Name: Anthony Teo's review of Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
Item: Stories of Your Life and Others
Rating: 4.5
Author: Anthony Teo

Ted Chiang

With his masterful first collection, multiple-award-winning author Ted Chiang deftly blends human emotion and scientific rationalism in eight remarkably diverse stories, all told in his trademark precise and evocative prose. From a soaring Babylonian tower that connects a flat Earth with the firmament above, to a world where angelic visitations are a wondrous and terrifying part of everyday life; from a neural modification that eliminates the appeal of physical beauty, to an alien language that challenges our very perception of time and reality. . . Chiang's rigorously imagined fantasia invites us to question our understanding of the universe and our place in it.

Stories of Your Life and Others

Anthony Teo

Now in softcover, the first book from one of the most acclaimed new sci-fi writers of the last 20 years. Collected for the first time are all seven of Chiang's stories so far--plus an eighth story written especially for this volume.

“O que mais me encanta em nossa vida juntos é que, sabendo do futuro, escolho agir como se não soubesse…”

Douglas Rodrigues

Includes “Story of Your Life” the basis for the major motion picture Arrival, starring Amy Adams, Forest Whitaker, Jeremy Renner, and directed by Denis Villeneuve. “Shining, haunting, mind-blowing tales . . . Ted Chiang is so exhilarating, so original, so stylish he just leaves you speechless.” —Junot Díaz Stories of Your Life and Others delivers dual delights of the very, very strange and the heartbreakingly familiar, often presenting characters who must confront sudden change—the inevitable rise of automatons or the appearance of aliens—with some sense of normalcy. With sharp intelligence and humor, Chiang examines what it means to be alive in a world marked by uncertainty, but also by beauty and wonder. An award-winning collection from one of today's most lauded writers, Stories of Your Life and Others is a contemporary classic.

Eva Ströberg

Ted Chiang is a master of sci-fi writing! In this book, he wrote 8 short stories that were very interesting and causing me to pause and think of the actual possibilities of most of the scenarios he had presented in the story. One of the “more famous” story “Story of Your Life”that adapted into the film “Arrival” was imho better story than the film (but isn’t it always?). He’s very imaginative, yet still in the boundary of what commoners like me could understand easily 😅 Lets just say I love (sci-fi) stories like these

Kevin Wammer

And there I was, convinced that Science Fiction is mostly about spaceships and aliens. This book is fantastic. Every short story is an absolute joy to read, and I can't wait to dive into Chiang's second short story collection Exhalation.

P.S: There is one story about spaceships and aliens, and the movie "Arrival" is based on that one.

elizabeth

I hadn't read anything by Chiang before, but I had read his Electric Lit interview where he said: “I’m not sure that technical writing has had a direct impact on my fiction, but I think the impulse that originally drew me to technical writing is also one that underlies my fiction, and that is a desire to explain an idea clearly.” Coming from a technical writing background myself and being obsessed with clarity in the writing I do professionally, this stuck with me. I only really explicitly consider the clarity of ideas in works of nonfiction, but reading this collection made it, well, clear what clarity can look like in fiction. 

I suspect this has something to do with Chiang's approach to storytelling, which he also depicted in the aforementioned interview: "Because when a story idea crystallizes in my mind, what I’m thinking about are sentences. I assume that if I were a screenwriter, I’d be picturing scenes... The stories do feel crystallized and the sentences that Chiang crafts are unremarkable and cold on the surface (technical writers love plain language!) but combine like elegantly and efficiently engineered building blocks to explain concepts with precision, build atmosphere, and ask daring questions.

Very interesting storied. Good combination of Sci-Fi/ Fantasy and Phylosohical questions, that are a breeze to read.

Chrispy

Vicky  Nuñez 

Stories of your life and Others is an anthology compilation of short stories, one of them which was the basis for the film Arrival. I loved that film to death and thought I would the anthology that started it all. I was not disappointed. 
All the stories are so different, but they are all very much thought-provoking. Can't recommend them enough.

Tobias V. Langhoff

This is a great collection of short stories. I’ve never read anything by Ted Chiang, but decided to check out this book, since it contained “Story of Your Life”, the basis of the upcoming film Arrival which looked very intriguing. Neither that story, nor most of the others, disappointed. These are philosophical works, mostly science fiction, and very well thought out. A wide array of disciplines intertwine; religion and futility, formal logic and mathematics, consciousness and intelligence, linguistics and pre-determination, eugenics and class warfare, the distinctions between utopias and dystopias, beauty, and much more.

