman sway the debate. So the entire debate was futile. This same egalitarian theme appears in a famous short story by Kurt Vonnegut, one where pretty folk were burned with acid, and smart individuals were lobotimized, so that everyone was "equal" and nothing would rouse the spite and envy of the herd. There, Vonnegut's tale cheers for the individual; here, Chiang's tale cheers for the herd.
"The Evolution of Human Science" has all scientific inquiry prove futile once super artificial intelligences take over the field.
The satire "Hell is the Absence of God" reads like it was written by someone who never met a Christian, or read anything written by a Christian. In this tale, those who see the light of heaven are grotesquely disfigured (their eyes and eye sockets are removed) and loose free will, and become perfect in faith, so that they are automatically assured of entrance into paradise. The main character, mourning after the death of his wife, seeks to find a spot where an angel is leaving or entering the world, so that he can, if only for a moment, glimpse the light of heaven, so that he can loose his eyes and his free will, but be assured of meeting his wife again in heaven. All goes as planned, but God capriciously sends the man to Hell in any case. Hell is not a place of torment, but a bland area much like earth, merely separate from God, peopled by Fallen Angels who sin was not rebellion, but free-thinking. Hence, out of all created beings, only the main character is actually suffering in Hell, since he is the only one who longs not to be there, and, thanks to his free will being destroyed, is the only one who loves God wholeheartedly. Again, all efforts of the main character to rejoin his wife are futile. There are secondary characters whose lives are also ruined and for no particular reason.
I myself am an unrepentant atheist, but I would never pen such trite antichristian propaganda. If an author is going to set a story in an alternate universe where the Christian myths happen to be true, the author should become familiar with (or, at least, hide his contempt for) the source material. Read Thomas Aquinas or John Milton. Christians may be wrong, but they are not stupid.
Over all, Mr. Chiang is an excellent writer, who writes wonderfully about big ideas, but weds them to a theme of dispirited nihilism. He is capable of subtle and penetrating characterization, except when he trots out a tired leftwing cliché, whereupon suddenly everything becomes flat and predictable (see, for example, his treatment of the CIA, Big Business, the Military, and the Victorian Age).
I can only reccommend the first half of each story.

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.

The first few stories were quite entertaining and interesting. The later few, especially the last two, were very labored - yes, we get it: God is capricious, and beauty is subjective. He just keeps going on and on as if he's try to figure something out for himself. I bought the book on the strength of the reviews, and reading part of the first story on a Kindle preview. I was a bit disappointed - I'd be happier if the last two stories were simply not there.

I love the title story, "The Story of Your Life." It's about a linguist, doing linguist-y things, and it *gets the details right.* (An unbelievably and shamefully rare occurance.) For that alone I would have to love it; but it has a good sci-fi twist too, with a nice bit of philosophy and physics which all ties together beautifully. Unfortunately, I was not so enthralled with the rest of the collection. I *wanted* to like it. So many awards! So much praise from writers I admire!: but wanting doesn't make it so. Oh, I don't mean the stories are of poor quality; not at all. Each one is an interesting science fictional (or fantastical) premise very nicely worked out through all of its logical ramifications. The problem was that as I was reading I kept nodding my head and thinking, "oh, very nicely worked out. Yes, very clever use of mathematical metaphor. Wow, the author did a lot of research on mud bricks; impressive!" If all you need is clever premises well worked out - and there are a lot of science fiction readers for whom that is true, and no harm in it - then sit back and enjoy. But I want logic *and* mud brick research *and* neat mathematical metaphors *and* emotion *and* dialogue that serves more than just the story's needs *and* characters whose names I can remember two minutes later *and* maybe some pretty prose *or* some atmosphere, in the non-oxygen/nitrogen sense. Call me a greedy reader, but this collection did not work for me.

SAMPLE PARAGRAPH
At the Second International Congress of Mathematics in 1900, David Hilbert listed what he considered to be the twenty-three most important unsolved problems of mathematics. The second item on his list was a request for a proof of the consistency of arithmetic. Such a proof would ensure the consistency of a great deal of higher mathematics. What this proof had to guarantee was, in essence, that one could never prove one equals two. Few mathematicians regarded this as a matter of much import.

Two things.
First, the book. Yeah, go buy the book, it *is* the greatest thing since sliced bread. Better, really, I *like* unsliced bread. Mmmm, baguettes with all that crispy yummy crust... this book is at least as good as that. I bought the thing, and Merlin yelled at me for spending the money, but I bought it ANYWAY because I've already read half the stories and I *knew* it was going to be just... that... good. Mmm, book. Book book book book book. All perfect, all utterly Ted Chiang, except for "Hell is the Absence of God," which I SWEAR Ted had Harlan Ellison temporarily killed so that he could channel his spirit to help with it. (It's sort of like a collaborative effort, only with more teams of evil Nazi doctors and big cryogenic tube things and stuff. Like what happened to Stalin in Greg Bear's "Vitals".)
Second... Ted, what exactly DID Merlin say to you about Gwyneth? 'Cos, she didn't remember exactly, and I don't know how much of the parallelism was from life and how much was just made up, and, well, I wonder.

I always forget how much I love reading SF. I've read it all my life, but I've started veering towards the softer stuff, fantasy, and urban fantasy as I've gotten older. And then I'll pick up a book like this and remember all over again how wonderful SF can be. The stories range from a tower of Babel to an alien first encounter, to pretty much everywhere in between. They're amazing. Most of them won awards, and it's quite apparent why. "Hell is the Absence of God" just won a Hugo, for example. I think only two stories in the book haven't been at least nominated for anything, and one of those was written for the collection. I am slowly converting the rest of my friends to the Cult of Chiang. I gave it to my mom to read and she raved over it for 15 minutes when I called to ask her how she liked it.

In 1990, I read the short story/novella "Tower of Babylon" published in Omni magazine. I was blown away, and the story has remained in my mind for over a decade. I later found that this story won a Nebula award, but was never able to find another copy to read.
Ted Chiang is apparently not a prolific writer. Since "Tower of Babylon," his first story, was published, readers have only been treated to six other pieces (one a short-short) by Mr. Chiang. But what he lacks in quantity is more than made up for in quality. All of these pieces, plus a new story, are bound in this volume, making for one spectacular read.
This is science fiction for non-sci-fi readers. The emphasis here is on character and story, with any technology being smoothly incorporated into the setting. It's more like the slightly fantastic realities created by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez than what many would think of as SF. I'm not sure whether this pedigree (and the Tor imprint) will help or hurt sales of this book -- the stories could have just as easily been published in The Atlantic Monthly as anywhere else, and that might be an audience who could be sorely missing out on a great writer.
Bottom line: Highly recommended literary fiction.

--Tower of Babylon, 1990. Nebula.
--Understand, 1991.
--Division by Zero, 1991.
--Story of Your Life, 1998. Nebula, Sturgeon.
--Seventy-Two Letters, 2000. Sidewise.
--The Evolution of Human Science, 2000.
--Hell Is the Absence of God, 2001. Nebula, Hugo, Locus.
--Liking What You See: A Documentary, 2002.
'Liking What You See' is original to this collection.
Ted Chiang won also the Campbell New Writer Award in 1992.
As you can see, this writer wins a lot of awards.
Anyway, check out this collection if you want to read some fine stories. Chiang is at his best in the longer short story {novelette and novella regions}. This contains all fiction he wrote over the years.
Happy reading.

I am an obsessive reader of speculative fiction, and consider myself a fair judge. Chiang is arguably the best author of short fiction in this genre alive today. Every one of these stories is an absolute gem. Of course, there's no money in short fiction--buy this book in hardcover and support this stunning young talent!