mixed habitat & densely vegetated hiding places

Stories of Your Life and Others (which is a title that trips me up as if there's something syntactically wrong with it, though I don't think there is) is a collection of speculative fiction, consisting of high concepts developed in an outpouring of copious and inventive detail. Most of the stories are on the long side, verging on novelette territory. The best of them are well researched and thought through to the point of near-airtightness, thoroughly exploring questions like "what if historical scientific theories had been correct?" and "what would communicating with aliens really be like?" while leaving very few holes for the reader to object "but what about—?" As soon as you start to formulate whatever your issue is with the premise, Chiang addresses it. Having read a lot of speculative short stories lately, I have become very aware of how often sf authors will just state a cool idea and not develop it. Chiang's stories are the polar opposite of that.

Some of the pieces that I found less successful were missing the human element, tipping the balance between ideas and characters too far to the idea side for my taste. Chiang also likes to write about religious themes from an atheist perspective, and while this can produce interesting results, sometimes I felt that his outsider approach lacked insight and greatly oversimplified or distorted the concepts he was exploring. But all of the stories offer a lot to chew on and are fun to think about even when they miss the mark.

My comments on the stories may contain spoilers, because they are kind of hard to talk about without going into some detail.


"Tower of Babylon" (1990)

What if the builders of the Tower of Babel really could and really did build all the way to Heaven?

This was my favorite story in the collection. I felt it set an extremely high (no pun intended) standard for pushing a concept to a jaw-dropping extreme while maintaining the focus on the experience of the humans in the story. I love the literalization of ancient concepts of Earth and space, having the characters climbing for months past the sun, moon, and stars. The setting is a perfect blend of fanciful worldbuilding and internally consistent logic. (Just as I was wondering what would happen if a star hit the tower, it was brought up!)

I also found it the most effective of the pieces that explored religion and atheism. Digging through the vault of Heaven and finding yourself back on Earth in an ouroboros... a man goes looking for God and finds himself back in the realm of man. Throughout the story, loving attention is paid to human ingenuity—I especially enjoyed the historically grounded descriptions of Egyptian stonework and engineering—and that prepares you for the conclusion that these are people who never needed God. They are doing it all on their own. (Though it could also be argued that God's contribution was the motivation for them to push their mechanical and logistical skills to the limit! If they can do this, what else can they do? How might the technology they developed for the Tower be put to other uses?)

"Understand" (1991)

A man who experienced brain damage undergoes an experimental treatment and becomes hyperintelligent.

This starts out as "Flowers for Algernon" and then takes a leap into Babel-17, though it reverses Babel-17's order of things—language doesn't give him superpowers, but his ever-increasing meta-self-awareness and physiomental capabilities can't be contained within ordinary languages, so he has to make his own. It touches on similar ideas of going beyond human cognition, but goes into far more detail and specifics about all the new levels on which the protagonist's brain is working, from conscious control of autonomic functions to playing 5D chess with the stock market. Nothing is handwaved, almost to the point of tiring excess.

The most interesting part of the story is when the protagonist is challenged by another test subject who has the same powers he does, but different goals—while the protagonist just wants to see how far he can develop his own mind and doesn't care about anything else, his rival wants to use his powers to make a better world. Of course there isn't really such a thing as a benevolent dictator, but at least the rival has altruistic intentions. I think what's missing here is any discussion of why the characters' motivations differ so greatly. Since we don't know what either of these people were like before they became superintelligent, it's hard to tell what the story is trying to say.

The protagonist is extremely unlikeable, which I imagine is intentional given that his increasingly repugnant self-absorption is his downfall, but it limited the story's appeal for me. I would recommend this story as offering a wealth of ideas for people who want to write about superhuman perception and cognition, but not necessarily as a pleasure read.

"Division By Zero" (1991)

A mathematician disproves the consistency of arithmetic and becomes suicidally depressed.

So, this is an allegory for losing your belief in God (this is stated in the text) and I think it doesn't work, because math and God are fundamentally different in kind. Math is a way of thinking about things, and if our current understanding of math were wrong, there would be another way of thinking about things that would be closer to right. Thinking and scientific inquiry do not stop just because one framework was incorrect, even if it is a very large and longstanding framework. But if there's no God, that doesn't mean there is another version of God waiting to be discovered; it means where you thought there was something, there's nothing. These scenarios are starkly distinct and I don't see how they can be likened.

The mathematician's husband, who is a scientist, though (gasp!) an experimentalist, repeatedly makes this point, and I don't think it is successfully refuted in the text. He asks if it isn't like when they discovered quantum mechanics and had to rewrite the textbooks, and she keeps saying "no, it's not like that, it's totally different" but why? Just saying it's different doesn't prove anything. Which is funny because rigorous proof is what the story centers on, so when you try to talk about that by handwaving everything, it doesn't work.

The most successful aspect of the story is the husband's POV, where his inability to understand what his wife is going through breaks his ability to empathize with her, to the point where he can't stay in the relationship anymore. That part works.

"Story of Your Life" (1998)

A linguist learns to communicate with an alien species and finds her own way of thinking is transformed.

Holy shit, it's a story about doing linguistics that wouldn't make a real linguist die of cringe!! This piece is thoroughly researched and demonstrates fieldwork techniques that are used in real life to learn undocumented languages when the linguist and the informants do not have any common language to begin with.

