Ted Chiang's work may be familiar to some readers because "Story of Your Life", one of seven in this collection, inspired the 2016 film Arrival, which I haven't seen because it's been a decade since I watched more than one movie in a year; I will recommend one or the other, depending on your preferred medium. For those precluded by a peculiar loyalty to television, I'll point out that "Story of Your Life" reminded me of Lost at its best for the way it created a coherent narrative using events from past and present, and I will therefore expand my above suggestion to include the first three seasons of ABC's hit show as a suitable alternative (1).
Stories of Your Life by Ted Chiang (November 2020)
The stories in this collection were true to the spirit of science fiction in the way they explored with varying success the inevitable questions that arise at the intersection of science, society, and philosophy. A line from one story stands out as a broad summary of the entire work - to prove the obvious, start by assuming the doubtful; Chiang's worlds start with an unfathomable premise - for example, a technology makes us all equally attractive - and follows the chain of events to reach a simple conclusion about our current times - the undiscussed discrimination in modern society is against the unattractive.
The overall result was a bit of a mixed bag for me, and I only reread two of the seven stories. One of the rereads was "Tower of Babylon", a story notable for the way it set the mood rather than for its exploration of a deep or existential question. The collection as a whole produced a handful of interesting comments that I included in my book notes - that night is the Earth's shadow on the sky, that human ears are tuned for human sounds, and that the question of zero complicates the assertion of division being the inverse of multiplication.
The other reread was the aforementioned "Story of Your Life". This was a special story, likely to remain one of my favorite works from the genre for a long time. The crux of the story reminded me of my recent thinking about spoken communication - although the process seems to move sequentially from word to word, there is a type of person who will begin speaking only when ready to express an entirely formed thought. The question for me is whether this is an innate or a learned skill. My experiences from writing TOA incline me to the latter - there are times I feel that I am speaking in complete paragraphs rather than in sentences or even words, and I've noticed that in many of these cases the writing process preceded my otherwise unplanned verbalization.
TOA Rating: Three UFOs out of four.
Footnotes
1) If you think watching just one movie a year is bad, think about this - the final episode of Lost aired the day I graduated from college, and I was so disappointed by the culmination of the show's final three seasons that I stopped watching television. I simply said - I will never again invest this much time in something that might have this ending - and that was the end of it. This was ten and a half years ago.
Of course, if you include sports, I still watch an obscene amount of television.
Anyway, I still stand by those first three seasons, which is why I limited my recommendation to the first half of the series.