“Tower of Babylon”

The first of several stories about religion that were the least interesting stories from a science-fictional standpoint. It’s not about our world (or a world which could be our own if a few crucial things were changed), which automatically made it less appealing to me. It was well written and had a fine, if predictable, ending – I’m just not sure what to take away from the ending, unless it’s supposed to be an alternate Sisophysian parable from a parallel Bible.

“Understand”

An interesting story about the change of consciousness, a subject that has always interested me. Could beings who are vastly superior in intellect communicate and convey their thoughts to us? How could an intellectual singularity event occur and look like if it could be observed? In this story, a man’s intellect begins rapidly evolving, kind of like in Flowers for Algernon. It turns into a thriller when he realizes there’s another person like him out there. They are both superheroes and supervillains in one package; they can both save the world through utilitarian means that the other can’t allow, so the world isn’t big enough for both of them.

“Division by Zero”

I’ve studied formal logic, so this one was pretty interesting to me. It’s about stuff like Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, but also just the portrayal of how something so abstract as discrete mathematics can consume an academic person and drive them mad when their theoretical world views are shattered, which more or less happened with Gödel.

“Story of your life”

This story is the basis of the film Arrival, and the reason I (and probably many others) picked up this collection. It’s very good. A first contact story where the humans actually try to communicate with the aliens (and vice versa), which is refreshing enough. In addition, understanding each other is realistically enough very hard. Underlying all of this is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity, which posits that the language you speak determines or at least influences the way you think. I studied a bit of linguistics in college – enough to find Sapir-Whorf interesting, but not enough to debunk it, like apparently most linguists have done in recent years. Because these aliens think radically different from us, either because of their language, or else their language is constructed in a very special way because of their different view of the world: They think kind of like Tralfamadorians from Slaughterhouse-Five.

“The 72 letters”

Like the first story, this one also doesn’t take place in our universe, and I initially dismissed it as not as interesting as the others. It’s a strange piece, taking place in an alternate steampunk world where procreation works completely differently, and there is no evolution. However, the story is perhaps the most interesting in the collection after all.

The ancient Jewish folklore about golems is fact, and there’s a kind of robotics industry revolving about researching permutations of Hebrew letters that make up a “name” for a golem, and this name imbues the golem with life and certain qualities. Golems cannot speak or write, however, so they can’t reproduce themselves like Von Neumann machines. This search for the perfect name impression reminded me a bit about the story The Nine Billion Names of God, and also a little about the Jewish mysticism in the film PI.

The story touches upon many aspects of our own society. The protagonist has found a name that gives the golems dexterity, which makes them useful for mass producing golems (except for impressing them with a name, since they still cannot write) and other things, which threatens to bring about an industrialization that will make the robots take over human jobs. This attempt is foiled by a strong union that threatens a strike.

The names that are discovered are covered under a sort of patent law, which also has interesting parallels to our society. I was reminded of how 3D printing soon promises to let anyone mass produce almost whatever they want, except that blueprints are still protected by patents and copyright. This is exemplified by a religious group who claims to have discovered a name that does allow the golems to reproduce a name; they want to combine it with the name that gives golems dexterity, and in exchange the name should be released into the public domain for religious purposes. This group reminded me of the Free Software Foundation and their GPL software license. The protagonist, however, refuses.

After being strong armed by the union, the main character comes into contact with a secret society of researchers who have discovered that the human race is close to extinction. In this world, reproduction is very different: Evolution and genetics does not exist. Instead, just like in our world where a female mammal’s eggs are all pre-created and exist from birth, in this world these eggs also contain the actual foetuses. And each of these foetuses, if female, contain all of its eggs and foetuses again. Like matryoshka dolls. And apparently, humans are about to give birth to their inner-most dolls, and the last generation of humans. Before you ask what sperm is good for in this world: Imbuing the foetuses with some sort of “spark of life”, not unlike the names for the golems.

