Ted Chiang

Stories of Your Life: And Others — (2002) Publisher: What if we discovered that the fundamentals of mathematics were inconsistent? What if exposure to an alien language forever changed our perception of time? These are among the questions posed by the stories of Ted Chiang, eight of which are presented here.

Stories of Your Life: And Others

In his review of Ted Chiang’s brilliant short story collection Stories of Your Life and Others in The Guardian, China Miéville mentions the “humane intelligence [...] that makes us experience each story with immediacy and Chiang’s calm passion.” The oxymoron “calm passion” is an insightful and ingenious way to describe these stories because of the way it hints at their deft melding of the most solid of hard science fiction concepts with an often surprisingly gentle, humane touch. There’s no other author I can think of who can inject such a level of emotionality in a story about a mathematical theorem like “Division by Zero.” There’s no one who has ever combined linguistics, alien contact and the struggles of raising a child as movingly as Ted Chiang does in “Story of Your Life.” And that’s just listing two out of the eight consistently excellent stories collected here.

At this point, because we’re talking about what’s considered by many to be one of the single best collections of short speculative fiction ever, I’d like to encourage you to save yourself some time, stop reading this review and just go buy the lovely new edition by Small Beer Press (which also includes the author’s fascinating notes about each of the stories and features a gorgeous new cover commissioned by Ted Chiang himself), but if you wish to continue reading, the rest of this entry will provide some more impressions of the book and the individual stories, some links to further reading about the author, and at the end, an entirely hypothetical description of his writing process that hopefully will not lead to cease-and-desist letters.

Ted Chiang’s prose is often understated, as if he didn’t want flowery language to stand in the way of the ideas behind the stories. As advanced and frankly strange as some of his concepts are, the lucid and rational tone Chiang employs to introduce them allows them to sneak into your mind without any resistance, much in the same way that a comedian’s dead-pan delivery often amplifies the effect of a joke.

Especially in the pure science fiction stories, Chiang makes no excuses for the hard science that underpins his work and will at times go into great depth explaining the theories behind the tales, even illustrating them with charts. At the same time, he also doesn’t shy away from emotion, especially in “Story of Your Life” and “Division by Zero.” Amazingly, the stories that lean more towards fantasy than science fiction, notably “Hell Is the Absence of God” and “Seventy-Two Letters,” sound just as rational and logical, despite the oddness of their concepts.

Chiang also employs some neat tricks and techniques, such as the lack of any dialogue in “Hell Is the Absence of God.” In contrast “Liking What You See: A Documentary” is essentially all speech (in the form of a series of long interview and debate answers). Also compare the faux Victorian era style in “Seventy-Two Letters” with the modern magazine article format of “The Evolution of Human Intelligence.” Most impressively, in “Story of Your Life,” Chiang intermingles two separate story lines, mostly moving in two temporal directions — and not only is the story perfectly readable, but the technique is highly relevant to the story’s theme. It almost feels like he’s showing off, writing eight stunning stories, none of which are alike.

Several of these stories received one or more of the major genre awards upon publication, including three Nebulas, a Hugo, a Campbell Award, a Sturgeon Award, a Locus Award and a Sidewise Award, with “Hell Is the Absence of God” being the most decorated story with three separate awards. It’s also interesting to note that Ted Chiang withdrew “Liking What You See: A Documentary” when it was nominated for a Hugo, because he felt the story didn’t turn out the way he really wanted it to after having to rush it due to editorial pressure.

With all of this, it’s quite likely that this isn’t the first time you’ve read that this is some of the best short-form speculative fiction work published in the last two decades. If it is, I would like to take this opportunity to encourage you, once again, to stop reading and go buy this collection. If you’re still not on your way to the bookstore, here are a few notes about the individual stories.

The collection starts off strong (say, Jorge Luis Borges-level strong) with “Tower of Babylon,” in which a group of miners are traveling to the tower of Babel, an impossibly tall structure that, in an astonishing literalization of Ptolemaic cosmology, rises past the moon, sun and stars to reach the Vault of Heaven, where God resides. This is one of those stories that starts out sounding normal, takes a left turn into the surreal early on, and ends with one of the all-time greatest brain-twisters in speculative fiction history. It’s also a great example of Chiang’s stylistic habit of using an eminently reasonable tone, almost comparable to that of a realistic travelogue, to describe something wonderfully odd. If M.C. Escher had written short stories, he might have come up with this.

Next up is “Understand,” an examination of the hypothetical effects of unimaginable levels of intelligence amplification. The inside look at the protagonist’s mind is at once impressive and terrifying. Describing this story as “Flowers for Algernon” on steroids doesn’t do justice to its mind-bending final pages, but thematically there’s definitely a link.

