# Stories of Your Life and Others

![Book cover of Stories of Your Life and Others](/books/covers/stories_of_your_life_and_others.jpg)

by [Ted Chiang](/books/authors/ted_chiang/)
Awards: [Hugo](/books/by-award/#hugo-award), [Locus](/books/by-award/#locus-award), [Nebula](/books/by-award/#nebula-award)
★★★☆☆

## Review

_Stories of Your Life and Others_, by Ted Chiang,
is a collection of 8 short stories and novellas. The concepts range from alien
linguistics to the literal nature of God, but reading them together reveals a
strict logical formula that sometimes lets the ideas overshadow the
narratives.

_Stories of Your Life and Others_ was my nomination for this month's science fiction book club.
I've wanted to read Ted Chiang's work for 2 reasons. First, I appreciate
how short stories---like [_Lena_](/books/valuable_humans_in_transit_and_other_stories/#lena) or [_I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter_](/books/i_sexually_identify_as_an_attack_helicopter/)---can explore big
ideas in a stripped-down way. Second, authors I love, like [Peter Watts](/books/authors/peter_watts/), speak
incredibly highly of him.

Chiang's stories all have fantastic ideas, but
reading _Stories of Your Life and Others_ made me realize they rely on a formula:

1. Take an axiom.
2. Turn the crank and see what happens.
3. QED, the ending follows logically from the first 2.

Every story is different, very different, but that formula makes them all
_feel_ the same. They are at their worst when he just works through the idea
logically without adding anything more. It's the same problem I have with [PKD](/books/authors/philip_k_dick/), which I discussed in my review of [_Ubik_](/books/ubik/): ideas alone aren't
enough to carry a story. Fortunately, Chiang doesn't leave
all of his concepts bare. His stories are best when he does something
subversive with his formula, like in [_Hell Is the Absence of God_](/books/stories_of_your_life_and_others/#hell-is-the-absence-of-god), or adds
rich worldbuilding, as in [_Tower of Babylon_](/books/stories_of_your_life_and_others/#tower-of-babylon).

### _Tower of Babylon_ {#tower-of-babylon}

★★★★☆

[_Tower of Babylon_](/books/stories_of_your_life_and_others/#tower-of-babylon) assumes [Ptolemaic cosmology][geo] is correct and
treats the construction of the [Tower of Babel][babel] as a real mega-project.
It's a simple story about a group of miners climbing the tower to dig their
way into Heaven, and I really enjoyed the details Chiang
includes about the tower, how the people on each level live, and the journey
the miners make.

[geo]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geocentrism
[babel]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel

During the story, the guide tells the narrator about a time when a star
crashed into the tower. Stars as literal, physical objects moving past the
characters reminded me of [Banks](/books/authors/iain_m_banks/)'s [_Matter_](/books/matter/), with its
rollstars that roll on tracks set in the ceiling of each level of Sursamen. It
made me realize that [Banks](/books/authors/iain_m_banks/) also based his shellworlds on
Ptolemaic cosmology: giant towers to support the heavens, a world of
concentric shells, and stars on tracks.

### _Understand_ {#understand}

★★☆☆☆

In [_Understand_](/books/stories_of_your_life_and_others/#understand), a brain-damaged man is given an experimental treatment
that continuously increases his intelligence until he can see the patterns
behind everything and discovers another super-intelligence that's been
watching him. It's a response to [Keyes](/books/authors/daniel_keyes/)'s [_Flowers for Algernon_](/books/flowers_for_algernon/), but without the eventual slide that adds emotional weight.

When I read this story, I had not yet figured out Chiang's writing pattern, so I kept second-guessing
where the story was going. I was sure the protagonist was delusional, but no,
the doctors really are trying to trick him, the CIA really is watching. It's
my main critique of Ted Chiang's writing: his proof-like structure makes
it hard to be taken by surprise.

### _Division by Zero_ {#division-by-zero}

★★★☆☆

A mathematician disproves the consistency of arithmetic, allowing her to show
that `1 = 2`. Her proof shatters her view of math and drives her to attempt
suicide, while her husband struggles with the realization that he no longer
understands her.

There is some clever narrative structure related to the math: comparing things
that are similar and showing how different they are (the mathematician and her
husband), or how things that seem different can be the same (understanding and
not understanding). But in the end, I didn't really connect with the
characters.

