Stories of Your Life and Others

Rating:
Summary: Excellent.
Review: Ted Chiang has an innate gift; he has the ability to write wonderfully lyrical stories about real people in situations generally caused or effected by mathematics and language. And that, really, is the theme in all of his work. For the title story, he combines the two subjects to make math and language inextricably linked, meant for each other as if they had been created that way. Mathematics as language also appears in other stories, such as "Understand," about an ordinary man suddenly gaining abnormal powers through a complicated medical procedure. (Not a very good description, granted; but I recommend you read it for yourself. After all, descriptions never really do a written work justice.)

Among the standouts here include the beautiful "Division by Zero," a story about a woman who struggles with a relationship that is falling apart, partly because of her own studies--where she has just discovered that all mathematics, no matter how complicated or revolutionary, is obsolete, meaningless; the wonderfully provocative "Story of Your Life" about a woman's encounter with an alien language which forever destroys her perception of time; and "Tower of Babylon," a story that is filled with the "Sense of Wonder" that so many SF fans are now craving--I could feel the singular enormity, the mass of stone and wood and work, and I could feel a distinct sensation of vertigo as the miners climbed the tower to the vault of heaven.

All in all, a wonderful collection, certainly worthy of a spot on your SF shelf.

Rating:
Summary: Brain and heart
Review: Ted Chiang has two gifts.
First, like Greg Egan, he has the uncanny ability to take a seemingly innocuous scientific fact and turn it into a story. You'd think that would be a given for sf writers but few can actually pull it off. The trick is to not show the reader what the world would be if some law were changed, but to make him think about it. Ted Chiang's stories are not rides, they're challenging, they change you while you read them. You quickly get into the main protagonist's frame of mind even when it's very alien (like the all-knowing character in "Understand" or the one who "chrono-synclastically" remembers the future in "Story of your Life") and you fully understand its problem. Moreover, you start to logically follow its train of thought, deftly guided by the author's hand.
Each one of these stories is built around a simple but brilliantly developed hypothesis (except for "72 Letters", which is built around two simple but brilliantly developed hypotheses, and that's maybe why it's the less emotionally engaging of the book): What if maths were inconsistent ("Division by Zero")? What if the tower of Babylon had reached Heaven ("Tower of Babylon")? What if you could choose not to perceive the beauty of a face ("Liking What You See: A Documentary")? What if Heaven was a certainty but you couldn't bring yourself to love God ("Hell Is the Absence of God")?
In an interview for Locus, Ted Chiang said that he aimed for the sense of wonder that discovery brings. That's exactly what I felt reading his stories: each time, I discovered something about the nature of an imaginary world and, conversely, about the nature of ours.

Ted Chiang's second gift is empathy. Not only do we understand why the protagonist has a weird predicament, but he also makes us care about it. The main idea of each story is so well intertwined with its protagonist fate that the process of discovery is also a catharsis. Basically, Greg Egan's "Luminous" and Chiang's "Division by Zero" talk about the same thing: what is true in maths. But where Egan tickles our brains with images of waves of theorems competing for truth, Chiang pierces our hearts with the story of a woman wrecked by a discovery that even precludes her, in a perverse way, from ever finding solace.
Other reviewers have written here that these stories are bleak. They are not. They are true, which often means that they're tragic. The protagonist of "Tower of Babylon" sees the dreams of thousands of people shattered, yet does he feel despair? No, he is elated by the truth he's learnt. And so are we, thanks to Ted Chiang's gift.

Chiang's style is quasi-vonnegutian (an author he cites in his notes): short sections ranging from half a page to two pages, each bringing its own intellectual or emotional impact, adding a layer to the story. This style makes for easy reading and sometimes even becomes an effective storytelling technique (in "Division by Zero", "Story of Your Life" and "Liking What You See: A Documentary"). His prose is fluid except when he voluntarily obfuscates his subject ("The Evolution of Human Science") and he makes complex ideas easy to grasp and play with. This is not a surprise since most of his stories basically talk about language.

I've been using Amazon for years but it's the first book that compelled me to write a review.
"Stories of Your Life and Others" is the best sf book I have read in years.
This is what sf is about.

Rating:
Summary: Long-awaited collection brings together all of Chiang's work
Review: Ted Chiang is a technical writer who lives near Seattle. He is also, proportionally, the most decorated author in the sci-fi/fantasy field today. "Stories of Your Life and Others" contains all of his published work to date. That's right, all of it. He may not write much, but what he writes is always worth reading. His stories are consistently thought-provoking and in the best cases, alter the way the reader views the world.

Indeed, it's a bit of a shame: because he has been pigeon-holed as a sci-fi author, many people may not be exposed to his work (including fantasy fans, but also mainstream readers). And yet Chiang's stories do what all great literature should do - they pull you into the world he has created so deeply that you don't want to leave it, and when you do, you take something of it with you.

