A good collection of short stories, overlapping partially with Exhalation.

Many scifi authors have the tendency to explore advanced technology or physics – worlds that expand on our own. A common theme in Ted Chiang’s work is going the opposite way: choosing a universe with much simpler physics (Tower of Babylon, Exhalation, Seventy-Two Letters) and exploring what life would be like, with a similar flavour to magical realism.

The best story in this anthology is Hell is the Absence of God, set in a world where Judeo-Christian metaphysics is part of quotidian life: angel visitations occur regularly, God makes miracles happen, and you can see souls ascend to heaven. It’s a nice exploration of the problem of suffering, since it controls for the variable of the existence of God. The subversion of religious tropes is a recurring motif in Chiang’s stories, and he consistently delivers – see also Omphalos from Exhalation.

Unexpectedly, my least favourite piece was the eponymous Story of Your Life, which is the premise of the excellent film Arrival. The ideas are excellent, but it just doesn’t work terribly well in textual form. Arrival manages to create a Louise Banks with both emotion and detachment (due to her variant perception of time), while in Story of Your Life, Banks is one-dimensional and almost robotic. I certainly came away with a renewed appreciation of the screenwriter Eric Heisserer’s imagination and Denis Villeneuve’s artistry.

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Premises and commentary

• Tower of Babylon – people are building the Tower of Babylon, which takes months to ascend, in order to reach heaven.
  • I enjoyed the alternative physics and “magical realism”
  • Anticlimactic ending: reaching through the heavens, they end up popping out of the ground. The mystery of the universe is preserved – it’s turtles all the way down.
• Understand – superintelligence drug
  • While superintelligence drugs are a common trope in fiction (Limitless, Flowers for Algernon), I enjoyed Ted Chiang’s take on it.
  • It’s a good complement to Prometheus Rising: Chiang explores the “metaprogramming” circuit – what happens when the brain is so advanced that it can reprogram itself.
  • Interesting discussion on the goal of superintelligence: the protagonist seeks knowledge for his own sake, Reynolds wants to save humanity.
  • Fascinating climax: Reynolds designs an attack that only works against ultimate superintelligence – getting the superintelligence to design its own Gödel sentence!
• Division by Zero – a genius mathematician proves that arithmetic is an inconsistent formal system
• Story of Your Life – the inspiration for Arrival. A linguist learns to perceive time differently by comprehending an alien language
  • This was the most disappointing of the stories in the anthology, if only because Arrival gave me such high expectations.
  • The movie is far better than the story… it makes me even more appreciative of the artistry of Denis Villaneuve.
  • The most interesting part was the brief discussion of heptapod physics vs human physics: because they perceive time differently, all of their physics is formulated in terms of the principle of least action, which is a little unintuitive for humans.
• Seventy-Two Letters – with the right incantation, inanimate matter can be brought to life (like the legend of the golem).
  • This entire story is a fascinating allegory of molecular genetics.
  • With the right incantation (DNA sequence), one can get chemicals to become animate.
  • What makes DNA magical is that it also codes for its own reproduction (see Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid for more)
• The Evolution of Human Science – metahumans are now doing all the scientific research, which is far beyond what normal humans can do
  • The goal of human science is now to decode what the metahumans have discovered
  • Very short, but an interesting take on the purpose of scientific discovery.
• Hell is the Absence of God – angels exist and their visitations wreak havoc. When people die you can see their souls ascend to heaven, or descend to hell.
  • The best story in this collection: delicious religious satire and a lot of emotion.
  • Perfect ending.
• Liking What You See – one can get a mental procedure to stop you from perceiving physical attraction
  • An amusing exploration of “lookism”, from the perspective of probably the most looks-sensitive age group: college students.
  • Thought-provoking and highly relevant to society!
• Stories that were also in Exhalation
  • What’s Expected of Us
  • The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate
  • Exhalation
  • The Lifecycle of Software Objects

Highlights

• Understand
• Division by Zero
• Story of Your Life
• Seventy-Two Letters
• The Evolution of Human Science
• Hell is the Absence of God
• Liking What You See: A Documentary