Stories of Your Life and Others in War Nerd Reading List

Feb 05, 2023 Rashid Yasin rated it really liked it

Shelves: sci-fi

Ted Chiang is an inventive writer of short stories, and those collected here are no exception. This collection ranges from excellent to good - as an anthology, it's hard to judge as a whole, so I'll go through each briefly.

The Tower of Babylon is a great exploration of what Chiang describes in the end-notes as a work of early-history science fiction - "what if the Tower of Babel reached so high it knocked on the (literal) doors of heaven?" A number of the ones in this collection take seriously s Ted Chiang is an inventive writer of short stories, and those collected here are no exception. This collection ranges from excellent to good - as an anthology, it's hard to judge as a whole, so I'll go through each briefly.

The Tower of Babylon is a great exploration of what Chiang describes in the end-notes as a work of early-history science fiction - "what if the Tower of Babel reached so high it knocked on the (literal) doors of heaven?" A number of the ones in this collection take seriously some element of religious belief/tradition and then push it to the limit to explore what sort of world that would create. In this case, brick layers and builders would come from miles and miles to build such a colossal tower that communities live suspended in the air, above the sun, moon, and stars where their plants grow downward and they have never touched the ground. A neat introspection with a nice touch of non-Euclidean geometry to top it off. A later story, Hell is the Abscence of God takes a similar premise (what if Angels regularly visited Earth, bringing both miracles and destruction) with a capstone about God's Will being fundamentally unknowable and, as presented therein, somewhat capricious. Both present a world filled with religiosity, something often lacking in other works of science fiction, that I appreciated as a nice touch of world-building.

Understand is the best of the bunch, in my opinion. A man brain-dead from almost dying in a frozen lake is brought back to life with a drug that repairs his lost neural connections, with subsequent doses bringing him to superintelligence. The way Chiang addresses both the intricacies of what could be possible by synthesizing all the cues we pick up, not only social or scientific or political, but also in being able to understand the pheremones and brain-patterns that guide subconscious behavior or the the meta-organization of the human brain. It's Flowers for Algernon, but instead of reverting back at the end, the man reaches higher levels of understanding than anyone else ever could dream of.

The Evolution of Human Science picks up in a similar location, exploring what would happen if metahumans (which could easily be substituted in for AI) developed scientific advances that "normal" humans not only could not find on their own but could not even understand in the first place. So science no longer is about discovery, it becomes a practice of hermeneutics and interpretation of the texts and messages from higher-level intelligences that don't even regularly communicate in a language normal humans can understand. Our inability to grasp the whole universe and to see that it might be unobservable or that physics might violate certain axioms that we have always held true is explored in focus in Division by Zero where a proof of mathematic uncertainty (1+1 does not always equal 2), shakes someone's foundations of reality. If we discovered such a proof, what would we even do with it? And when someone has the foundations of their reality so shaken, how can they keep themselves together when their world's core assumptions are no longer true?

Story of Your Life is now and will forever be "the story that gave rise to Arrival", which was a great movie and companion to the short story. I never got deep into variational calculus to understand that metaphor for the aliens' view of time and communication, but it's a great exploration into our ability to understand the world and how other species might do so differently.

Seventy Two Letters is another exploration of a simple premise but with a lot of other pieces thrown in. Overall, it seemed a little flat - the combination and spread of different ideas was fascinating, but the end result became a little muddled due to their overlap. We have a early-industrial society based on use of the golems of Jewish myth, powered by specific letter combinations, the desire to use cheap automation to prevent the ills of mass-industrialization and wage slavery, the growth of super-sized fetuses to explore genetics via microscopy, a form of reproduction that requires all information of all future generations to be contained in the sperm, a Lamarkian system of evolution, a plot by the rich to start a mass program of eugenics, an assassination plot by a jealous trade union, and ultimately a transition to the usual chromosomal form of reproduction we know in our own reality. Fascinating, but it doesn't cohere as the best short stories should.

Liking What You See is probably my second-favorite of the group - it focuses on "lookism", i.e. the discrimination of individuals based on their overall facial beauty. It is written as the script of a documentary with many of the main characters teenagers, which unfortunately gives the entire thing a somewhat juvenile tone. While the word obviously conjures comparisons to racism (something we're all familiar with and should know as insidious at a much deeper level than "lookism" is), I do find it an appetizing idea to think about and didn't find the implicit comparison to be made lightly. There's something real there. A lot of the side-commentary was about our cultural standards of beauty and how advertising and a whole set of beauty industries are incentivized to keep us feeling inferior to an always-unattainable beauty ideal. It is core to their business model. But more fundamentally, I think he posits the idea that, more than the manipulation by corporations or the inequities of societal standards, there is a built-in weakness in our genetics that the beautiful are privileged over the less-beautiful and that we do judge people by outward appearances in ways we often don't think about more than subconsciously. The anecdotal data about CEO's and US presidents being taller than average comes in here. While "pretty people" aren't a cohesive enough social group to have the replicated problems of bigotry towards racial, religious, gender, or national identity, there's obviously something to explore deeper. The story proposes using a neural block on the center of the brain that assesses faces for beauty, which I don't think is actually desirable, but I do think we'd be better off as individuals and a society if inequities due to the perception of external traits was minimized. It's a neat thought, well explored! ...more

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