Kurt Braddock > Recent Status Updates

Up through seven stories:
7) Hell is the Absence of God: Almost as good as Story of Your Life. This story is about a world in which the existence of God, angels, Heaven, and Hell is a matter of scientific fact, making faith in these things obsolete. Rather than pray for certain outcomes, people act in ways to manifest them, and even in doing so, are not guaranteed what they want. Dark, but really gripping.

Up through seven stories:
6) The Evolution of Human Science - More a speculative article than a story, this was a neat little passage about the future of how we will come to understand things (in the event of human evolution). There isn't much to comment on, since this is the shortest story in the book by far, but it was a cool little read.

Up through 7 stories:
5) Seventy-Two Letters - To be honest, I didn't know what to make of this story. It involves a future scenario where beings can be brought to life with language written on paper and inserted into them... I think. I don't know. Really didn't like this story and was eager to get finished with it. I was happy when I was.

Up through four stories:
4) Story of your Life: The reason I (and I assume, most people) read the book. A fascinating, almost hypnotic story that matches the beauty of Arrival (the movie based on the story). It reads almost as a meditation on the choices we make and whether those choices are of our own free will or not. I'll write a more in my overall book review, but found the story heartbreaking, but beautiful.

Up through four stories:
3) Division by Zero: Not bad -- an interesting way to describe a person's descent into obsession with an idea and drawing analogies to that person's personal relationships. It's written as if it were entirely a mathematical proof, which was pretty cool. I just don't think the story had as much meat on the bones as I hoped for. Good, but not great.

Two stories in.

Understand: Much better than the first story, though it grows more technically complex as the story goes on. To me, it seemed like Flowers for Algernon on speed. I enjoyed the growing abstraction with which Greco could interpret his own thoughts and the way Chiang described the confrontation with Reynolds at the end. Not for everyone, but a great story about the line between genius and madness.

Two stories in so far.

Tower of Babylon: I didn't enjoy this story at all. It read like one of the early books of the Old Testament, with detailed descriptions of the tower, tools, and individuals in the story, with very little plot movement other than "they went up." In the last quarter of the story, it got a bit more interesting as they approached the vault, but the first three-quarters was a bit of a slog.