### _Story of Your Life_ {#story-of-your-life}

★★★★☆

[_Story of Your Life_](/books/stories_of_your_life_and_others/#story-of-your-life), the basis for the feature film _Arrival_, is
probably the most famous story in the collection. It's about first contact
between humans and heptapods, narrated by one of the linguists trying to
decipher the language. As she learns it, she realizes that heptapods
experience time differently than humans do, and that learning their language
makes her experience it the same way.

This is another good example of Chiang playing with
structure: we experience the story the way the linguist does, with the future
and the past mixed together. Her tenses slip when she talks about her
daughter, and like [_Tower of Babylon_](/books/stories_of_your_life_and_others/#tower-of-babylon), the story begins where it ends.

The heptapods know what is going to happen, but they do it anyway because
otherwise what they know to be true wouldn't be true. The narrator starts
behaving the same way, having a child even though she knows it ends in
tragedy, unable to avoid it and not wanting to.

Telling a story out of order in time reminded me of how [Banks](/books/authors/iain_m_banks/)
tells a story forward and backward in [_Use of Weapons_](/books/use_of_weapons/). Both authors use
the narration itself to hide clues for the reader: Chiang
through wrong tenses, [Banks](/books/authors/iain_m_banks/) by never naming the protagonist.

### _Seventy-Two Letters_ {#seventy-two-letters}

★★☆☆☆

[_Seventy-Two Letters_](/books/stories_of_your_life_and_others/#seventy-two-letters) assumes the world _actually_ works roughly how
17th-century scientists and mystics thought it did. [Golems][golem] are real
and animated by a [Kabbalistic][kabbalah] name (the titular 72 letters).
Reproduction happens not via sperm and egg but via a homunculus already in a
man's body when he is born. And the human race is 5 generations from
extinction.

[golem]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golem
[kabbalah]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabbalah

I've read stories where authors use mysticism to make technology feel
unknowable, like [Gibson](/books/authors/william_gibson/)'s Vodou Loa in [_Count Zero_](/books/count_zero/), or the
Adeptus Mechanicus praying to machine spirits in _Warhammer 40,000_. Chiang does the exact opposite. Like [Stephenson](/books/authors/neal_stephenson/)'s treating Sumerian myth as a literal language-virus in [_Snow Crash_](/books/snow_crash/), he
takes mysticism and treats it strictly as a technology. Names as programming
and math; golems as industrial machines.

The golems reminded me of modern large language models. Both take instructions
and carry them out in a manner that only humans could before, and as the
golems improve, they start replacing humans at skilled crafts. We might be
starting to see the same thing with our own language golems, piles of words
given thought, as they completely replace manual programming.

This story has a lot of interesting branches: golems as a replacement for
skilled labor, and the guild's objection to golems building each other; the
way names are factored and studied to create new ones; the coming end of the
world; the interplay between the politics of the poor and the gentry. But Chiang is only interested in how they serve the plot, not in
exploring their consequences. That's why I didn't like this story. It was too
short to make use of all its ideas.

### _The Evolution of Human Science_ {#the-evolution-of-human-science}

★★★☆☆

A very short story in the form of a letter from a scientific journal editor to
their readers. The narrator writes about how humans no longer do science now
that smarter metahumans have surpassed them, and how human scientists can no
longer understand what is going on.

Despite its short length, the story hints at deep questions: What do you do
when your life's work moves beyond your ability? Should you allow your
children to become metahuman, knowing you won't be able to understand them? As
a parent, I find that last question poignant because we never truly understand
our children; they grow up in a different world than we did.

But we don't need metahumans to see this happening. Science has already become
so specialized that no one can understand more than a tiny fraction of it,
with thousand-person collaborations needed to advance the field. And now
LLM-assisted math proofs are solving problems humans spent decades failing at,
through a new form of intelligence.

Structurally, [_The Evolution of Human Science_](/books/stories_of_your_life_and_others/#the-evolution-of-human-science) is similar to [qntm](/books/authors/qntm/)'s
[_Lena_](/books/valuable_humans_in_transit_and_other_stories/#lena), which uses a dry Wikipedia article format to deliver its horror.
The dissonance between the tone and content is what makes it work. Here, the
letter-from-the-editor is also dry, but the content isn't disturbing enough
for the juxtaposition to be effective. The story also reminded me of Siri
Keeton, the "synthesist" narrator of [Watts](/books/authors/peter_watts/)'s [_Blindsight_](/books/blindsight/).
Just like the scientists, Keeton interprets the actions and responses of
posthuman (and alien) intellects into something baseline humans can
understand.

