Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang

[knivesout]

Stories of Your Life and Others
Ted Chiang
Published: 2004

Remember when science fiction was about crisp, taut short stories that hummed with ideas and exploded with insights and revelations? Remember when you could count on SF to hit you over the head with people, concepts and possibilities that were way larger than 15,000-or so words they inhabited? Those days are pretty much over, it would seem, with audiences and publishers favouring, and authors delivering, weighty tomes that brim with multiple viewpoints, kickass action and are often part of a larger series. SF has been warming its hands at the fantasy campfire, it would seem, and has picked up some of the locals' nasty habits. Or maybe it's just too dark - post-New Wave dystopianism, post-cyberpunk grit and street-savvy, and WAY post-Golden Age optimism, there seems to be little left to do except heap up the rogue AIs, messy, smelly biotech, moral murk and underlying decreptitude of human ideals. Or something like that.

And then there's Ted Chiang. Wandering through by-ways of abstract thought and wonder, he writes SF the way it ought to be. Take note: this isn't a reversion to some notional How Great SF Used To Be style. Chiang's stories are clearly products of this particular time and place in the evolution of SF. What makes them timeless is the sharp, astringent kick of pure Idea-stuff finding expression in Story-form. This truly is SF as a 'literature of ideas'.

Case in point: The Story of Your Life, the almost-title story of Chiang's collection, Stories Of Your Life And Others. It springs from a meditation on Fermat's principle of Least Time, which states, according to Chiang, that light finds the fastest path to its destination and follows that path. Or maybe that light only ever takes the fastest or the slowest path to any given destination. Which implies that light somehow knows what the destination is. Perhaps. Human beings view reality from a causal viewpoint - but a teleological viewpoint might be equally valid.

So how does Chiang play out this idea? By introducing a first-contact scenario, where teams consisting of linguists and physicists interact with alien heptapods through special communication-screens sent by the aliens. The narrator of the story, a linguist, alternates between describing the discovery process, and speaking to her yet-unborn child of the life that lies ahead of her.

In the process of fathoming the heptapod's non-linear script, the narrator begins to understand that they view reality in a fundamentally different way. At some point, human and heptapod intellectual evolution diverged. We see reality as a chain of cause and effect, with the next effect just beyond our immediate knowledge. The heptapods see all of time as existing simultaneously - past, present and future. After some time, the aliens leave as mysteriously as they arrived. The narrator and several other linguists are left with a strange, non-linear understanding of reality.

Chiang steps back from these large concepts to make us care about the narrator and her unborn daughter with a series of poignant, finely-observed vignettes. In the end, the story is less about the impact these new modes of thought might eventually have on human society as it is about the narrator's own journey to revelation and acceptance.

That's what makes this story pure genius.

The ideas are as big and sweeping as you'd want. But the story itself winds up being about the people in it, as much as the ideas. And that's true of the other stories here, too. I just chose this one as an illustrative example.

This is not your father's SF. This is not even your SF. This is SF, in its purest form, for anyone who cares to go along for the ride.

Here's the amazing thing - Chiang only writes short stories! I think he shows an admirable restraint and focus on his own concerns and strengths as a storyteller by doing this. Of course, if he does write a novel someday, I'll be in line to read it. In the meantime, get yourself a copy of Stories of Your Life And Others and read it , if you have any love for SF at all. You know you owe it to yourself! This is the real thing, alive and well in 21st Century.

[GOLLUM]

First of all JP, well done on a very well written and lucid review......

I'm not a big fan of SF but the obvious passion you display for this author's work has inspired me enough to want to investigate this author's craft. And guess what, this guy's day job is as a Technical Writer, so there's still hope for us yet...

He also cites Gene Wolfe as one of the 2 major literary idols he read in his formative years, so if he writes with anything like the intelligence of Wolfe you can count me in.

Anyway I hope I'm not hjacking your thread but here's a link to an interview with the author that seemed pertinent to your comments.

http://www.sfsite.com/09b/tc136.htm

[knivesout]

Excellent interview! I believe one of Chiang's stories, Understanding, can be read online - haven't found the location though!

[GOLLUM]

Thought you might like it....

If you find a free text version of any of his work please let me know either here or via PM please...

[GOLLUM]

OK, for anyone wanting to have a look at Ted Chiang, here's the link to the free text version of his novellete Understand.

Impressive...

http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/under.htm