Stories Of Your Life and Others

I really don't know why I "review" some things on this blog and not others. I'll write a post about every video game I play, no matter how short or long. I'll review novels and nonfiction books, but not graphic novels. I used to review TV shows and movies and the occasional album, but haven't done that for ages.

One in-between medium is the short story collection. I usually don't review those, unless it can share a post with some other content, or feels particularly meaningful, or maybe if I just have a lot of free time on my hands.

 

The most recent short story collection I read was really excellent: Stories Of Your Life And Others by Ted Chiang. I'd previously read and loved his later collection, Exhalation. These days I mostly think about him as the author of the best article I've read yet on generative AI, where he brings a Neal Stephenson-esque mastery of knowledge, metaphor and opinion to shine clarity on an (often intentionally) obscure topic.

I vaguely think of Chiang as a science-fiction writer, and I'm not sure why. Most of his stories aren't really sci-fi: they aren't set in the future or in outer space. But the stories are comfortably within the realm of speculative fiction. Chronologically they're often set in historical or modern settings, and feel like they're set on our world, but an alternate version of our world with some fundamental difference. Not a branching point in history, like Man in the High Castle or Merchant Princes. Rather they're worlds where some key physical law works differently from ours: reality itself is different.

MINI SPOILERS

Jumping through some of the stories: I feel like this must have occurred to me in the past, but I don't recall previously noticing the similarity of Babel and Babylon. The story I know of the Tower of Babel is one of arrogance and punishment. The main character considers that possibility here, when he wonders about how God will respond to them digging into heaven: Will he be upset? Jealous? Proud? Flattered? Friendly? The story leads to a kind of cool transcendent understanding, revealing God without actually showing Himself, proving he exists through the evidence of nature rather than direct revelation.

There are a lot of religious themes and references in many of these stories, more than I'm used to encountering. I think that was the case in Exhalation as well; in that book, the opening story is rooted in Islam, with a respectful and deeply-considered teleology taking both Allah and man into account. This book has more Jewish and Christian references, which I'm personally more familiar with.

I'm not sure which story in this collection was my favorite, but Seventy-Two Letters was particularly compelling. This story had a lot of links to our own world, such as the religious practices and social upheavals of England in the 1800s, but (a) golems are real and widely commercialized; (b) so are protective amulets; and (c) the entire means of biological reproduction are different from our own. Like a lot of the stories in this collection, characters have different perspectives and disagreements, and it feels like Chiang honors them all. I can definitely sympathize with the metal-worker unionists who fear that their jobs are being threatened, and at the same time admire the protagonist for wanting to bring labor-saving conveniences to the poor masses. For a relatively short story there is such an interesting combination of lots of little ideas, combining into a world where everything seems to be about 15 degrees off of normal.

The title story, "Story Of Your Life", was the basis of the movie "Arrival". I've only seen that once and remember liking it. I think that the story is similar to the movie; I feel like there was more plot at the end of Arrival, but I may be mis-remembering. Reading this definitely makes me want to watch it again, though! Also, while reading this story, I briefly got confused about exactly how the aliens' language works. (Spoilers for China Mieville's Embassytown follow in this paragraph!) There's a throw-away line early on here, I think during her first session with the aliens, where she tries to orally repeat back a spoken line to the aliens. They don't respond to her when she speaks, only when she plays back the recording of their own voices. I went "Oh, that's right - these are the aliens where language is the same as thought, it's impossible for them to lie, and the only way they can hear you is if you mean what you're saying." But that isn't the deal for these aliens, it's the deal for the aliens in Embassytown! For these aliens, their deal is that they have an inverted view of causality to our own: instead of viewing the universe as a place where taking actions leads to results, they view the universe as a place where results necessitate the performance of actions. This impacts their grammar and writing, but also their entire way of thinking: not just "way of thinking" as in their philosophy, but how they perceive the universe. In order to learn their language, the linguist needs to understand their thoughts, and eventually comes to perceive as they do, aware of everything that will happen in her future, and still performing actions when she knows the results they'll lead to. Anyways! I think it's funny that there are multiple sci-fi linguist stories out there, and I only belatedly realized that several years after encountering them.

The last story (note: there are other stories I haven't mentioned here, but that doesn't mean they aren't good! Just that I can't think of anything significant to say about them!), "Liking What You See: A Documentary", feels like something that would unfold during a semester at Oberlin: a student movement, covered with language of social justice, and everyone reacting to it in some way. Like the other stories, this doesn't proffer a simplistic moral like "tech bad" or "tech good", but offers a kaleidescopic vision of how some change would impact different people and how they would feel about it. It was interesting to read the end notes where Chiang mentions that he'd like to try calli if it was available; I wouldn't necessarily have assumed that that was his position just from reading the story. The setting and overall tenor of the story feels very applicable to debates about campus activism, cancel culture and political correctness that are much in the news lately: but reading this story (from over 20 years ago!) reminds me that these are all evergreen topics, just freshly felt by each generation.

END SPOILERS

I thought this was a great collection with a lot of fine stories. Overall my favorite Chiang remains The Lifecycle of Software Objects from Exhalation, but everything I've read from him has been thoughtful and thought-provoking: more cerebral than a lot of literary fiction and more humane than a lot of speculative fiction.