So this secret society wants to “genetically engineer” the human race so it’s able to reproduce again, by imprinting the foetuses with names or “epithets” that give them this ability. Unfortunately, a side effect of this would be a class suppression, where only the upper classes are given the opportunity to procreate freely. Kind of an indirect eugenics, through natural sterilization.
It creates interesting scenarios that the author obviously gave a lot of thought. Are these epithets Turing complete? Are they recursive, in that there are epithets that make a golem capable of reproducing both itself and its epithet?

In the end, it seems that this story might not occur in a parallel world after all, but in our past; a past that only Jewish folklore remembers – the scientists do, in fact, succeed in making an epithet that can reproduce parts of itself, without the restrictions that would allow class suppression. It sounds a lot like DNA.

“The evolution of human science”

A very short essay from a future academic journal about how human research has stalled since meta-humans arose in a kind of singularity event. This story didn’t give me much.

“Hell Is the Absence of God”

Another religion story. This one was perhaps a bit more interesting, in that it could happen in a parallel universe where religious phenomena and miracles actually occur in a very observable and measurable way, but where the miracles are also just as inscrutable as today when it comes to reason, God’s plan, and fairness. What is devoutness in a world where God obviously exists? How would religion change if its preachings were actually verifiably true? 

“Liking What You See”

An interesting view on the beauty tyranny, this story is set in the early beginnings of what will clearly become a Huxleyan utopia/dystopia where agnosias can be induced in brains. In this case, the inability to recognize beauty.

With most collections of essays, short stories, or other self-contained bits of writing, I find that I am bound to find one that falls flat. Not this time. Each piece embodies a unique concept that, whether or not it was obvious up front, left me wondering, page by page, how things were going to play out. This was one of the most thought-provoking and enjoyable works I have read in a very long time. Bravo sir! 

Brock

azliana aziz

Admittedly I only knew about Ted Chiang through Arrival and was mostly interested in reading the short story that inspired the film and what a blessing it turned out to be. 

Ted Chiang is one formidable sci-fi writer. I wholeheartedly agree with what Booklist said that he puts the science back in science fiction. I'm still in awe of his vast, variety of complex scientific ideas that he managed to spun into brilliant stories. He got some really (enviously) wide range in style and subject matters that he chose to work with.
My favorites:

TOWER OF BABYLON
- sci fi Babylon represent! Loved that ending.

DIVISION BY ZERO
- If Mathematics is just an illusion. 
If what you believe to be true turns out to be lesser.

STORY OF YOUR LIFE
- I wept. Again.

HELL IS THE ABSENCE OF GOD
- Really brought to mind The Leftovers. The question of loving God and the unending debate of why bad things happen to good people. 

LIKING WHAT YOU SEE: A DOCUMENTARY 
- This story really belongs to an episode of Black Mirror. In depth look about lookism and physical beauty.

Includes 'Story of Your Life' the basis for the major motion picture Arrival, starring Amy Adams, Forest Whitaker, Jeremy Renner, and directed by Denis Villeneuve.With his masterful first collection, multiple-award-winning author Ted Chiang deftly blends human emotion and scientific rationalism in eight remarkably diverse stories, all told in his trademark precise and evocative prose. From a soaring Babylonian tower that connects a flat Earth with the firmament above, to a world where angelic visitations are a wondrous and terrifying part of everyday life; from a neural modification that eliminates the appeal of physical beauty, to an alien language that challenges our very perception of time and reality. . . Chiang's rigorously imagined fantasia invites us to question our understanding of the universe and our place in it.

I am haunted by the fact that we do not have enough mainstream authors, curious about the world around them, like Ted Chiang. His work always covers a broad variety of topics, each of them well-researched. The collection was published over 20 years ago, with some of the stories having been written a lot longer before that, which makes it all the more impressive how contemporary to current societal issues they feel. Such quality can only speak of the incredible insight on humanity that Chiang has.

Favourite stories: "Tower of Babylon", "Story of Your Life", "Hell is the Absence of God" and "Liking What You See: A Documentary". "Seventy-Two Letters" had perhaps my favourite premise and I think it is very relevant to modern day society but something about it did not quite hit like the other 4.

I am haunted by the fact that we do not have enough mainstream authors, curious about the world around them, like Ted Chiang. His work always covers a broad variety of topics, each of them well-researched. The collection was published over 20 years ago, with some of the stories having been written a lot longer before that, which makes it all the more impressive how contemporary to current societal issues they feel. Such quality can only speak of the incredible insight on humanity that Chiang has.