“Division by Zero” is maybe the most emotional short story ever featuring this many math references. It consists of 9 sub-chapters, each consisting of a mathematical factoid, followed by a short look into the minds of each of its two protagonists. Saying the story is “about” a math theorem, as I did at the start of this review, is probably misleading, because it’s more about the effect of a theorem on the main character. Like several other stories in this collection, one of its themes is the inevitability of knowledge: the inability to ignore or forget something once it’s entered your mind. (For another great examination of this, check out China Miéville’s story “Details”.)

My personal favorite, and one of the single best science fiction novellas I’ve ever read, is “Story of your Life,” in which a linguist achieves an entirely new perspective on time and awareness while trying to master an alien language. This story, in itself, is easily worth the cover price of the book. It’s filled with poignant, delicate images that circle back to its main theme in unexpected ways (e.g. the main character’s daughter telling her to read a fairy tale “the right way”). It’s hard to imagine how emotional a hard science fiction story can be until you’ve read this one.

“Seventy-Two Letters,” one of the strangest stories in the collection, is set in an alternate version of the Victorian era, in which Golems are an integral part of the burgeoning industrial revolution and the Royal Society of natural philosophers is working behind the scenes to save mankind from extinction. (And since three times is a charm, a third line from this collection towards China Miéville leads through The Iron Council, in which he does some equally innovative — but very different — things with golems.)

The three-page entry “The Evolution of Human Science” is more of a concept than a story, but one that may mess with your head more than any of the others in the collection, especially after you read the author’s brief afterword about it.

In “Hell Is the Absence of God,” there’s no longer any question about the existence of Heaven or Hell — after all, both versions of the afterlife are at times visible from Earth, and everyone gets to go to one of them. Angels occasionally manifest in our reality, usually accompanied by a handful of miracles as well as some corollary damage. In this setting we meet the heart-broken protagonist of the story, whose wife died in the blast area of an angelic visitation, and who is afraid he doesn’t love God sufficiently to be allowed to join her in Heaven. Enough has been written about this extraordinary story that I won’t waste your time with more — suffice it to say that you won’t forget this one easily after reading it.

Closing out the collection is “Liking What You See: A Documentary” (the one he turned down a Hugo nomination for), in which people can selectively turn off the ability to recognize beauty in humans. The story consists of a number of short sections, all either answers to interview questions or parts of a speeches, debates and even commercials. This format somewhat masks its highly emotional content and is a great example of Chiang’s understated style. Most of the characters are very realistically painted college students, full of their newly discovered independence and individuality, and the various ways they deal with this issue (or turn it into an issue) is very sharply drawn.

That concludes this amazing lineup of eight unforgettable and excellent short stories collected in Stories of Your Life and Others. And now, as promised: China Miéville’s “calm passion” oxymoron mentioned at the start of this review, as well as the apparent contrast between the sometimes mind-bending concepts behind these stories and their lucid, uber-rational tone, kept running through my mind. After finishing the final story in the collection, a sleepless night during which I simply couldn’t stop thinking about the possible workings of a mind that can come up with this type of fiction led me to this description of Ted Chiang’s writing process, which, I would like to emphasize once again, is entirely fictional.

At varying intervals of several months to several years, but usually during a full moon, Mr. Chiang is overcome by a fit of inspiration that, in intensity and impact, is probably comparable to one of the angelic visitations he describes in “Hell Is the Absence of God.” After releasing a bloodcurdling scream, he races for his laptop and begins to type furiously for about 72 hours straight, disregarding everything around him in a desperate bid to record the searing visions granted to him before they fade. After this, he tiredly prints out the results (which at this point resemble a Joycean stream of consciousness that contains more neologisms than punctuation), locks them in a fireproof safe, and passes out for about two days. This completes the first phase of Mr. Chiang’s creative process. (While Mr. Chiang is recovering unconsciously, and his family cleans up the debris around his writing area, it’s now time — unbeknownst to the author — for the editors of the major speculative fiction magazines and anthologies to engage in their yearly cage match. The winner of this brutal fight wins the singular honor of being the first to publish the new Ted Chiang story.) Once the author is awake and lucid again, he somewhat sheepishly returns to his daily routine (in which he is an apparently soft-spoken technical writer living in Washington State), but after a few weeks, recollections of his last “turn” start to seep into his forebrain. This indicates the start of the second phase of Mr. Chiang’s creative process, which involves reviewing and deconstructing the chaotic output of the first phase, taking it apart much like a watchmaker repairing a timepiece, and with the help of graphing paper, a microscope, and possibly a few scientific implements that aren’t available yet to the general population, carefully and painstakingly building it into one of his supremely elegant and coolly lucid stories. Incidentally, this unusual and lengthy process also explains why Mr. Chiang has only published about 12 stories in the last 20 years. (Please note again that the above description is my entirely fictional attempt to come to terms with the utter brilliance of these stories. Aside from the editors’ cage match, of course — that’s all true.)

