Stories Of Your Life And Others, by Ted Chiang

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Short spec-fic stories.

I think this collection is not as good as Exhalation, his later book -- I might be misremembering but I swear his writing in Exhalation got better. The writing here is... often pretty bad, I'd say. A lot of his dialogue feels straight-up implausible, I don't think anyone talks like that, and a lot of his prose feels clunky and awkward.
Still, he very much has his charms, primarily that he seems to be a guy who truly understands tech and philosophy and (dare I say) theology, and has interesting ideas for premises and follows them through in plausible but surprising ways. One of his main "tricks" is to create a world that is like ours in general but where [X] underlying premise is different, often (but not always) because some major premise of religion is actually factually true, and then just following that to its conclusions.

One of the interesting feelings that creates is a battle within yourself, as the reader, to release the assumptions you hold because of the truth of the world we live in. I think a lot of my favourite books have this quality, where the interesting thing about them is a certain wrenching feeling they create inside you, rather than their actual content. (The artist Carsten Hoeller has said this about his artworks, that the art is not the pieces themselves but the way they induce certain very specific, hard-to-name or ill-remembered feelings in the observer, and I liked that -- it was the only placard next to an artwork I can ever remember finding valuable).

Can we talk about the fact that Chiang has only written two short story collections over, like, 30 years? You've really got to admire that, feels like he only publishes what he truly thinks is fabulous.

Alas I don't agree entirely on the fabulousness of all his stories. I would call this collection "spotty"; here were my thoughts:

  • Tower of Babylon -- pretty good, though a bit long. Payoff not much connected to story
  • Understand -- very good
  • Division by Zero made no sense to me, after the hype
  • Story of your Life -- is it possible that the movie version (Arrival) is actually better? Both because it works better in a visual medium, and because they (imo) improved and tightened the plot and the pacing? Also, I have no idea how anyone read this story and thought "this would make a great movie", one of those rare times when I think someone in Hollywood was pretty insightful and visionary.
  • Seventy-Two Letters -- interesting ideas, not sure it was a great story
  • The Evolution of Human Science -- super short, forgettable, not sure what he was going for
  • Hell Is The Absence Of God -- interesting, pretty good.
  • Liking What You See -- really enjoyed this

Looking at this list, it strikes (and amazes) me how bad an author can be at how many things and still be a very good author. In this case, I really don't respect Chiang's prose in this collection and I don't think his plotting or structuring is particularly good either (I think some of the stories in Exhalation were good in this sense, but some also weren't). And yet seemingly-all these stories won every possible award. Either I'm wrong about Chiang's plots and dialogues, or his ideas alone are carrying the rest of his work. I look at Chiang's stories and think: I could write this, my plot and prose are clunky but no worse than his. And yet... Chiang is very famous and successful, and I am not, and there are several highly-conflicting explanations for that (I'm worse and don't know it; he got very lucky; I don't pitch (or write!) enough; his ideas are so great that his prose and plot don't matter).

There are "Story Notes" collected at the end of this book, and I really think the notes should come individually after each story, as they do in the audiobook for Exhalation -- Chiang's work (like Octavia Butler's) is, I think, improved by knowing the background of the ideas he was playing with.

Recently I've taken to looking up authors I've just read in the London Review of Books archive, to see what's been said about them. There are (unsurprisingly) tens of pieces each about an Evelyn Waugh or a Graham Greene, a single (!) review of Helen DeWitt, and not a single (!!) reference, not even in passing, to Ted Chiang. Am I completely out of joint with the times? I really, truly thought Chiang would be popular, intellectual and prestigious enough to merit an LRB review. Maybe I misunderstand the LRB.

Anyway, I'm sad. I'm sad more generally that when I finish reading a book I have no good way to find an intelligent review of it; most reviews are dumb, staggeringly dumb and banal and uninteresting. That sadness is compounded when I think how many academics there are who do nothing but write about literature, who could be spending their time writing interesting thoughts about interesting books, but aren't.

Finally: of all spec-fic authors I can think of, Chiang reminds me most of my friends. Which maybe means he's the author I'd most like to be friends with.