A lot of things about this story made me think of Daniel Everett, a field linguist who wrote a book (Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes) about his experiences working with people in the Amazon. Everett started his career hoping to translate the Bible into new languages for evangelization purposes, but found instead that the things he learned from his linguistic informants made him question his own faith and change his worldview. The protagonist of "Story of Your Life" also has her understanding of the world deeply changed by learning the aliens' ways of speaking, thinking, and writing. This is another story with a Babel-17 flavor, though it's more nuanced and plausible. The alien language doesn't give her superintelligence, but it shifts her thinking about time and causality in ways that support her humanity rather than pushing her past it. This is an outstanding example of successfully melding a high concept with emotional resonance, as her new outlook helps her find peace and closure around the loss of her daughter.

It also struck me as a good example of a man writing a believable woman, including an empathetic and non-stereotyped depiction of motherhood. It made me feel like Chiang has close female friends who he actually listens to.

I will say it is a bit of a cheat to have your character outright state that a situation reminds her of the kind of thing Borges wrote about. (Though, now that I think about it... Borges did love to namecheck his influences in the text of his stories, so maybe it is appropriate!)

Anyway, after reading this I had to go back and dig up Daniel Everett's demonstration of monolingual fieldwork with a very patient volunteer, so here it is:

Watch on YouTube

"Seventy-Two Letters" (2000)

Victorian scientists co-opt Kabbalah to create golem-like automata. (cn: discussion of antisemitism and violence)

This story does a great job of evoking the vibe and attitudes of Victorian science, in both its optimism and its cruelty, and of showing us things the protagonist is far too naive to grasp. As soon as we see this magitech is being used to augment reproduction, we know it's going to end in a eugenicist nightmare, but the protagonist is shocked! Shocked! He only wanted to help the poor factory workers!

More subtly, the story assumes the reader is savvy enough to recognize how knowledge and power are being stolen from the Jewish community, and how little they can do to stop it. The protagonist is surprised to find Roth tortured, broken and defeated—but this only confronts him with the concrete, bloody reality of what is already happening to Roth and his people.

I appreciated the imaginative resolution to the theory of homunculi and their infinite regress, assuming every species has a finite number of generations before it dies out. It's a clever ending to have the characters essentially inventing DNA—the "letters" that spell out our identities.

I think this is the piece that would have benefited the most from a novel-length treatment, because there is a lot here and a lot more that could be said about it.

"The Evolution of Human Science" (2000)

A future academic paper summarizes the impact of superintelligent posthumans on science.

Chiang wrote this for an issue of Nature that printed fictional academic papers, and I think it shows that he was writing under a tight wordcount constraint. It's quite short and I don't think that works very well for his narrative style, which thrives on copious detail. I would have liked to see characters living in this world, not just be told about it. Is it plausible that posthumans would be doing all the science and regular humans would be reduced to trying to interpret their results? I don't know, maybe? I don't feel like there's enough here to evaluate the thought experiment.

"Hell is the Absence of God" (2001)

In a world where God, angels, Heaven, and Hell are demonstrably real, a widower wishes to follow his wife to Heaven.

Though creative and internally consistent, I don't think this story offers any real insight into religion. It assumes a vaguely Christian cosmology, but it's hard to argue that it really engages with what Christianity has to say about salvation since Jesus is nowhere in the story. The story posits that God is unjust and acts at random, but does any religion actually hold this tenet? If not, isn't it just a distorted, straw man version of religion?

I feel like the authorial perspective is so intensely atheist that the story is destabilized by contradictory assumptions. The premise "what if God were real?" is nonsensical unless you are an atheist, because for theists, God is real and many do not feel that there is any lack of compelling evidence! The depiction of Hell as exactly like normal life only makes sense if you don't believe in God in the first place. I mean, yeah, if you're an atheist, of course "the absence of God" is just normal life! No kidding!

I thought the story worked the best when it talked about the way people are held up as spiritual leaders, sometimes based more on what their followers want to see in a giver of wisdom rather than the content of that person's message. As the story shows, sometimes this takes the form of ableist inspiration porn. I also liked the depiction of people staking out places where angels appear and trying to get hit with a miracle, sort of like storm-chasers.

"Liking What You See: A Documentary" (2002)

A college campus debates a rule requiring students to turn off their brains' ability to perceive facial beauty.

Though the author's position on this is fairly obvious (he's for it), I think he does a reasonable job of looking at it from different perspectives and imagining various reasons why people might be against it. The unconventional format of a documentary transcript is put to good use in that way, showing us interviews with different characters.

The story tries extremely hard to separate lookism from sexism, racism, colorism, and classism; Chiang really really really wants to talk about just lookism and not those other things, frequently struggling to get free from them even within the text. But I think what he's trying to do is impossible and only underlines the inherent and complexly knotted intersections. You can talk about facial symmetry all you want, but you're still not going to get away from the fact that a lot of beauty is not culturally universal at all and that it is only one narrow facet of how people are judged by the external.

The conclusion, which presents a new kind of "deep fake" version of a speaker that makes her seem superhumanly charismatic, is startlingly prescient for 2002 and was actually a lot more interesting to me than the core premise of the story.

I also think it might have been a good idea to reverse the order of this story and the previous one, because the stakes of this one are so much lower that it feels anticlimactic through no fault of its own.

I would like to add that this post is 2500 words long and took absolutely forever. /falls over