Stories Of Your Life And Others

This is the first collection of short stories by Ted Chiang?, covering pieces written between 1990 and 2001.

The best book of SF since Luminous

This is the best book of SF since Greg Egan?'s 'Luminous'.

From this statement, you may infer at least two things: that by 'SF' i mean hard SF, and that i am one of those who feel that this, the only truly consciousness-expanding drug, is most effectively administered in the concentrated doses afforded by short stories. The eight prescription-only hits in this collection can be neatly divided into two (unequal) groups, according to whether the central idea concerns the world inside or outside the human skull; the five stories about the mind range from the purest hard SF to one in which the SF is all but incidental, whilst the three stories about the cosmos all take a radical approach to fantastical ideas.

Of the stories about the mind, the three hardest concern what happens when humanity becomes able to manipulate consciousness in various ways. 'Understand' deals with a brain-damage patient whose treatment with a new drug enhances his intelligence to a superhuman level; it is, pretty much by definition, impossible for normal humans to imagine what this might be like, but Chiang manages to make it sound convincing, and to tell a good story, culminating in a very elegantly handled encounter with another enhanced mind. 'The Evolution of Human Science' is a very short account, originally published in the scientific journal Nature under the title 'Catching the Crumbs from the Table', of what merely human science would be like after the emergence of hyperintelligent posthumanity; would there be any point, or would we struggle even to understand the posthumans' discoveries? 'Liking What You See' imagines that we could give ourselves calliagnosia - the inability to perceive beauty - and asks what the social consequences might be if we did, and whether we'd want to (and it's not as bad - or good! - an idea as it might sound at first); it's expertly handled, and provokes as many questions as it supplies insights, a rare achievement. 'Story of Your Life', one of two novellas in the collection, revolves around contact with an alien race with a very alien mode of thought, and how immersion in the aliens' language brings one human to a very different way of seeing of the world; the length gives Chiang scope to interweave the science-fictional ideas with a tragic human story, although he doesn't quite manage to make the two strands really connect. 'Division by Zero' is ostensibly about a mathematical paradox, but it's really a study of the impact on the minds and relationships of its characters; the paradox itself is almost entirely inconsequential, so this story arguably isn't really SF at all, and, whilst the story is sensitively handled, it's somehow insubstantial.

The stories about the cosmos are what we might call 'hard fantasy': they start with an essentially fantastic premise, then develop it in the logical, extrapolative way that is characteristic of hard SF. 'Tower of Babylon' revisits that tower, built to reach up to Yahweh himelf, and tells what happens when it succeeds (starting with digging a tunnel through the vault of heaven ...); the treatment of the cosmology and engineering involved puts one in mind of an old testament Arthur C. Clarke. 'Seventy-Two Letters', the second novella in the book, is 'kabbalahpunk', a vision of a Victorian era where the industrial revolution is powered by golems of all shapes and sizes, and natural philosophy still runs on Aristotelian lines; the plot itself is wonderfully inventive, and is resolved with a brilliant twist. Lastly, 'Hell Is The Absence of God' takes a materialistic approach to Christian theology; if angels, miracles, and the descent of sinners to hell are all observable natural phenomena, what place is there for faith?

This collection makes it quite clear that Ted Chiang is a major new talent (for some value of 'new' - the earliest story dates to 1990); Harry Harrison reckons him to be the best in thirty years. The eight stories presented here also demonstrate that he's versatile - he can go from flat-out science to three-dimensional humans, and cutting-edge neuroscience to millenia-old cosmology. This combination makes for a trip of rollercoaster-ride intensity; i look forward to my next hit.

-- Tom Anderson 23/02/2004

Niall Harrison?'s Review May Also Appear Somewhere Around Here Soon

If he can be arsed.