"And the result is that beauty is slowly ruining our lives."
STORIES OF YOUR LIFE AND OTHERS
Ted Chiang
Each of the stories in this collection is a marvel.
There's craft at work, and reading these stories (or experiencing them, really) often carried the sensation of voyeurism: I was watching a craftsman meticulously piece together a watch or chip away at crystals to power an engine. The science that had so intimidated me when I'd first begun reading science-fiction is here in abundance, but the sense of wonder comes from watching it being made intimate. If science-fiction is the literature of ideas, then this collection of stories is the chef d'oeuvre of one of its chief operators. These things, all of them, are sturdy and move with mechanical grace, but they are so beautiful and, more importantly, so deft in helping a man through the living and understanding of his life.
There's a certain vertigo that attends the blowing of one's mind, a scintilla of heat behind the eyes and just under the skull's top, shortness of breath, the beginnings of reflexive tears, the heart trip-hammering in your chest. All of the stories here did that to me. A good half of them did all of that while engendering in me an almost overwhelming gratefulness at having been alive to read them, thankful for this walking meat sack that could be moved and whose heart could be so touched by the science happening in those pages. And amidst all of this is the sheer extrapolation of ideas, an idea, past plausibility, past realism, into a land strangely recognizable, farther than we've been yet so much like home, as Hillalum the miner discovers in "Tower of Babylon". Even "Understand," the weakest story in the collection manages the feat of extrapolation impressively. But when these stories were firing on all pistons, when they managed that magical combination of impossibly intelligent brain-busting and pathos, the result is metanoia. The aforementioned "Tower of Babylon" filled me with a sense of wonder I'd not known in a long time, "Division by Zero" wrenched the heart and was a miracle of craft in that I hadn't realized how much of the story's poignancy lay in its structure until the kicker right at the very end. "Liking What You See: A Documentary" was a thrill to read and a prime example of a mundane bit of quotidiana passed through the machinery of Chiang's mind and processed into a wondrously poignant insight onto the human condition. The story from whose title the collection derives its own, "Story of Your Life," has been made into a movie starring Amy Adams and Forest Whitaker. Because movies behave as though all first-contact stories need to involve global calamity and military might, I highly recommend the source material, which promises a much quieter and more meaningful and meaningfully cerebral experience.
But the most powerful story here, for me, was "Hell Is the Absence of God." I finished the collection a few days ago and I'm still not ready to talk about that story and what it did to and for me. The meditation on grief and belief and all the different ways a person relates to God, how different people take different things away from calamity, how we derive purpose. It feels inadequate to talk about the story, as opposed to letting myself bask in the ineffable.
Which brings me to what surprised me the most: Chiang's preoccupation with the celestial/religious. Though "Seventy Two Letters" didn't capture me quite so completely, it did seem as though it shared DNA with both "Tower of Babylon" and "Hell Is the Absence of God." It could simply be that such a preoccupation in this writer's hands has made those stories my favorites.
I'd wanted to read this collection before I saw Arrival, and I'm so glad that I did. I've a feeling these stories will remain with me for quite some time and I am overjoyed that I was able to experience them the way I did.
Ted Chiang
Each of the stories in this collection is a marvel.
There's craft at work, and reading these stories (or experiencing them, really) often carried the sensation of voyeurism: I was watching a craftsman meticulously piece together a watch or chip away at crystals to power an engine. The science that had so intimidated me when I'd first begun reading science-fiction is here in abundance, but the sense of wonder comes from watching it being made intimate. If science-fiction is the literature of ideas, then this collection of stories is the chef d'oeuvre of one of its chief operators. These things, all of them, are sturdy and move with mechanical grace, but they are so beautiful and, more importantly, so deft in helping a man through the living and understanding of his life.
There's a certain vertigo that attends the blowing of one's mind, a scintilla of heat behind the eyes and just under the skull's top, shortness of breath, the beginnings of reflexive tears, the heart trip-hammering in your chest. All of the stories here did that to me. A good half of them did all of that while engendering in me an almost overwhelming gratefulness at having been alive to read them, thankful for this walking meat sack that could be moved and whose heart could be so touched by the science happening in those pages. And amidst all of this is the sheer extrapolation of ideas, an idea, past plausibility, past realism, into a land strangely recognizable, farther than we've been yet so much like home, as Hillalum the miner discovers in "Tower of Babylon". Even "Understand," the weakest story in the collection manages the feat of extrapolation impressively. But when these stories were firing on all pistons, when they managed that magical combination of impossibly intelligent brain-busting and pathos, the result is metanoia. The aforementioned "Tower of Babylon" filled me with a sense of wonder I'd not known in a long time, "Division by Zero" wrenched the heart and was a miracle of craft in that I hadn't realized how much of the story's poignancy lay in its structure until the kicker right at the very end. "Liking What You See: A Documentary" was a thrill to read and a prime example of a mundane bit of quotidiana passed through the machinery of Chiang's mind and processed into a wondrously poignant insight onto the human condition. The story from whose title the collection derives its own, "Story of Your Life," has been made into a movie starring Amy Adams and Forest Whitaker. Because movies behave as though all first-contact stories need to involve global calamity and military might, I highly recommend the source material, which promises a much quieter and more meaningful and meaningfully cerebral experience.
But the most powerful story here, for me, was "Hell Is the Absence of God." I finished the collection a few days ago and I'm still not ready to talk about that story and what it did to and for me. The meditation on grief and belief and all the different ways a person relates to God, how different people take different things away from calamity, how we derive purpose. It feels inadequate to talk about the story, as opposed to letting myself bask in the ineffable.
Which brings me to what surprised me the most: Chiang's preoccupation with the celestial/religious. Though "Seventy Two Letters" didn't capture me quite so completely, it did seem as though it shared DNA with both "Tower of Babylon" and "Hell Is the Absence of God." It could simply be that such a preoccupation in this writer's hands has made those stories my favorites.
I'd wanted to read this collection before I saw Arrival, and I'm so glad that I did. I've a feeling these stories will remain with me for quite some time and I am overjoyed that I was able to experience them the way I did.