Stories of Your Life and Others
What’s there to say about Chiang that all the others don’t say? He is the closest thing to a modern Jorge Luis Borges in melding high concepts with literature to create something better than either; in some respects, I’d rank his best short stories as better than Gene Wolfe’s (too often tedious and unsolved puzzle-boxes). His writing is deceptively excellent: I would call him a writer’s writer, because the flat evenness of his prose may strike a reader as boring unless they have tried to write as clearly themselves and failed abysmally, at which point they begin to appreciate Chiang’s infallible choice of words and lucid prose which sinks into the mind without friction.
Stories of Your Life and Others is much superior to his novella Life Cycle of Software Objects, and contains pretty much all of his greatest short stories which I have read, except for his excellent “Exhalation”.1 I read most of them online, so when I had the chance to read a hardcopy of the full collection, I seized it.
“The Tower of Babylon”; amusing, and in describing the lives of the people living on the tower, moving in some respects. The final ending feels like an appropriate conclusion.
If one had to criticize it, it would be that the Tower itself is completely unrealistic even in the Biblical cosmology of the story (mountains can’t work that way on Earth): as I said, the best Chiang stories unite literature and good ideas.
I would rank this #5 of the 8 stories.
“Division by Zero”; not terribly impressive—over-wrought, and I feel I have read this story before and better. #7.
“Understand”; a classic in the niche genre of superintelligence, and IMO better than Vinge’s “Bookworm, Run!” and at least as good as Flowers for Algernon.
Chiang, like every other author, confronts the limits of his writing ability in trying to write convincingly of a superintelligence who is by definition vastly smarter than he is (the same challenge laid down by Campbell to Vinge: “you can’t write this story, and neither can anyone else”), and so the start of the story is much stronger than the later passages. But the whole is still memorable.
#4. (Probably an even better read for those who haven’t read about themes of superintelligence before.)
“Story of Your Life”; I had actually read this one before, and dismissed it as sentimental tripe with some weak physics or linguistic layering that I didn’t really understand.
In this respect, like many of the other reviewers on this page who pan it as ‘dumb seeing-the-future’ tropes, the fault was mine: “Story of Your Life” is much better than the critics give it credit for being, simply because they entirely failed to understand the concept despite quite a lot of explanation from Chiang. Fortunately, just a few weeks ago I happened to read some material on the Lagrangian interpretations of physics and combined with knowing in advance the ending, I was able to appreciate the story much better this time. Thinking about it, I realized it does something unusual in providing another angle, a psychological angle, to timeless interpretations of physics and block universes and backpropagation in neural networks and I even connected it to Zen, which makes them all a little easier to understand for me. I didn’t get it the first time, but I’m glad I eventually reread it and ‘got’ it. I would rank this #3 of the 8 stories. #3. This story is what I believe was the first adaptation of any of Chiang’s stories, despite being overrated like “Life Cycle of Software Objects”, getting a movie in 2016.
Since there seems to be some confusion over what exactly Chiang is trying to say with this one, I’ve expanded out my thoughts on what is actually going on in an essay.
The movie, however, avoids this almost entirely. When I heard there was going to be a movie, I said to myself, “I bet it’ll miss the entire point and make it about time travel or something”. It does. Avoiding the physics entirely (!) the screenwriter takes the offhand mention of Sapir-Whorf and interprets the protagonist as getting actual time-travel powers; based on his interview making no mention of why and when he decided to drastically simplify, I suspect he doesn’t even realize how badly he failed to understand it. The scriptwriter apparently took the only bits he understood, a mention of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (which is mostly a hypothesis, as decades of searching have turned up less than impressive empirical results like slightly easier perception of named colors and better geographic location knowledge when grammar encodes direction—certainly nothing like the grand expectations in the 1960s that led to such linguistic neologistic monstrosities as ‘herstory’ or ‘womyn’). With the meaning of the story excised, he has to come up with a regular plot, and does this by giving the aliens a—dare I say—more human motivation in trying to somehow save themselves by uplifting humans. This is itself a betrayal of part of Chiang’s ethos: in many of his stories, Chiang is depicting the unknown and the unknowable and human confrontation with it. The heat-death of the universe in “Exhalation”, post-human intelligence in “Understand”, post-human knowledge and science in “The Evolution of Human Science”, the nature of God and morality and the implications of divine-command theory in “Hell is the Absence of God”, what lies beyond the sky or the circular universe in “The Tower of Babylon”, and… alien cognition and ways of viewing the universe in “Story of Your Life”. What’s left is mostly a glossy action movie heavy on military hardware (presumably this is one of those Hollywood productions where the US military provides lots of equipment and personnel in exchange for a positive depiction as honest and competent and not trigger-happy) about the need for a world government, with the physics theme turned into just a Sapir-Whorf superpower though this makes no sense in-universe (if the protagonist can create stable time-loops and steal information from the future, why doesn’t she steal a cure? Or why not see an alternate future where her child doesn’t get sick, or an entirely different husband and healthy child she could also love? Or how is Heptapodese not supposed to lead to incredible chaos as people learn it and start monkeying with the future? Why do the aliens need any assistance from the humans in the first place, whether to learn their language or to save themselves?) The special-effects depiction of Heptapod is some nifty cloud effects, but the heptapods themselves are not terribly compelling aliens.
As a rendering of Chiang’s vision, I would have to give it an F because it is frustratingly almost the opposite of what he meant, and as a generic Hollywood SF movie I would give it a B. I would doubtless have enjoyed it more if I had never read the story.
“The Evolution of Human Science”; short, dubious. Not Chiang’s best work, on either dimension. #8.
“Seventy-Two Letters”; simply fantastic. The setting is wonderful, the problem great, the ideas even better, and the solution and meaning better still. I can’t say it’s incredibly deep, but it’s a look at a road not taken, and a reminder of how confusing genetics was and how many strange ideas were proposed before we reached anything like the current Mendel-Fisher particulate-inheritance paradigm. #2.
“Hell Is the Absence of God”; as an atheist who keeps coming back to the Wisdom Books and the Book of Job particularly (KJV translation, of course), this story came as a gut punch. The writing is Chiang at his most Chiang-y, the world interesting and provocative (Chiang takes the Bible ‘literally but not seriously’, one might say), and the ending simply unspeakable. But don’t take my word for it, ‘decide for yourself’, as the fallen angels say. This story enriches reading the Book of Job for me, and I think ultimately hammers in for me the unacceptability of divine command ethics and makes me more atheistic. #1. Pairs well with Scott Alexander’s more freewheeling Unsong.
“Liking What You See: A Documentary”; interesting ideas, but something about the dialogues and characters seem off. It just jars me. I think somewhere Chiang also notes his dissatisfaction with the writing of this one. #6.