f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review
[Title] Stories of Your Life and Others [Author] Ted Chiang [Rating] ★★★★★ [Year] 2010 [Read] 2012/12/12 [Review] 
What’s there to say about Chiang that all the others don’t say? He is the closest thing to a modern Jorge Luis Borges in melding high concepts with literature to create something better than either; in some respects, I’d rank his best short stories as better than Gene Wolfe’s. His writing is deceptively excellent: I would call him a writer’s writer, because the flat evenness of his prose may strike a reader as boring unless they have tried to write as clearly themselves and failed abysmally, at which point they begin to appreciate Chiang’s infallible choice of words and lucid prose which sinks into the mind without friction. Stories of Your Life and Others is much superior to his novella Life Cycle of Software Objects, and contains pretty much all of his greatest short stories which I have read, except for his excellent “Exhalation”. I read most of them online, so when I had the chance to read a hardcopy of the full collection, I seized it. 1. “The Tower of Babylon”; amusing, and in describing the lives of the people living on the tower, moving in some respects. The final ending feels like an appropriate conclusion. If one had to criticize it, it would be that the Tower itself is completely unrealistic even in the Biblical cosmology of the story: as I said, the best Chiang stories unite literature and good ideas. I would rank this #5 of the 8 stories. 2. “Division by Zero”; not terribly impressive - over-wrought, and I feel I have read this story before and better. #7. 3. “Understand”; a classic in the niche genre of superintelligence, and IMO better than Vinge’s “Bookworm, Run!” and at least as good as Flowers for Algernon. Chiang, like every other author, confronts the limits of his writing ability in trying to write convincingly of a superintelligence who is by definition vastly smarter than he is (the same challenge laid down by Campbell to Vinge: “you can’t write this story, and neither can anyone else”), and so the start of the story is much stronger than the later passages. But the whole is still memorable. #4. 4. “Story of Your Life”; I had actually read this one before, and dismissed it as sentimental tripe with some weak physics or linguistic layering that I didn’t really understand. Fortunately, just a few weeks ago I happened to read some material on the Lagrangian interpretations of physics and combined with knowing in advance the ending, I was able to appreciate the story much better this time. I would rank this #3 of the 8 stories. #3. 5. “The Evolution of Human Science”; short, dubious. Not Chiang’s best work, on either dimension. #8. 6. “Seventy-Two Letters”; simply fantastic. The setting is wonderful, the problem great, the ideas even better, and the solution & meaning better still. #2. 7. “Hell Is the Absence of God”; as an atheist who keeps coming back to the Book of Job, this story came as a gut punch. The writing is Chiang at his most Chiang-y, the world interesting and provocative, and the ending simply unspeakable. But don’t take my word for it, ‘decide for yourself’, as the fallen angels say. #1. 8. “Liking What You See: A Documentary”; interesting ideas, but something about the dialogues and characters seem off. It just jars me. #6.
Ratings and reviews - Gwern.net
Review