Favourite stories: "Tower of Babylon", "Story of Your Life", "Hell is the Absence of God" and "Liking What You See: A Documentary". "Seventy-Two Letters" had perhaps my favourite premise and I think it is very relevant to modern day society but something about it did not quite hit like the other 4.

Aamna

logan chung

Some good some tedious. Tower of Babylon and Story of Your Life are my favorites

Claudiu

Just finished this collection of stories and I loved it. Amazing writing! Started it because I liked the movie Arrival but the actual stories are so much more. Awesome analysis of issues in all their aspects (Liking What You See: A Documentary, Hell Is the Absence of God), such great details of math and physics concepts (Division by Zero, Story of Your Life), of language meaning (Seventy-Two Letters), all wrapped in great stories. Reminded me at times of Philip K.Dick.

rumbledethumps

Most of these stories are about hidden languages, and that is normally a conceit I don't particularly like in a writer. But, these stories stick with me. I find myself thinking about the ideas and concepts in them long after I have finished them. This to me indicates a pretty good book, and even perhaps one worth re-reading.

Maria

One of the few sci-fi books that I enjoy. I think this works for me because while Ted's sci-fi narrative is interesting, what comes through the most was a human story, and it said something about being human.

Favorite stories are:
* Story of your life (of course): poignant and really interesting narrative surrounding a concept that I read in another book, 'eternal recurrence': knowing what a choice would bring and the experiences that would come about but choosing to live this path anyways. This was one of the first short stories that can hit me in a way that a novel takes more words and pages to do.
* Division by Zero: A story that requires more thinking to understand. It's interesting that the empathy that he has come to understand her also divides them - an empathy which separated rather than united them.
* Hell Is the Absence of God: I pondered about the main character's ending and the concept of "virtue isn't always rewarded"
* Understand

I'm writing this review 3 years later without needing to re-read anything. The fact that I can recall the stories and the biggest takeaways so well really speaks to how well-written these stories are.

Gavin

In one sentence: Stunning expansion of science fiction to very distant possible worlds and emotionally unusual near ones. Borgesian scifi.


To be read when: annoyed by the sterility of median scifi and the folksy ignorance of median litfic; if disparaging scifi; if you think Black Mirror is deep...


Astoundingly good. The stories are extremely miscellaneous (hard Sumerian mythology, linguistic-physics ethnography, singularitarian tragedy, Arabian Nights fantasy, mechanical-philosophy tragedy, misotheistic tragedy), but bear one heavy theme - that rationalism, materialism is not the enemy of humanism, but is much more able to accommodate us, our highest values, than is romantic supernaturalism.

So he's an artistically successful Yudkowsky; Chiang's own presumable nerdiness disappears behind his powerful austere prose, even when characters are expounding the principle of least action or the details of ancient masonry.

'Story of Your Life' is so much more interesting, emotionally and scientifically, than the Arrival film it was made into. It is about how alien and repugnant amor fati is, and maybe variational physics.

'Tower of Babylon' is rousing minutiae. 'Hell is the Absence of God' takes the tired, speculative, stupid themes of the Abrahamic conversation - faith, will, love, persistence, atheism - and wrings out a new chord from them. Ah! 



 
   
Galef type:

 Theory 1 - models of how a phenomenon works, &

 Theory 3 - pointing out a problem, &

 Values 2 - thought experiments to reflect on how you feel about something , &

 Style 3 - tickles your aesthetic sense in a way that obliquely makes you a more generative thinker .

Misha

I liked “Hell Is the Absence of God”, “Understand”, and “Seventy-Two Letters” the most.

Bouke van der Bijl

I really enjoy these sorts of small story bundles. My favorite in this one was _Seventy-Two Letters_ followed by _Tower of Babylon_. What's nice about a short science fiction story is that a speculative world can be created without having to fill in all the gaps—if some of these stories were longer you'd have more questions about how the world actually works, but now it can just be used to demonstrate a certain idea.