### _Hell Is the Absence of God_ {#hell-is-the-absence-of-god}

★★★★★

In my review of [Bradbury](/books/authors/ray_bradbury/)'s [_Fahrenheit 451_](/books/fahrenheit_451/), I said: "Some
of my favorite books have structures that reinforce their themes." [_Hell Is the Absence of God_](/books/stories_of_your_life_and_others/#hell-is-the-absence-of-god) was my favorite story in _Stories of Your Life and Others_ because
it subverts Chiang's formula and, in doing so,
reinforces the theme of the work.

The axiom in this story is "God is real, His acts are quantifiable". Chiang follows it to its logical conclusion: angelic
visitations are treated like weather and reported on the news; statistics on
who is damned and who ascends are tracked; people flock to places where angels
often emerge, hoping for miracles. Neil Fisk's wife was killed in a visitation
and ascended to Heaven. Neil doesn't love God, and so knows he won't be
reunited with her. But he also knows that if you view Heaven's light when an
angel emerges, you are rewritten to unconditionally love God and always ascend
to Heaven. He sets out to see it.

Neil's reliance on the quantifiable system of God is similar to Sol Weintraub
from [Simmons](/books/authors/dan_simmons/)'s [_Hyperion_](/books/hyperion/). Despite Sol being an academic
expert on God's covenant and Kierkegaard's _Fear and Trembling_, all of his theological mastery is useless when a god-like entity demands
the sacrifice of his daughter, Rachel. He cannot outdebate the absolute. Neil
tries the same, reasoning: if A (see the light), then B (love God), then C
(salvation).

Neil succeeds in glimpsing Heaven's light, comes to love God unconditionally,
and is sent to Hell anyway. Chiang breaks the chain of
logic he followed so steadfastly in the rest of the stories, and in doing so
shows you that God isn't just, God isn't kind, God---even in a world where you
think you can write down rules that He follows---is Sovereign.

This story, with its natural-disaster-like angels, reminded me of _Neon Genesis Evangelion_,
where angels are alien, terrifying, and an extinction-level threat. It's also
similar to [Stross](/books/authors/charles_stross/)'s _A Colder War_ in how it takes the
cosmic and grounds it in the real world.

### _Liking What You See: A Documentary_ {#liking-what-you-see-a-documentary}

★★★☆☆

This story takes the form of a documentary script about calliagnosia, a
reversible procedure that makes people blind to how attractive someone is. A
college holds a vote to require students to have calliagnosia, which sparks
debate: Should it be mandatory? Is it ethical to force people to use it? The
vote fails, but not because of the debate---advertisers release a new
modification that makes people unnaturally charismatic and use it to persuade
students.

The idea is similar to [Vonnegut](/books/authors/kurt_vonnegut/)'s _Harrison Bergeron_, in
which people are made equal by handicapping everyone to the same level. But
where [Vonnegut](/books/authors/kurt_vonnegut/) comes down clearly on the anti-handicap side, Chiang leaves his questions open.

The story is great as a discussion prompt: my book club spent some time having
the same debate. But it's another of Chiang's
great idea stories, without that "something else" to elevate it.

<p class="tombstone" markdown="1">[□][qed]</p>

[qed]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q.E.D.

## Related Books
- [_Valuable Humans in Transit and Other Stories_](/books/valuable_humans_in_transit_and_other_stories/) by [qntm](/books/authors/qntm/) --- ★★★☆☆: Valuable Humans in Transit and Other Stories is a collection of short stories by qntm.
- [_I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter_](/books/i_sexually_identify_as_an_attack_helicopter/) by [Isabel Fall](/books/authors/isabel_fall/) --- ★★★★★: I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter, by Isabel Fall, is a novelette about a pilot whose gender is reassigned to “attack helicopter” to make her a better soldier. It follows Barb as she bombs a high school, wrestles with what she’s become, and asks what gender even is.
- [_Ubik_](/books/ubik/) by [Philip K. Dick](/books/authors/philip_k_dick/) --- ★☆☆☆☆: Ubik, by Philip K. Dick, is a 1969 science fiction novel about a prudence organization that hires out anti-psis and anti-precogs to protect people’s and corporations’ privacy. Everything begins to fall apart when they’re lured into a too-good-to-be-true job where their boss is murdered. Suddenly, reality starts deteriorating, with objects reverting to older versions, and the characters start dying one by one.