This collection of impressively varied sci-fi short stories is dry, cerebral and at times challenging, but ultimately I found it rewarding and stimulating in the best way science fiction can be.
I haven’t heard the name Ted Chiang before I picked up this book on a recommendation, however he’s considered to be one of all-time greatest science fiction short story writers, despite his relatively sparse output. Stories of Your Life and Others was his debut and he published only one other short story collection since, which I’d like to read as well.
Generally, saying that a book felt like hard work is a dubious compliment, but in this case I mean it in the nicest possible way. This felt like proper hard sci-fi, where every story is a dramatised thought experiment that grips your imagination, gives you food for thought or raises profound moral and philosophical questions. Some stories lean into science, linguistics and mathematics to the point where I felt like I was barely keeping up with them, like a swimmer just managing to keep her head above water, but it all felt like a stimulating exercise for the brain rather than just an exercise in frustration. Above all, I was mighty impressed with the breadth and diversity of this collection, where every story explores the limits of knowledge in its own unique way.
Not all of the stories here are exclusively science fiction about an imagined future. The first story, Tower of Babylon, goes back in time to the Old Testament account of a tower so tall it reaches the vault of Heaven, though in this version God allows its completion. This retelling of the Tower of Babel and the archaic cosmology is a fantastic opener, easing you into the book before hitting the reader with hard science stuff.
Understand initially reads like a millionth variation on a topic of genetic engineering, but it very quickly comes to follow its own unpredictable path all the way to the wild confusion. As the protagonist’s intelligence skyrockets, he even creates his own language to make sense of the new way he perceives the world and its patterns. This and the next story, Division by Zero, centred around mathematics and the heartbreak of disproven faith, were probably the most challenging.
Story of Your Life, my personal favourite and hands down one of the best sci-fi short stories I’ve ever read, was actually the basis for the Denis Villeneuve film Arrival. I had very mixed feelings about that movie, and I wasn’t at all surprised to see that its best elements came straight from this lean, effective short story (whereas the film additions didn’t really work in my opinion). I love the idea of learning a language so alien it changes your perception of time, where you see your life all at once rather than experiencing it in a sequential order. This story is a perfect blend of the emotional and the cerebral, engaging the brain and touching the heart.
Seventy-Two Letters takes place in the imaginary steampunk Victorian England where the industrial revolution took a very different turn. I previously encountered golems from the Jewish tradition in Terry Pratchett’s Night Watch series, and here the story improbably weaves in golems and homunculus, a miniature fully formed human once believed to inhabit an egg or a sperm. And it all has to do with the looming extinction of the human race. Though I still haven’t completely wrapped my head around the ending, I absolutely love the world-building in this story.
The Evolution of Human Science is the shortest story in the book, and deals with the world where meta-humans have so far exceeded normal humans they rendered human science obsolete. Though brief, it reminded me a lot of The Waves Extinguish the Wind by the Strugatsky brothers, which explored very similar themes.
Hell is the Absence of God is another standout, telling the story of a man struggling to love God after the death of his wife. The kicker is that he must find a way to do so in order to join his wife in Heaven. In this world, God is unquestionably real, and souls can be visibly seen either ascending to Heaven or descending to Hell. Angelic visitations are common, but here they are re-imagined as something more akin to a natural disaster, leaving many dead, injured or transformed in the wake. The ending is a real gut punch!
Liking What You See: A Documentary asks a provocative question: is it right to mess with nature for the sake of social justice? It concerns a procedure that allows people to switch off their sensitivity to physical beauty, which in theory would create a world where appearance-based prejudice no longer exists. Many sides of the debate are presented, touching on how looks affect relationships and the power of modern-day advertising. I don’t think I’d choose the procedure myself, since I’d hate to miss out on enjoying physical beauty, but it’s an interesting issue to ponder.
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