Stories of Your Life and Others brings together the short(ish) stories that make up the first half of the career of American author Ted Chiang. While there are elements of science fiction in the stories, they could perhaps best be described as speculative science fact. In short, Chiang asks the question "what would happen if..." and then sets up a world in which that is reality. At the same time, he manages to establish a cast of characters and begin, develop and conclude their story arcs. This is an achievement in itself given that most of the stories are under 50 pages. But it's really only half of the whole.
Chiang is clearly a very intelligent man. While Wikipedia states that his academic endeavours concluded with a bachelor's degree in computer science, I find it hard to believe that he is anything short of PhD level in pretty much every discipline. In fact, the story Understand follows the path of a man who is endowed with a superhuman intelligence that allows him to collate and then transcend all existing human thought, and I imagine Chiang's mind to be on the same plane.
The collection starts in a relatively straightforward manner with Tower of Babylon, an account of the biblical tale of a tower constructed with the aim of reaching God. Once you can get past the physical differences to our world, the story builds nicely to a surprising conclusion and you find yourself immersed in the setting. But that's about as easy as it gets.
It's probably no coincidence that I found Story of Your Life, the inspiration for Arrival, to be the next-most accessible story. During my MA course I was forced to attend a module on research methodologies in applied linguistics. Perhaps it was due to the fact that the lectures were held at 9am on Monday mornings, but I found it hard to see any significant application beyond that study of the vocabulary sizes of various rappers and the recent article breaking down Donald Trump's speech patterns. But Story of Your Life provides another possible use - when aliens first make contact with Earth, a linguistics researcher is sent in with the seemingly impossible task of deciphering what the aliens are saying, and then replying to them. The zen-like approach to language that Chiang invents for the aliens is truly inventive, as is the way in which the story develops and then concludes once the main character begins to understand how to speak and read it herself. It's an abstract story in a lot of ways, but I felt that my knowledge of the area helped keep me grounded.
Consequently, I think there was probably a lot I didn't catch in the other stories. GCSEs in maths and biology only got me so far with Division by Zero and Seventy-Two Letters, while my knowledge of theology (Hell is the Absence of God), sociology (Liking What You See: A Documentary) and genetics (The Evolution of Human Science) is even less developed. And as stated above, to fully understand Understand would require multiple lifetimes of study in a multitude of subject areas. Which is actually the point of the story.
But none of this matters too much, because Chiang can write. While in less capable hands these stories might be frustrating, falling into either textbook-like descriptions of the worlds they describe or focusing too much on the characters and leaving the setting underdeveloped, Chiang balances the two perfectly, meaning that while the concepts require a lot of additional thought, the stories themselves are surprisingly easy reading.
4.5/5 for making me feel stupid.
If The Life & Death of Scenery was the 2nd-best sci-fi hip hop album of 2016, then clipping.'s Splendour and Misery was the best. Producers Jonathan Snipes and William Hutson work on a high level of theory - the latter may have completed a PhD in experimental music, but the concise and entertaining flow of rapper Daveed Diggs means you don't need one yourself to enjoy it.
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