Stories of Your Life and Others FROM THE PUBLISHER
Ted Chiang's first published story, "Tower of Babylon," won the Nebula Award in 1990. Subsequent stories have won the Asimov's SF Magazine reader poll, a second Nebula Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, and the Sidewise Award for alternate history. He won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1992. Story for story, he is the most honored young writer in modern SF.
Now, collected here for the first time are all seven of this extraordinary writer's stories so far-plus an eighth story written especially for this volume.
What if men built a tower from Earth to Heaven-and broke through to Heaven's other side? What if we discovered that the fundamentals of mathematics were arbitrary and inconsistent? What if there were a science of naming things that calls life into being from inanimate matter? What if exposure to an alien language forever changed our perception of time? What if all the beliefs of fundamentalist Christianity were literally true, and the sight of sinners being swallowed into fiery pits were a routine event on city streets? These are the kinds of outrageous questions posed by the stories of Ted Chiang. Stories of your life . . . and others.
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
Here's the first must-read SF book of the year. Chiang has acquired a massive reputation on the basis of very few pieces of short fiction. This collection contains all six previously published tales, including the Nebula Award-winning "Tower of Babylon," plus a new story, "Liking What You See: A Documentary." It's rare for a writer to become so prominent so fast. In this case, though, the hype is deserved. Chiang has mastered an extremely tricky type of SF story. He begins with a startling bit of oddity, then, as readers figure out what part of the familiar world has been twisted, they realize that it was just a small part of a much larger structure of marvelous, threatening strangeness. Reading a Chiang story means juggling multiple conceptions of what is normal and right. Probably this kind of brain twisting can be done with such intensity only in shorter lengths; if these stories were much longer, readers' heads might explode. Still, the most surprising thing is how much feeling accompanies the intellectual exercises. Whether their initial subject is ancient Babylonians building a tower that reaches the base of Heaven, translation of an alien language that shows a woman a new way to view her life as a mother, or mass-producing golems in an alternative Victorian England, Chiang's stories are audacious, challenging and moving. They resemble the work of a less metaphysical Philip K. Dick or a Borges with more characterization and a grasp of cutting-edge science. (July 12) Forecast: Chiang is poised to prove the exception to the rule that short story collections don't sell as well as novels, backed by blurbs from David Brin, Greg Bear, Ellen Datlow and a host of other big names in the field. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
KLIATT - Dr. Lesley S.J. Farmer
This anthology of eight SF short stories represents Chiang's work since 1990. Chiang takes a philosophical approach to predictive situations: the breakdown of mathematical logic, the link between naming and existence, the transformation of time. Chiang also gives a new spin on the Babel story and the sufferings of Job. As an example, the last story recounts a college freshman's experience. Tamera has been raised with a "filter" that makes her unable to see or distinguish human physical beauty. She decides to turn off that filter, and finds that she is pretty-and notices other people's physical appearance as well. The college is thinking about requiring all students to turn on this filter just as Tamera has, which gives rise to a great controversy. Tamera thinks she can get back her boyfriend who broke up with her before college started. Even though he is not handsome she can see his inner beauty, but he is uncomfortable when his own filter is turned off, and he still does not get back together with her, to a large extent because he doesn't think he is worthy of her. Both he and Tamera turn on their filters again, even though the campus decides not to; she does it to protest the way that the media manipulates the population. While a bit uneven, Chiang's stories are thought provoking. Older teens could gain interesting insights about social issues, based on their reflections on Chiang's ideas. KLIATT Codes: A-Recommended for advanced students and adults. 2002, Tor, 331p., Ages 17 to adult.
Kirkus Reviews
First collection for multiple award-winner Chiang. Of the eight pieces here, seven (1990-2001) are more or less famous; the other is original to this volume. Assuming that "The Tower of Babylon" rose high enough to touch the vault of heaven-what if the builders then attempted to break through, to see what was on the other side? Humans develop godlike intelligence in "Understand," but, Chiang demonstrates, it isn't just intelligence that makes us human. In "Division by Zero," life loses all meaning for a mathematician who discovers a proof that mathematics itself is meaningless. The narrator of "Story of Your Life" deciphers an alien orthography, thereby acquiring the aliens' nonlinear view of time: she remembers the future as well as the past. "Seventy-Two Letters," a sort of compressed novel, combines kabbalistic magic and certain 19th-century scientific doctrines into an entire alternative biology. The short-short "The Evolution of Human Science" first appeared in the prestigious science journal Nature, and ponders what science might become following the advent of incomprehensibly intelligent metahumans. And "Hell Is the Absence of God," the crown jewel of a spectacular assemblage, terrifyingly probes the nature of belief and faith in a world where God, angels, heaven, and hell are all verifiably real and actual. Lastly, the original piece, "Liking What You See: A Documentary," considers, from numerous viewpoints, the freedom to act and react, to like or dislike, other people based on judgments more complex than those deriving solely from appearance. Chiang writes seldom, but his almost unfathomably wonderful stories tick away with the precision of a Swiss watch-and explode in yourawareness with shocking, devastating force.
Home
