The book featured eight short stories whose connecting theme is the science fiction genre and how deeply human these really are. Chiang didn’t mainly write about the near-future or the effect of futuristic technologies; in fact, his most compelling story and my absolute favorite Hell is the Absence of God is set in an alternate present-day world. And while he did write about this and other main SF tropes (e.g., aliens and automata), Chiang differs because his tales are so human. Most SF stories had that cold, mechanical feel; the readers are transported to new cities and societies that utilize steel more than glass and cement, populated with androids and robots, and what-nots. Chiang wrote about people who suddenly found themselves in the middle of the most bizarre events (see: Story of Your Life, Understand) or how scientific concepts affect our lives (see: Division by Zero). At the center of all his stories are humans who are simply trying to live their lives in the most normal way possible.
As I mentioned, my favorite piece was Hell is the Absence of God. It’s set in an alternate present-day where angel visitations were more frequent and more normal than we could have imagined. These visitations, however, brought both miracles and disasters to the people who were lucky (or unfortunate) enough to witness it. The latter could be said about the protagonist Neil Frisk who lost his wife during a visitation. Determined to spend eternity with his beloved when he dies, Neil attempted to love God, whom he hadn’t been paying attention to before. The ending came as a complete shock and it felt like the ending to George Orwell’s 1984. It was exceptional.
My second favorite is the story I wanted to read after watching the movie Arrival (2016), Story of Your Life. Having known the premise based on the film, I was still not less than excited when I began reading the life of linguist Louise Banks who found herself communicating with aliens and interpreting their language. The plot twist presented at the end of the film had devastated me and I thought the same thing would happen in the novelette. But short story and a full-length film are two separate and different forms of media and one cannot expect that the same elements shown in one could still be efficiently adapted to the other. That’s just common sense. And anyway, the short and movie tackled different matters. While the movie focused on said plot twist and the arrivals of the Heptapods, the book presented and confirmed the twist early on because it was not about it. It was about whether we’d still act the same if shown of our future, of the story of our life. Alas, the concepts of determinism and the Book of Ages were ultimately scrapped out from the movie adaptation. But each was a beast of its own.
And my third favorite is Division by Zero, a succinct tale about a brilliant mathematician, Renee, and her husband, Carl, and the events that followed when she found a proof that the mathematics that she loved and respected was unstable. It was told in three perspectives: the A subsets were written from Renee’s POV; the B’s, from Carl’s. The numerical subsets that introduce the dividing chapters were anecdotes about mathematics. In the end, Renee’s and Carl’s met in a single subset aptly and self-referentially titled “9A=9B” where the readers found themselves heartbroken by the husband’s revelation. Two belief systems were introduced in this and both were decimated in the end.
An honorable mention is Liking What You See: A Documentary where Chiang presented a story in the format of a documentary. “Interviewing” various students from Pembleton University and experts, Chiang started the debate about calliagnosia, a neurological software that make people with it not feel anything about the aesthetic of another person’s face. The universal conflict of more attractive people are more likely to be successful was argued over in this. Interesting students were interviewed, including a female student who decided to remove her nose to “freak” people out and to challenge beauty itself.
The rest are equally fascinating; from the retelling of the Tower of Babel story (Tower of Babylon); to the tale of the man who became a super-intelligent being (Understand); and to the world where inanimate objects could be made alive by a special set of letters (Seventy-Two Letters), Chiang’s imaginative mastery were expressed greatly. Each story was as original, as unique, and as engrossing as the next. It was an absolute delight to experience Chiang’s worlds and words.
 by Ted Chiang){kind=link}
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