Stories of Your Life
and Others
Ted Chiang
Despite my never having heard of
him, Ted Chiang is apparently a hot commodity in the world of science fiction,
with ecstatic blurbs promising that his is a collection not to be missed. Though
Chiang has a stunning array of intriguing ideas and competent control of his
prose, he seems to aim just a tad too high, taking too many tips from the
handbook of boring-but-lauded mainstream litfic writers and taking too little
inspiration from the wide-eyed wonders of science fiction's past. His ideas,
rather than being elevated by moving prose, are stymied by a capitulation to
the current move toward pretentious artistry that dooms stories to be devoid of
meaning. Its as if Chiang takes his mind-boggling ideas and strips them of all
potential to cater to a different crowd, and it's a shame, really, because if
he let his ideas roll around a bit and actually had some fun with them,
"Stories of Your Life and Others" would go from a collection of
interesting stories driven by wonderful ideas to the mind-blowing promise
implied on its covers. Not every attempt is a swing and a miss, though, and
Chiang's inventiveness and blending of litfic prose traditions and sci-fi ideas
does create some memorable moments. "Tower of Babylon" evokes a
realistic vision of what the magnificent tower may have looked like in a very
realistic ancient Babylon, and though its twist is a bit difficult to
comprehend, the setting drives the story to a satisfactory, if slightly
baffling, conclusion. Where "Understand" loses its narrative steam
somewhere amidst its attempt to explore different consequences of
superintelligence, "Division By Zero" barely registers on the science
fiction radar, using a scientific concept to deftly explore the meaning of our
conceptual frameworks of the world- and what happens when those unexpectedly
collapse. Here is a brilliant story on the edge of genre, a vision of science
and its implications for the human spirit, a story that reaches the heights
Chiang so clearly aspires to, and so often misses, in the other pieces.
There are other periodic sparks
of brilliance, such as the hard-science linguistics and effective parallel
narration at play in "Story of Your Life," which exhibits Chiang's
remarkable scientific versatility. For all of its faults, the collection does
truly boast a stunningly diverse array of possibilities, from the
religiously-fueled alternate history golem robots (both cooler and more lame
than that sounds, oddly) of "Seventy-Two Letters" to the brain
surgery proposed in "Liking What You See: A Documentary." Though the
author's endnotes imply that I would disagree with his own conclusion about the
story, he happily sticks to his well-deployed interview format (think World War Z) and keeps his controversial
beauty-blinding procedure at the crux of various arguments, rather than the
polemic it could have easily become. Likewise, "Hell Is the Absence of
God" works in subtlety, where it could have deployed many forceful
bludgeons. The fantasy element is excellent, and it is an much appreciated
intelligent treatment of religion that manages to remain somewhat neutral,
though readers may read a pro- or anti-religious bias into the story according
to their own notions. Ted Chiang may aim high in this collection, but though he
sometimes succumbs to the perils of overwriting and losing the plot, Stories of Your Life and Others is a
solid collection of forward-thinking science fiction that displays a range of
the author's talents.
Grade: B+
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