Joe's Reviews > Stories of Your Life and Others

My introduction to the fiction of American author Ted Chiang comes with Stories of Your Life and Others, a 2002 collection of eight hard science fiction short stories published over the previous twelve years. My anticipation was to dust off one tale in particular, "Story of Your Life", the source material for a movie titled Arrival starring Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner that opens in the U.S. two months from the time I'm posting this book report. I dove into the collection due to Chiang's gift for immersing me in worlds where physics, linguistics and engineering are used as tools for characters grasping at the very essential and emotional questions of what it means to be human.

-- "Tower of Babylon" (Omni, 1990). In the world of the Old Testament, a miner named Hillalum from Elam arrives by caravan in the storied city of Babylon, where the fabled tower has extended to the vault of heaven itself and a team of miners has been contracted to tunnel through. Chiang's supplants biblical myth with physical and mechanical engineering to create a world where man is using tools and technology to create marvels and unlock the very secrets of God. This story is everything the Bible isn't when I try to read it: sensual, clear and full of wonder. The ending is one I'd like to think that Rod Serling would've appreciated. ***** (5 stars).

-- "Understand" (Asmiov's, 1991). A graphic designer named Leon Greco revived after an hour drowned under the ice is treated with the experimental hormone K. Side effects for those who suffered major damage to their neural network turns out to be elevated levels of intelligence. Developing genius level skills in strategic thinking, Leon anticipates the CIA will attempt to recruit him so he goes on the run, discovering he's not the only test case to get that idea. This is an intellectually thrilling story in which Chiang very clearly and very cleverly depicts what might be capable and become of an average person who begins using their brain's capacity. ***** (5 stars).

-- "Division By Zero" (Full Spectrum 3, 1991). Mathematician Renee Norwood checks out of a mental facility and returns home with her husband Carl, who anticipates he'll be able to help his wife recover from her suicide attempt due to hitting rock bottom himself in college. He doesn't anticipate that the formula Renee has discovered erodes the foundation of mathematics, forcing her to question the very nature of the reality she knows. I liked this story okay, which is more fiction with science in it than science fiction. Chiang documents the perils of a career in theory when the theories cease to be sufficient, creating a theological vacuum. I want to reread it with a dictionary. *** (3 stars).

-- "Story of Your Life" (Starlight 2, 1998). When extraterrestrial ships appear in orbit and their "looking glasses" materialize in meadows around the world, linguist Louise Banks is recruited by the army for fieldwork. Working with physicist Gary Donnelly, Louise deploys to one of the screens in the U.S. Her assignment is to help establish communication with the aliens, which have seven limbs, seven eyes and are being called heptapods. Communicating with two heptapods they name Flapper and Raspberry, Louise and Gary determine that learning a new spoken language (Heptapod A) will take longer than communicating with a written one (Heptapod B).

The idea of thinking in a linguistic yet nonphonological mode always intrigued me. I had a friend born of deaf parents; he grew up using American Sign Language, and he told me that he often thought in ASL instead of English. I used to wonder what it was like to have one’s thoughts be manually coded, to reason using an inner pair of hands instead of an inner voice. With Heptapod B, I was experiencing something just as foreign: my thoughts were becoming graphically coded. There were trance-like moments during the day when my thoughts weren’t expressed with my internal voice; instead, I saw semagrams with my mind’s eye, sprouting like frost on a windowpane.

Louise unlocks heptapod communication, which is not based on the sequential consciousness of humans but simultaneous consciousness, which takes into account the future as well as the past and present. Louise becomes fluent in this alien consciousness, which has the side effect of (view spoiler)[illuminating the joyous life and tragic death of her own unborn daughter (hide spoiler)] and stripping Louise of what she once considered to be free will. Like the stories that precede it, this one is so good that my only criticism is that it could've been expanded into a novel. The characters seem too comfortable around the aliens, but the story is riveting and emotionally resounds. ***** (5 stars).

-- "Seventy-Two Letters" (Vanishing Acts, 2000). I abandoned this story is muddled in fantasy and/or scientific concepts that I couldn't wrap my mind around. Worse, it's also the longest of the collection. I like knowing where I'm at and what the rules are quickly as opposed to belatedly. * (1 star).

-- "The Evolution of Human Science" (Nature, 2000). I abandoned this story as well, the shortest in the collection, a three-page essay of some sort that doesn't attempt to tell a story but looked like jargon-filled writing to me. * (1 star)

-- "Hell Is the Absence of God" (Starlight 3, 2001). The archangels (Nathaniel, Bardiel, Rashiel, etc.) exist and visit earth with the shock and awe of superheroes. Neil Fisk is forced to reevaluate his belief in God when his wife Sarah is killed by falling glass during a visitation. He seeks out a religious communicator named Janice Reilly who was not only born with flippers instead of legs, but as an adult, has her legs restored for unexplained reasons by God during a visitation. In addition, a family man named Ethan Mead has waited all of his life for a sign and struggles with what God wants from him based on the non-eventful visitation he witnessed.

Ethan attended the support group meetings that followed and met other witnesses to Rashiel's visitation. Over the course of a few meetings, he became aware of certain patterns among the witnesses. Of course there were those who'd been injured and those who'd received miracle cures. But there were also those whose lives were changed in other ways: the man and woman he'd first met fell in love and were soon engaged; a woman who'd been pinned beneath a collapsed wall was inspired to become an EMT after being rescued. One business owner formed an alliance that averted her impending bankruptcy, while another whose business was destroyed saw it as a message that he change his ways. It seemed that everyone except Ethan had found a way to understand what had happened to them.

This is my favorite story in the collection. The imaginative leaps and bounds Chiang takes to build a fully functioning world are staggering. Angels do exist in this world, but they're nothing like those in angel-themed movie or TV series we've seen before. In this story, as many innocent bystanders are killed or witnesses cast into lives of confusion as souls are saved. The designs of God and His messengers remains a mystery to man, who grasps at even more straws to determine their place in the world as we do in ours. Each of the three characters are taken on a spiritual journey filled with equal parts soul searching and levity. It's a truly amazing read. ***** (5 stars).

-- "Liking What You See: A Documentary" (Stories of Your Life and Others, 2002). Transcript of a "documentary" in which a college debates whether to ban "calliagnoisa," a medical procedure in which young people can be temporarily blocked from discriminating on the basis of physical appearance. They can see faces but have no reaction as to whether it's an attractive or unattractive face and are able to consider people on substance, not superficiality. It's "interesting," which means I didn't care for it. The transcript approach wasn't to my liking. A narrative about a college freshman who unblocks her "calli" protection and then has it reinstalled might've worked. ** (2 stars)