Words&Dirt

Summary:

Stories of Your Life and Others is the first collection of short stories by Ted Chiang, a man who will surely be remembered as one of this era’s finest writers. Ranging from reimagined biblical fables to ethical examinations of near-future technology, Stories contains a batch of bizarre narratives brimming with emotional poignancy and intellectual depth. With each tale, it’s as if Chiang generates an entirely new universe––complete with its own bespoke laws of physics, evolutionary history, and mythology––and then flenses off a tiny slice of human life for analysis under his literary microscope. Speaking with a powerful voice both starkly alien and deeply humanistic, Chiang invites readers to become transported, bewildered, delighted, and horrified.

Key Concepts and Notes:

• My favorite stories in this book are: “Understand,” “Division by Zero,” “Story of Your Life,” and “Liking What You See: A Documentary.”
• “Understand” puts a nice twist on the transhumanist question of what might happen if we could massively increase an individual’s level of intelligence, resulting in a superintelligent being living amongst normal humans. Chiang does a great job of dropping the reader into the overwhelming phenomenology of such a mind, and also confronts the ethical question of how such towering intelligence should be utilized.
• “Division by Zero” presents the idea of a mathematical equation with the potential to drive people mad, or at least plunge them into a major existential crisis. The story itself isn’t too remarkable, but its core concept is haunting.
• “Story of Your Life” is the crown jewel of this collection, well-deserving of its excellent adaptation into the 2016 film Arrival. Chiang’s musings on the nature of language, perception, time, causation, grief, and parenthood are equal parts emotionally stirring and intellectually gripping. I feel like this is one of those rare instances where the written story and the film are both excellent in their own rights, containing many overlapping qualities but also uniquely suited to their respective mediums.
• “Liking What You See: A Documentary” is intriguing both in its form and content. It’s written like a series of interviews, very much like what we’ve come to expect from a mainstream documentary film. I’ve never seen that style presented in written form before, which was interesting. The story presents a diversity of views on how (or if) we should make use of a new technology that induces “calliagnosia.” This condition essentially cancels out a person’s aesthetic response to seeing human faces, the result being that no one appears more or less beautiful than anyone else. This story is an absolute master class in perspective-taking, with Chiang working extremely hard to present the ethics of calliagnosia from every possible angle.
• Overall, I didn’t find Stories quite as captivating as Chiang’s more recent collection, Exhalation. But that’s great news because it means that the quality of Chiang’s work seems to be improving over time. I am very eager to see where his remarkable imagination takes us next.

Favorite Quotes:

Blinding, joyous, fearful symmetry surrounds me. So much is incorporated within patterns now that the entire universe verges on resolving itself into a picture. I’m closing in on the ultimate gestalt: the context in which all knowledge fits and is illuminated, a mandala, the music of the spheres, kosmos.

I seek enlightenment, not spiritual but rational. I must go still further to reach it, but this time the goal will not be perpetually retreating from my fingertips. With my mind’s language, the distance between myself and enlightenment is precisely calculable. I’ve sighted my final destination. (55-6)

It will forever astonish me how quickly you grow out of one phase and enter another. Living with you will be like aiming for a moving target; you’ll always be further along than I expect. (115)

The physical universe was a language with a perfectly ambiguous grammar. Every physical event was an utterance that could be parsed in two entirely different ways, one causal and the other teleological, both valid, neither one disqualifiable no matter how much context was available.

When the ancestors of humans and heptapods first acquired the spark of consciousness, they both perceived the same physical world, but they parsed their perceptions differently; the worldviews that ultimately arose were the end result of that divergence. Humans had developed a sequential mode of awareness, while heptapods had developed a simultaneous mode of awareness. We experienced events in an order, and perceived their relationship as cause and effect. They experienced all events at once, and perceived a purpose underlying them all. (133-4)

Before I learned how to think in Heptapod B, my memories grew like a column of cigarette ash, laid down by the infinitesimal sliver of combustion that was my consciousness, marking the sequential present. After I learned Heptapod B, new memories fell into place like gigantic blocks, each one measuring years in duration, and though they didn’t arrive in order or land contiguously, they soon composed a period of five decades. It is the period during which I know Heptapod B well enough to think in it, starting during my interviews with Flapper and Raspberry and ending with my death.

Usually, Heptapod B affects just my memory: my consciousness crawls along as it did before, a glowing sliver crawling forward in time, the difference being that the ash of memory lies ahead as well as behind: there is no real combustion. But occasionally I have glimpses when Heptapod B truly reigns, and I experience past and future all at once; my consciousness becomes a half-century-long ember burning outside time. I perceive––during those glimpses––that entire epoch as a simultaneity. It’s a period encompassing the rest of my life, and the entirety of yours. (140-1)

When you see a smile that’s genuine, you’ll see beauty. When you see an act of courage or generosity, you’ll see beauty. Most of all, when you look at someone you love, you’ll see beauty… True beauty is what you see with the eyes of love, and that’s something that nothing can obscure. (269)

Rating: 8/10