CBR16 BINGO: Celestial, because the first story is about humans building a tower into the heavens
Four years ago I fell in love with Ted Chiang’s short story collection Exhalation, and I’ve finally made good on the promise to myself to read Stories of Your Life and Others. If you’ve read any of his work, you won’t be shocked to hear that this is the most moving, inventive, and thought-provoking collection I’ve read in years.
Ted Chiang, a graduate of Brown University with a B.S. in computer science, consistently demonstrates what happens when science and technology meet a brilliant imagination and humanistic perspective. Sometimes humorous and sometimes heart-breaking, the stories in this collection all offer glimpses into what humans might achieve.
In “Tower of Babylon,” humans attempt to build a tower high enough to reach the heavens. Unlike the Book of Genesis story, their motivation wasn’t pride or fame, but to know their God better, “a stair that men might ascend to see the works of Yahweh, and that Yahweh might descend to see the works of men.” If you are familiar with the biblical tale, you might be surprised at the direction this story takes. While I enjoyed the “twist” ending, what impressed me most about this story was the power of Chiang’s words to give me vertigo. I never considered myself megalophobic, but his descriptions of workers traveling for months up the tower only to pass off supplies to the next group, who traveled for months, and so on and so on, made me uneasy. One character says, “We live on the road to heaven; all the work that we do is to extend it further. When we leave the tower, we will take the upward ramp, not the downward.” For whatever reason, that freaks me out a little.
Another story inspired by religious symbolism is “Hell Is the Absence of God,” in which angels are terrifying, Old Testament beings who appear at sites of natural disasters. In an attempt to catch a glimpse of Heaven’s light, some people seek out natural disasters (imagine Twister but with biblical storm chasers), hoping it will guarantee them a place in Heaven. Chiang’s notes on this story explain how he wrote it as way to explore the idea of innocent suffering. He comments that he always found the biblical story of Job unsatisfying because, in a story about how virtue isn’t always rewarded and that bad things happen to good people, why does the tale end on a happy note? “Doesn’t this undercut the message?” Not only is that food for thought, but how awesome is it that Chiang is critiquing the Bible from a storytelling perspective?
Other entries are equally intriguing–“Division by Zero” has a mathematician questioning the very nature of reality, and “Seventy-Two Letters” touches upon the power of language, reproduction, autonomy, and even eugenics. And while all the stories in the collection are interesting to varying degrees, Story of Your Life is magnificent.
In this novella, a linguist named Dr. Louise Banks is called upon to help interpret the language of aliens who have arrived in Earth’s orbit. Although she’s one of many linguists and physicists recruited to the task, the story is told from Louise’s perspective on the day she and her husband decide to have a child. The movie Arrival, which was my first introduction to Chiang, did a respectable job conveying the basic ideas of the story, specifically, that understanding the alien language allows Louise to experience time differently and what that means for her future choices. But no visual interpretation can compare to how beautifully those themes are expressed through Chiang’s writing. Take, for example, the narrator’s description of the written language, which she calls Heptapod B (Heptapod A being the completely separate alien spoken language): “When a Heptapod B sentence grew fairly sizable, its visual impact was remarkable. If I wasn’t trying to decipher it, the writing looked like fanciful praying mantids drawn in a cursive style, all clinging to each other to form an Escheresque lattice, each slightly different in its stance.”
As Louise studies the language, she realizes that the aliens don’t experience time sequentially as humans do: “We experienced events in an order, and perceived their relationship as cause and effect. They experienced all events at once, and perceived a purpose underlying them all. A minimizing, maximizing purpose.”
If you could experience time all at once, how would that affect your choices? Would you conceive a child knowing that 25 yeas later you would encounter the worst tragedy a parent can face? What would it mean for free will? This story is infused with love and powerful human emotion while explaining aspects of time through–wait for it–Fermat’s principle. If you don’t know what that is, don’t worry. Chiang explains it with helpful drawings that even a linguist can understand. Story of Your Life is one of the best novellas I’ve ever read; I’m in awe of how much it means to me.
In our modern world where technology is king, Ted Chiang is a potent reminder that people can’t live by AI alone. Through Chiang’s imagination and words, science and art meet, and the results are magical.