Shiveen Pandita

This has been on my to read list for a while but I never bothered since I'm not usually a fan of anthology style short story books. However, Ted's writing style is intriguing even disregarding an overuse of "I make tangential scientific connections to add meat to my story" style. Some of the stories that went longer imo should have been cut short, especially the last one. However some of the ones I think had a good freedom of motion to evolve into something bigger were randomly cut short, perhaps not to up the disbelief factor too much. Overall an okay read since I'm not a big fan of the genre, however the writing was captivating and some elements were truly well thought out.

Shona Tiger

Vishwa

Ted Chiang writes some cool shit. His short stories are a work of art. 

Short stories are one of my favourite forms of writing because they pack a punch. And when done well, they're incredibly impactful.

I'd read most of these before several years ago and forgotten most of them (except the titular one, which is the basis for the movie Arrival) and had a great time reading again. Makes you think. Would've been good as a book club reading with the right group of people.

What if men built a tower from Earth to Heaven - and broke through to Heaven's other side? What if we discovered that the fundamentals of mathematics were inconsistent? What if there was a science of naming things which calls life into being from inanimate matter? What if exposure to an alien language forever changed our perception of time? What if all the beliefs of fundamentalist Christianity were literally true, and the sight of sinners being swallowed into Hell was a routine event on city streets? These are the kinds of outrageous questions posed by the stories of Ted Chiang. Collected here for the first time are eight of his extraordinary stories - including one specially written for this volume.

Dylan Garrett

Ted Chiang's stories are a great mix of concept, storytelling, characterization, and counterpoint.
Sci-fi stories often get so deep into their own concept that they lose multi-dimensionality and become preachy and unrealistic. In Chiang's stories with more of a social message like "Liking What You See", I was impressed by how he could bring me through multiple stances and leave me wondering what I would actually do in a scenario that originally seemed so clear-cut.

It's still sci-fi, and it still focuses more on the concept than anything else, but I really enjoyed these stories.

Pavonini

Loved it! 

Every story was different, and I loved his use of different formats/documents to give perspective. Loving the language/religion angles on science fiction. I felt echoes of Flowers for Algernon, The Sparrow, Philip Pullman etc. I'll be seeking out more of his writing.

Nelson Zagalo

“Stories of Your Life and Others” (2002) é um livro de contos dotados de boas estruturas narrativas, bom conhecimento científico e acima de tudo um apurado sentido crítico social. As ideias centram-se no domínio da ficção científica, com alguma fantasia à mistura, seguindo de perto alguns modelos especulativos reconhecidos, tais como “Black Mirror” ou “Twilight Zone”. Ou seja, aquilo que aqui importa não é a escrita, nem sequer a história, mas apenas as ideias. Podemos dizer que estas abordagens da ficção especulativa, que usam metáforas do dia-a-dia para elaborar abstrações críticas, muito suportadas em ciência, acabam evadindo-se da FC para a Filosofia. No fundo, o que preocupa o escritor e os leitores, é a discussão da ideia, a sua plausibilidade, aceitabilidade, exequibilidade, e por fim significado.

Este foi o primeiro livro de contos de Chiang, mas as histórias foram todas (exceto Liking What You See) publicadas previamente entre 1990 e 2001, em coletâneas com outros autores, revistas como a Asimov's Science Fiction, e uma delas — The Evolution of Human Science — foi mesmo publicada na Nature, a revista mãe das revistas científicas. Muitas destas histórias arrecadaram os Oscars e Emmys da ficção científica, ou seja o Hugo e o Nebula na categoria de contos, levando Chiang a conquistar mais de 10 prémios, desde 1991.

Das 8 histórias a mais conhecida hoje é sem dúvida Story of Your Life (1998) por ter sido adaptada ao cinema por Denis Villeneuve com Arrival em 2016. Para quem tiver visto o filme, as ideias que ali se discutem, a sua importância e impacto nas sociedades humanas, serve bem de ilustração do trabalho de Chiang. Naturalmente, e como acontece em todos os livros de contos, não sentimos que todos valem o mesmo, nem que todos valem sequer a pena, por isso deixo-os listados por número de estrelas que atribuí a cada um.


5 *****
Tower of Babylon (1990)
Understand (1991)
Story of Your Life (1998)

4 ****
The Evolution of Human Science (2000)
Liking What You See: A Documentary (2002)

3 ***
Division by Zero (1991)
Seventy-Two Letters (2000)
Hell Is the Absence of God (2001)


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Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang

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