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Title: Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang ISBN: 0-7653-0419-8 Publisher: Orb Books Pub. Date: 01 July, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.62 (24 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Brain and heart
Comment: Ted Chiang has two gifts.
First, like Greg Egan, he has the uncanny ability to take a seemingly innocuous scientific fact and turn it into a story. You'd think that would be a given for sf writers but few can actually pull it off. The trick is to not show the reader what the world would be if some law were changed, but to make him think about it. Ted Chiang's stories are not rides, they're challenging, they change you while you read them. You quickly get into the main protagonist's frame of mind even when it's very alien (like the all-knowing character in "Understand" or the one who "chrono-synclastically" remembers the future in "Story of your Life") and you fully understand its problem. Moreover, you start to logically follow its train of thought, deftly guided by the author's hand.
Each one of these stories is built around a simple but brilliantly developed hypothesis (except for "72 Letters", which is built around two simple but brilliantly developed hypotheses, and that's maybe why it's the less emotionally engaging of the book): What if maths were inconsistent ("Division by Zero")? What if the tower of Babylon had reached Heaven ("Tower of Babylon")? What if you could choose not to perceive the beauty of a face ("Liking What You See: A Documentary")? What if Heaven was a certainty but you couldn't bring yourself to love God ("Hell Is the Absence of God")?
In an interview for Locus, Ted Chiang said that he aimed for the sense of wonder that discovery brings. That's exactly what I felt reading his stories: each time, I discovered something about the nature of an imaginary world and, conversely, about the nature of ours.
Ted Chiang's second gift is empathy. Not only do we understand why the protagonist has a weird predicament, but he also makes us care about it. The main idea of each story is so well intertwined with its protagonist fate that the process of discovery is also a catharsis. Basically, Greg Egan's "Luminous" and Chiang's "Division by Zero" talk about the same thing: what is true in maths. But where Egan tickles our brains with images of waves of theorems competing for truth, Chiang pierces our hearts with the story of a woman wrecked by a discovery that even precludes her, in a perverse way, from ever finding solace.
Other reviewers have written here that these stories are bleak. They are not. They are true, which often means that they're tragic. The protagonist of "Tower of Babylon" sees the dreams of thousands of people shattered, yet does he feel despair? No, he is elated by the truth he's learnt. And so are we, thanks to Ted Chiang's gift.
Chiang's style is quasi-vonnegutian (an author he cites in his notes): short sections ranging from half a page to two pages, each bringing its own intellectual or emotional impact, adding a layer to the story. This style makes for easy reading and sometimes even becomes an effective storytelling technique (in "Division by Zero", "Story of Your Life" and "Liking What You See: A Documentary"). His prose is fluid except when he voluntarily obfuscates his subject ("The Evolution of Human Science") and he makes complex ideas easy to grasp and play with. This is not a surprise since most of his stories basically talk about language.
I've been using Amazon for years but it's the first book that compelled me to write a review.
"Stories of Your Life and Others" is the best sf book I have read in years.
This is what sf is about.
Rating: 5
Summary: More lives, please.
Comment: I always forget how much I love reading SF. I've read it all my life, but I've started veering towards the softer stuff, fantasy, and urban fantasy as I've gotten older. And then I'll pick up a book like this and remember all over again how wonderful SF can be. The stories range from a tower of Babel to an alien first encounter, to pretty much everywhere in between. They're amazing. Most of them won awards, and it's quite apparent why. "Hell is the Absence of God" just won a Hugo, for example. I think only two stories in the book haven't been at least nominated for anything, and one of those was written for the collection. I am slowly converting the rest of my friends to the Cult of Chiang. I gave it to my mom to read and she raved over it for 15 minutes when I called to ask her how she liked it.
Rating: 5
Summary: Great short sci-fi!
Comment: Possibly the best collection of SHORT science fiction that I have ever read! All of the stories are engrossing and intellectually stimulating.
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Title: Toast: And Other Rusted Futures by Charles Stross ISBN: 1587154137 Publisher: Cosmos Books (NJ) Pub. Date: 01 February, 2002 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection by Gardner Dozois ISBN: 0312308604 Publisher: St. Martin's Press Pub. Date: 23 July, 2003 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: The Fantasy Writer's Assistant and Other Stories by Jeffrey Ford ISBN: 193084610X Publisher: Golden Gryphon Pr Pub. Date: 01 August, 2002 List Price(USD): $23.95 |
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Title: The Etched City by K. J. Bishop ISBN: 189481522X Publisher: Prime (OH) Pub. Date: 01 February, 2003 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: A Scattering of Jades by Alexander C. Irvine ISBN: 0765340984 Publisher: Tor Books Pub. Date: 01 July, 2003 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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