Rating:
Summary: Some of the best short SF of the past decade
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: absolutely creative and unique literature
Review: This is a great book. All of the stories collected here are excellent, but there were three that I especially liked:

"Understand" is about acquiring high intelligence through advanced technology, which is a pretty common topic in science fiction, but this one was different in how detailed and downright imaginative it was. In fact it almost convinces you that the author is actually writing from experience; his ideas seem so close to reality.

"Division by Zero" is not science fiction; instead it presents a fascinating mathematical concept that requires a lot of (rather enjoyable) brain-bending to grasp, though still managing to tell a story that touches your heart.

"Hell is the Absence of God" is an intriguing thought experiment, telling the story of what the world and what people would be like if the Christian form of God not only existed but actively participated in everyday life.

I also really liked the story notes at the end.

Though I was kind of bothered by the hasty endings to most of the stories. I don't mind being made to draw conclusions and mentally tie up strings, but sometimes here they were ended just too abruptly.

Overall, I definitely recommend this book to anyone who likes creative, character-centered science fiction unlike anything you've ever read. I look forward to reading more of Ted Chiang's work.

Rating:
Summary: This Book Needs A Warning Label
Review: This is not a normal book. It is not just a good book. Ted Chiang's stories stick to you and won't let go.The cover story is an excellent example. After a first reading you will think: "What a great story. What an interesting idea."But your brain will not start to process this story until you are sleeping that night. Then you willl begin to think about whose life the story is about.A week later while you are in a business meeting or making love your mind will drift and you will have a new insight.A month later you will begin to think seriously about what you have learned from this wonderful tale.Then it will become the story of _your_ life.Chiang's writings are fine art that imho will be remembered long after all of us are gone.He is that good.If you buy one book this year, this is the one.

Rating:
Summary: Wow!
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Hard SF
Review: To my taste, Ted Chiang is SF's preeminent working hard SF writer, and one of the best creators of thought experiments the genre has ever seen. He doesn't write much, and so far all he's produced has been short fiction; it's hard to imagine his particular techniques--and his focus on following premises to their logical conclusions, and not a word farther--working at greater length. I especially recommend him to people who like Connie Willis' "At the Rialto" and "Schwartzenchild Radius"; like Willis, he is very fond of structuring stories as the living exemplars of scientific theories. Depending on how you look at the stories, they are either using science as a metaphor for human experience--or using human experience as a metaphor for science.

There's one weak story here, "Understand," which wastes a very intriguing Flowers for Algernon/Camp Concentration-like setup of the creation of superintelligent beings on a cliched contest for supremacy among supermen: the notes indicate this was the earliest written, if not the earliest published. The earliest published was "Tower of Babylon," a matter-of-fact SF-like practical recounting of the construction of the Tower of Babel; it won a Nebula award. Other stories include "Seventy-Two Letters," a similarly SFnal investigation of a fantasy premise (What if medieval theories of human reproduction were true? And the answer is: If Nature hadn't invented DNA, humans would have had to); "Hell Is the Absence of God," a cruel, utterly matter-of-fact story set in the universe of fundamentalist Christianity; "Division by Zero," the story of a mathematician who learns mathematics is not true; and "The Evolution of Human Science," a scientific article wondering what's left for humans in a future where posthuman evolution (a la Ken MacLeod) has succeeded.

My two favorites are "Story of Your Life" and "Liking What You See: A Documentary." I especially recommend "Story of Your Life" to any story-structure geeks reading this: it is told by a woman who learns an alien language which changes her perception of time. It is about how the knowledge of a future outcome changes our perceptions of actions; it is about grief; it is about love. It works even if you think the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is absurd.

"Liking What You See: A Documentary" (the only story original to the volume) posits that a way to deliberately and reversably induce "calliagnosia"--the inability to recognize human beauty. (Studies of brain damage indicate that facial recognition is a perception skill-set that's separate from the recognition of beauty; Chiang extrapolates from there.) A college campus debates making calliagnosia mandatory for all students, and a number of parties--students pro, students anti, a student who grew up in a calliagnostic community but opted for reversal on her 18th birthday, and, of course, advertising agencies--give their responses. Clever and thought-provoking, and it very nicely uses the "ivory tower" to show that it's not possible to examine such theses thoroughly without investigating likely uses and misuses by outside forces.

Rating:
Summary: This book is as good as I am incoherent.
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Perfect
Review: WHO SHOULD READ THIS:

If you haven't gotten the point from our main review, we think that these stories can be read and adored by anyone. Absolutely anyone. All ages, all fields, all nationalities. Chiang is the kind of writer who can single-handedly change a genre. Especial notice to those fans of Ray Bradbury whose moods and internal conflicts as a concept are echoed (and surpassed!) in these tales.

wHO sHOULD PASS:

It's hard to imagine anyone who bothers to read at all would not gain something profound from reading at least some of these works. But the, they are absent of cursing, violence, and sexual titillation. Those of you who seek super-action or other thrill-seeking vehicles should seek out Goodkind or some other author to satisfy these baser needs and return to Chiang when that catharsis is over.

READ THE WHOLE REVIEW AT INCHOATUS.COM