For a more truthful look at Ted Chiang’s writing process, check this Boing Boing interview. If you don’t want take my word for the excellence of this collection, take it from the participants in one of SFsignal.com’s recent Mind Melds, who all listed their ideal table of contents for the Perfect Short Story Collection. Go ahead and count the number of times Ted Chiang is mentioned. Then go buy Stories of Your Life and Others.  —Stefan Raets

The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate — (2007) Publisher: In medieval Baghdad, a penniless man is brought before the most powerful man in the world, the caliph himself, to tell his story. It begins with a walk in the bazaar, but soon grows into a tale unlike any other told in the caliph's empire. It's a story that includes not just buried treasure and a band of thieves, but also men haunted by their past and others trapped by their future; it includes not just a beloved wife and a veiled seductress, but also long journeys taken by caravan and even longer ones taken with a single step. Above all, it's a story about recognizing the will of Allah and accepting it, no matter what form it takes.

The Lifecycle of Software Objects — (2010) Publisher: What's the best way to create artificial intelligence? In 1950, Alan Turing wrote, 'Many people think that a very abstract activity, like the playing of chess, would be best. It can also be maintained that it is best to provide the machine with the best sense organs that money can buy, and then teach it to understand and speak English. This process could follow the normal teaching of a child. Things would be pointed out and named, etc. Again I do not know what the right answer is, but I think both approaches should be tried.' The first approach has been tried many times in both science fiction and reality. In this new novella, at over 30,000 words, his longest work to date, Ted Chiang offers a detailed imagining of how the second approach might work within the contemporary landscape of startup companies, massively-multiplayer online gaming, and open-source software. It's a story of two people and the artificial intelligences they helped create, following them for more than a decade as they deal with the upgrades and obsolescence that are inevitable in the world of software. At the same time, it's an examination of the difference between processing power and intelligence, and of what it means to have a real relationship with an artificial entity.

The Lifecycle of Software Objects

Ted Chiang is one of my favorite writers. He only writes one short story, novelet or novella a year, it seems, but every one is a masterwork. A year in which Chiang’s name does not appear on every award ballot means that he’s skipped writing for a year. (If you haven’t yet read Stories of Your Life and Others, I strongly urge you to do so at once. This is what brilliance looks like.)

In The Lifecycle of Software Objects, Chiang posits that humans have developed a software program that gives buyers a pet — one that never requires walking in the rain and doesn’t cry to be held the way a baby would. But the program requires a significant investment of time and energy, as this software has the ability to learn. Each digient, as these creatures are called, develops its own personality based upon its interaction with its owner. They are able to speak, and their ability to do so develops much the way a human child’s would, that is, through interaction with humans. Digients are great fun for a lot of people...

...People who tire of them. Digients become yesterday’s fad. They are turned off, the same way you can turn off any other computer program, and left in stasis. Fortunately for the digients, they don’t experience anything while they’re turned off, and the only way they notice is because they do not share experiences with other digients who have been kept running continuously. Nonetheless, the fading of the craze for these creatures becomes more and more troublesome, particularly as the original platform on which they were built to run becomes obsolete, and there is nowhere left for them to play.

Worse, some humans have taken to abusing digients for sexual pleasure. This bears an uncomfortable resemblance to child pornography and/or prostitution; but do those concepts make the slightest bit of sense when applied to software programs? If you program the digients to enjoy their sexual exploitation, does that excuse using them in such a way?

Chiang has hold of a great many questions about artificial life. Steven Spielberg’s treatment of the subject in the movie, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, is cursory in comparison. As usual, Chiang is playing with deep philosophical concepts.

The Lifecycle of Software Objects is the first work Ted Chiang has written that fails to live up to the high standard he has set for himself. He has hold of an idea that deserves a full novel: what duties do humans owe to the artificial intelligences they create? But rather than write that novel, he has forced his work into the confines of a novella and these concepts are too deep to be convincingly explored in such a short space. It shows, for example, every time he tries to demonstrate that time has passed with a clumsy transition: “The year following Blue Gamma’s closure involves many changes for Derek.” “Another year passes.” “Two more years pass. Life goes on.” The seamless writing Chiang’s audience has come to expect has gone missing. Many of his fans have long wished that Chiang would write a novel and this idea would have been the perfect vehicle for him to attempt his first. As it is, The Lifecycle of Software Objects is the longest work Chiang has ever written, but it should have been longer yet. —Terry Weyna