Stories of Your Life and Others: Book Review

The Tower of Babylon

So far, I'm kind of in the middle. I might be disappointed with the first two stories for different reasons, but there were also aspects that I enjoyed. I think I might be able to appreciate idea stories if they are short stories. I know I have read idea stories that were novels or novellas, and at the time, they just annoyed me. I would rather have an essay just share the ideas, you know? But I didn't mind that as much, this time around, idk.

The prose in the first one was a problem. It was very workman-like, lacking in the flourish that makes narratives so compelling. I could get used to it, but that doesn't fix things.

I think I liked the first one more. It didn't really go the way I was expecting—I thought the vault would just be an illusion, meaning they would have to keep building—but the ending worked in a different way. I saw readers trying to rationalize the logic of the world that was "revealed" at the end, but I got the impression that there was no logic to it. I thought their understanding was just limited, whether by God or by their nature.

Tower of Babylon: 7/10

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Understand

The second one has an interesting concept to it. But it kind of got out of hand by the end. The notion of higher intelligence is interesting and even something I might want to touch upon in the future; it genuinely is that fascinating to me. At the same time, I often get too skeptical. You can usually tell when the concept starts to fall apart, even if they play it safe. Like: memory is actually separate from intelligence, as far as we understand. And when things steer into the supernatural (or whatever you want to call it), I kind of just tune out.

The execution is usually the problem. They speak so vaguely about the progress—and it feels so obvious, how the author is just skating over the specifics because that would create problems. I especially don't appreciate when the author equates high intelligence with solving the major problems of human knowledge. Doesn't the story imply that gambling was an option, now? The problem of gambling is not due to our intelligence. There are inherent limits to our ability to predict some things.

I think other stories dealt with this concept better. Flowers for Algernon is one: I have a review of that. And R. Scott Bakker's series is the other. They both have a more measured approach, and I think Bakker's execution was probably my favorite.

I did still enjoy the twist of another person like him. Especially when Chiang had them take different paths in response to the change.

Understand: 2/10

***

Division by Zero caught my attention almost from the beginning. I find the ideas of these stories to be fascinating, and the philosophical discussions about the metaphysics of mathematics has always been fascinating to me. In some areas, especially among mathematicians, there are those who think that mathematics exists in a platonic realm that is beyond the reality that we are able to empirically observe. And there are nihilistic chads, like myself, who dismiss math as a mere language. Either way, I could immediately see how a mathematician might have a reaction to their god being struck down in this manner, even if it isn't my own "god."

I also liked the gimmick he used in the subheadings of the story. The word "gimmick" sound derogatory, but that isn't my intent, here. I remember my reaction when I read that and realized how the threads were about to come together. Definitely cathartic.

The execution of the reveal that suicide was the reason for being committed also stood out to me. It was subtextual, which I have a lot of respect for, and I especially appreciated the one-sided conversation that revealed the information.

This was my favorite story up to that point in the collection.

Division by Zero: 9/10

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But Story of Your Life quickly became my favorite story in the collection, and because this was my first time with it (I did not watch the movie), I didn't have any background context to inform me of anything. I was wondering where the two threads of the story would come together, and I wasn't disappointed by the end. I've read more than a few things that have touched upon this subject (linear perception of time being perspective contingent/an illusion), but I still thought this story brought something new to me. The notion that free will means nothing to someone who already knows what is happening is a way of stepping outside our perception of things, and I don't think I truly grasped it, even if I had heard of the idea; quite simply, there is no reason to care about free will, at all; and the only reason we care is because of our own relative position. I especially liked the bit about reading the same story over and over again, despite knowing how it will end. Even in our relative position, we can at least understand the appeal of having a given experience, as opposed to simply knowing what will happen in the abstract.

Though, this also makes me question how it would feel to go through some horrific experience, even as you know it's coming. Our relative position limits our ability to understand that, at least.

I especially liked the technical aspects of this story. I have some experience reading and learning about human perception and its relation to language. The notion of phonemes is instructive. We have to project sound distinctions onto a continuous difference in the real world, which makes some languages incommensurable in some ways. For example: english makes a distinction between the "L" and "R" phonemes. But Japanese lacks this distinction altogether, instead having an intermediate phoneme that sounds a little like each. Just imagine if the color spectrum wasn't ROYGBIV, but RYGBIV, where orange and yellow weren't distinct, but represented by an intermediate concept "Yorange." It's easy to underestimate how much of our interpretations of data are somewhat arbitrary. And this is why there are translation issues. This story captured just how complicated language differences can be. And I liked how it made me think of Star Trek or Star Wars and how they brush over problems like language difference.

Finally, I really liked how the language changed the narrator's perception over time. This true to some degree. Though, I'll admit that I had thought the story had specified that the change was limited and would not go as far as it ended up going. That led to some confusion. Either way, the idea is fascinating, and the character relationships were definitely the best executed in the collection up to this point.

Story of Your Life: 10/10

***

For Seventy-Two Letters, the story was bloated. I only wanted it to end. The concepts were too opaque for me to really grasp in any meaningful manner, although I tried in the beginning. The climax near the end was boring and I didn't care. The ending was annoyingly shoe-horned and stupidly happy/convenient. I hate those endings.

Seventy-Two Letters: 0/10

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The Evolution of Human Science: This is a story concept, not a story.

This and the last one are the worst ones in the collection.

The Evolution of Human Science: 0/10

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Hell is the Absence of God

I found this story to be interesting. Though I interrogated my religious beliefs in my late teens and early twenties, and so I am pretty much past this kind of debate. Either way, I was interested in the overall idea that the story was trying to communicate. I liked how he mentioned that the angels were basically meant to be natural disasters. And this, taken in conjunction with the consistently futile attempts to take meaning out of these actions really stood out to me.

Even as the supernatural was self-evident, the morality attached to the occurrences was impossible for these people to parse. Then it ends with the suggestion that God and morality have no connection. Their intuitions about morality quite simply could not be paired with these supernatural occurrences. It was simply about conviction to God.

The prose of the story, however, was a problem. I can't get away from the feeling that this is really just a summary of what could have been a novella or even a novel. The story is almost entirely told. "Meh" to that.

Hell is the Absence of God: 6/10

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Liking What You See: A Documentary

The last story was good up until the end. It was interesting to think about the implications of the calli and engage with the hypothetical. I personally just want to experiment with the thing so I can understand what it feels like. I guess I would bar access for children, but then let people go wild once they get to 18 years (the opposite of Tamera's parents).

Either way, the hypothetical was interesting in the beginning. He did a good job exploring the different perspectives and making you think about it. Then Chiang's own biases (perhaps ironically) seemed to leak in at the end of the story. It seemed like he was poisoning the well by having one side engage in all this underhandedness. As if business interests don't affect both sides of almost every debate, even the ones apparently opposed to business interests, lol. The side against callis started to be caricatured, and then I just rolled my eyes at the reveal about people being influenced by an altered speech. And then again when a conveniently perfected form of the calli was introduced (one that can be turned off at one's discretion).

Basically, the whole of my politics is built around the idea of process costs and how applications of ideals necessarily depend on this. I get the value of hypotheticals in discussion, but it's also just obvious when someone is conveniently ignoring plot-relevant side effects to make one side more correct.

Liking What You See: A documentary: 3/10

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Conclusion:

Overall: 5/10