Mini-Reviews 1

In line with one of my (many) new year's resolutions, I am trying to write at least a brief review note of what I read, as both aide memoire and an exercise in concision. I post them on Bluesky and Mastodon as I go along, and provide an 'omnibus edition' from time to time on this blog. I read a number of short stories by Ted Chiang recently, mostly from his 2002 collection Stories of Your Life and Others, and this forms the subject matter of this first omnibus post.

From Stories of Your Life and Others

Tower of Babylon 
An immersive, reflective story, in which the intention to build a tower to touch the vault of heaven answers an unasked question. Very effective defamiliarisation of the familiar: up, down, dawn, dusk...

Understand
Science-fiction existentialism as two views of the ultimate aim of human existence. Clever, convincing premise, but the super-enhanced narrator's account of his doings has a espionage-film-script feel to it that partially works, but I found it a bit unsatisfactory as prose.

I haven't listened to this reading of it yet, but might enjoy it a little more.

Division by Zero
A mathematician's existentialist crisis proved by mathematical formula. Touching, thoughtful, sophisticated echoing and balancing of opposites.

Story of Your Life
Rewarding foregrounding of linguistic, rather than military or hard-science, response to a first-contact event, and the transformation of a mind to one that collapses the usual progression to comprehension. Aliens, wonderfully, unresolved. Basis of 2016 film Arrival.

Seventy-Two Letters 
Steampunky:  industrialised golem manufacture, based on the doctrine of names, and the realisation that humankind has a limited duration, in alt-Victorian England. Atmospheric and intriguing. The solution either satisfies or alarms, depending.

Hell is the Absence of God
All of Chiang's worlds (so far) have been impressively imagined—like the best historical novelists, always the right balance, and type, of detail included. This one is a lowering elaboration on the nature of human devotion.

Liking What You See
Not so keen on this one. The idea is interesting, foreshadowing as it does the heightening of life and its appearances via social media/filters, but not that interesting. The characters drag rather than drive the story and the writing is too flat to compensate.

Other Stories

The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate 
A very satisfying and engaging read. Inevitable echoes of Calvino's Invisible Cities but a lively and distinctive analysis, using time-travelling stories-within-the-story, of ideas about predictions, free will, and changing the past.

Exhalation
Chiang in fine form: a mechanical scientist, investigating why clocks are running slow, dissects their own brain to discover the consequence of the universe beginning "as an enormous breath being held." A  meditation on death, as well as a parable both scientific and philosophical.

The  Lifecycle of Software Objects
Relevant in a different way now, this explores the complex socialisation, rather than training, of AI entities. A sense of watching humans create problems they don't quite have the capacity to solve.