Stories of Your Life and Others

Really solid, smart sf. A little ponderous, and I found Ted Chiang's “voice” to be a little homogenizing (basically all the characters sounded the same), but the range of his ideas was great - this short story collection spans a very imaginative set - and one of his stories is, imo, one of the best sf short stories ever written. Simply masterful!

Brief notes about some of the stories:

- Understand: This is basically Flowers for Algernon: a first-person account of a dude with brain damage who, through some hand-wavey magical medicine, becomes a super-intelligent mega-brain genius. The difference here being that, this time, the protagonist is basically an asshole (whereas Charlie was a sweetie). Fine.

- Division by Zero: Meh. An academia power couple has angst because the Mathematician Wife has stumbled upon a painful, foundational inconsistency in ALL DA MATHS. I would have been into this in grad school, when having deep, philosophical reactions to foundational mathematical principles was something I considered fun/cool instead of kinda tedious? It was fine. 1+1 = 1, omg.

- Seventy-Two Letters: This was a hoot. What an imaginative idea! A kinda steampunk story with a pleasantly creepy vibe. The world is weirdly skewed, and Chiang does a good job of slowly revealing how this world is different from our own: words - specifically, Hebrew letters arranged in various ways - (inexplicably?) give “life” to clay-based automata. Or sort of. It's 19th century London, and an industry rises up of automatons that can carry shit, clean shit, and do other mindless chores. Protagonist is a “nomenclator” - a scientist (?) who comes up with the Hebrew words that power these automata. He has lots of labor sensitivities (Industrial Revolution being what it is!) and wants to make a self-replicating automaton that can be cheaply distributed to all English households and thus de-industrialize the landscape. Yeah, I wasn't sure about his reasoning either, and neither are his factory worker buddies. Also there is some drama about “mega-foetuses”, and the inevitable Frankensteinean ambitions to make a true automata: an actual person! That can procreate other people! Definitely a hoot. One of my favorite stories in the collection.

- Story of Your Life: This is the short story that turned into the movie Arrival. I found Arrival overly intellectual and overly solemn - i.e. classic mid-2000s literary sf! - and so I wasn't super pumped about the story. But I found reading the story a “second” time to be oddly enlightening. While the movie seemed to be mostly about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (the theory that language “creates” our reality), the short story was much more free will vs. seeing the future. As is cliche for this sf issue, there is a dead child and lots of regret. The ultimate idea is that, even when you can see your sad, tragic future, you still choose it to still feel the feelings - the highs and lows. As I was sobbing at the (super sad) final section, I realized - omg - THAT'S WHAT I'M DOING RIGHT NOW. I knew the ending (of this story), but I still went through the motions of reading it and still felt the feelings afresh! If not more deeply! So that was an interesting meta moment.

- Liking What You See: A Documentary: A fun, fake oral history about a near future where, to combat “lookism” (the statistical likelihood that better-looking people get treated better by society), neurologists have developed a minimally invasive procedure that gives people mild face-blindness. A local college debates where to have everyone have this procedure done, to basically create a lookism-free campus. This was pretty fun, and obviously reminds the reader about all the various older people who variously critique the “special snowflake PC culture” of younger people at liberal arts colleges. Chiang makes a good argument for both the pro-procedure and anti-procedure groups, and it's a nice, dystopian, Black Mirror-ish moral fable.

- Hell is the Absence of God: AHHHH, THIS. THIS. I read this story back in 2008 and it has stayed with me since then, it is MASTERFUL. It's the story that put Ted Chiang on the map for me, and it's the story that inspired me to write The Good Deaths stories (yo, if anyone wants to buy Part I, plz let me knowwww). The idea is wonderful: Chiang envisions an alternative reality where evangelical Christianity is Literally True. The angels of God come blasting out the sky like natural disasters, dispensing with miracles (you! no more cancer!) and causing havoc in a pretty indiscriminate, random way. When people die, witnesses can see their literal souls flying up to Heaven or falling down to Hell. Hell can occasionally be glimpsed when the ground turns translucent: and Hell doesn't look so bad? It's just a place where the angels and God don't appear. The way that everyone deals with this seemingly amoral but inscrutable and all-powerful deity is wonderful. Protagonist is a recently-widowed dude whose wife dies during one of the angel visitations (she gets fatally injured by exploding Starbucks windows); her soul flew up to heaven, since she was a devoted, God-loving nice lady. Protagonist, however, has always been kinda meh about the whole destructive, amoral God business, and fine with going to hell, but now - wracked with grief over his dead wife! - needs to fall in love QUICK with God so he can earn his way into heaven. Baaahhh. IT'S SO GOOD. I think what I love about it is that, even in a world where “faith” is a moot point, the mysteriousness of our lives - the problem of evil, of randomness - would actually not at all be solved by the literal presence of an all-powerful deity. I ALSO admired Chiang's ability to wrap this essentially non-theistic argument in a story that FEELS strongly, especially in the end, like a moral fable. So many emotions in the end! It's like a Grimm Bros. tale, very wtf and very wonderful.