Ted Chiang
has been publishing novellas and novelettes for a little more than a
decade, and has published fewer than ten stories during that time. Nevertheless, Nick Gevers selected Chiang as one of the top
ten contemporary SF and fantasy short story writers in a December 2001
article which appeared at Locus Online.
The publication of all of his stories in Stories of Your Life
and Others will give readers who have managed not to notice Chiang a
chance to discover why he has received so many nominations and critical
praise.
As the title
indicates, “Tower of Babylon” is about an attempt to build a tower to
reach to the sky. Unlike the Biblical story, the masons and minors
of his world have succeeded. Hillalum is a miner from Elam whose
services have been hired to break through the Vault of Heaven.
"Tower of Babylon" is part travelogue as Hillalum and his
companions spend four months climbing the tower to the sky, and part
philosophical tale, as he reflects on what, exactly, he is doing and
whether it is something which meets God's approval. Chiang's
denouement is not expected based on the original tale, nor telegraphed by
Hillalum's story as he climbs ever higher. Although Chiang only
gives a sparse description of the various societies which have arisen on
the tower, all of them based on the foundation society, he presents them
in a believable manner which leaves the reader wanting to know more about
them.
“Understand” is Chiang’s take on Daniel
Keyes’s classic “Flowers for Algernon.”
Before the story opens, Leon Greco lapsed into a coma following an
accident. Treatment with
hormone K has begun to raise his intelligence and capacity for learning.
Greco uses his newfound ability to look at the world in a different
way and gain a more complete understanding of it.
At the same time, he grows bored with how easily he is able to
understand what he sees and his newfound intelligence helps to
disassociate him from the rest of the human race.
Chiang creates a human driven completely by intelligence, logic and
a quest for information. Whether
the changes he has made to Leon Greco would give Greco the physical
ability Chiang describes is up to the suspension of disbelief for the
individual reader. Eventually,
Greco comes upon his own equal, or superior, who has not cut himself off
from humanity. Their
conflicting world views provide the denouement for the increase in
intelligence and breaks the story from Keyesian model.
“Division by
Zero” is an hard science fiction story dealing with the science of
mathematics. In the middle of
a brilliant career as a mathematician, Renee tries to commit suicide, in
part because of her discovery that mathematics may not be as consistent as
has always been believed. As
with “Story of Your Live,” Chiang combines the professional life with
the personal one as Renee and her husband experience marital problems when
her professional worries spill into her personal life.
Although Carl knows that he doesn’t fully understand his wife or
her work, he clearly loves her and tries to help her come to terms with
the debilitating discovery she has made.
“Story of Your Life” is an, at first, unlikely
mix of Louise Banks reciting her daughter's biography interspersed with
her descriptions of the linguistic work Banks is performing on the alien
heptapods who have just made contact with earth. Although the story
is disorienting at first as Chiang switches back and forth between the
action, eventually he manages to bring the two plotlines together in a
manner which, while it doesn't explain everything, does provide the reader
with the necessary clues to piece the story together in a logical manner.
“Seventy-Two Letters” is an alchemypunk story set
in the Victorian era in which kabalah (mysticism) functions as a science.
As with earlier stories like “Division by Zero,” Chiang
presents his protagonist, Robert Stratton, as a child first getting
interested in experimentation with a toy golem.
These early views of Stratton’s life are later tied into his
mature research. Stratton,
and through him Chiang, support the idea of cooperation in scientific
endeavor, and when Stratton is denied the chance to cooperate his research
stagnates. Since his research
indicates that there is a strong possibility of the human race become
extinct, it is important to overcome the social and scientific
(kabalistic) pressures which preclude cooperation.
Set in Victorian times, Chiang is able to bring up casual racism
and classism in a non-offensive way, although it is clear that the
problems are still with us. Chiang’s
story is gripping and clever and raises questions about both science,
society and the way the two work together.
“The Evolution of Human Science” was originally published in Nature
under the title “Catching
the Crumbs from the Table.” In
this short piece, Chiang looks at a world in which scientific achievement
has moved beyond human understanding.
While he could have written this as a cautionary tale predicated on
the idea that there were some things that man was not meant to know, he
instead offers it as a natural extension of human inquisitiveness.
“Hell Is the
Absence of God” postulates a world in which appearances by angels and
views into Hell would seem to make faith a matter of fact. Instead,
people react to the knowledge of God's existence and an afterlife in a
variety of ways. The story focuses on Neil Fisk, a non-devout man
who wife is killed during an angelic visitation. While dealing with
his grief, Fisk comes to the realization that if he is to be reunited with
his wife in the afterlife, he must learn to love God. Unfortunately,
never having been devout before, he fails to see how he can love God now
that his wife has been taken from him. Fisk's quest for
understanding brings him into contact with Janice Reilly, a woman whose
physical infirmity was cured during a visitation, and Ethan Mead, whose
own life was strangely unchanged by witnessing a visitation. Chiang
raises several questions about faith in this story with ends by breaking
some of the rules Chiang had set up, but which increases the poignancy of
the story.
Chiang has elected to close the collection with an
original story, “Liking What You See:
A Documentary.” The
piece is written as a transcription of a film documentary, encompassing
several characters with widely divergent viewpoints on the subject of
calliagnosia, a means of allowing people to see what people look like
without making any conscious or unconscious value judgments based on their
appearance. The crux of the
story is the experiences of Tamara Lyons, a young girl who elects to stop
using calli in order to learn more about the world around her.
While the specific issue Chiang addresses may be fictional, the
manner in which he addresses it is balanced in a way which few debates
seem to be these days. Chiang
presents a variety of points of view on the lookism, which can stand in
for the racism and classism discussed in “Seventy-Two Letters,” and
gives some insight into the mechanizations which go on behind the scenes
during a public debate.
For those who have
read some or all of Ted Chiang's stories, Stories of Your Life and
Others is a collection of those stories in one place so you can
revisit all of his writing without having to dig through old anthologies
and magazines. For those who have not yet had the chance to read his
work, Stories of Your Life and Others will open the door on one of
the best new authors to hit the science fiction field in a long time.
