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Jul. 2nd, 2009 02:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsThe stories in Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life and Others have been praised a lot, and with good reason - they're a really good demonstration of what sci-fi at its best does. Each story carefully takes a 'what-if?' idea and extrapolates it out, step-by-step, considering the ramifications that don't necessarily occur to you on the first consideration of the "HEY SO COOL" premise. Even the stories that aren't explicitly science-fictional have sort of this attitude to their premises, which is what makes them work so well.
So, story-by-story, we have:
Tower of Babylon -- so what about a tower that reaches all the way up to Heaven? How do you actually construct something like that when it takes months to get a third of the way up it? There's cool cosmology stuff in here, but what's unique is the description of how the Tower of Babel works.
Understand -- the notes say this was a very early story, and it sort of shows, but cool to read anyways. Everyman gets smart. Then he gets super-smart. Then he gets MEGA-ULTIMA-SUPER-smart.
Division By Zero -- mathy types, beware! This story is about the worst thing that could possibly happen to a mathematician. :O
Story of Your Life -- this is a lot of reviewers' favorite story in the collection, and though it wasn't my favorite, I can see why. Alien linguistics, physics equations, relative perception of time, and parenthood. (The alien linguistics are AWESOME.)
Seventy-Two Letters -- steampunk bringing together two premises: 'what if a lot of the stuff the Victorians believed about reproduction was actually true?' + 'SCIENCE OF GOLEMS!' The ending felt a little abrupt to me, but it was fun getting there.
The Evolution of Human Science -- super-short, but I kind of loved this one. Written in the form of a scientific journal article querying the point of scientific journals when no ordinary human scientists can understand what super-genius-meta-human scientists are saying in their articles anyway.
Hell is the Absence of God -- this one was absolutely my favorite. In this cosmology, angels regularly appear like natural disasters, miraculously healing some and damaging or killing others. The story is about a man who loses his wife in an angelic manifestation, and is beautiful and chilling and touches on a lot of my own personal Religion Issues which I am not getting into at this time.
Liking What You See - A Documentary -- I really liked this one also! Controversy on a college campus about a technique that allows you to turn off your perception of faces as beautiful or ugly.
Most of the stories in the book, though very good, were thinky/intellectual stories for me; "Hell is the Absence of God" is the only one that I felt like was talking to me. But I suspect this would vary person-to-person.
So, story-by-story, we have:
Tower of Babylon -- so what about a tower that reaches all the way up to Heaven? How do you actually construct something like that when it takes months to get a third of the way up it? There's cool cosmology stuff in here, but what's unique is the description of how the Tower of Babel works.
Understand -- the notes say this was a very early story, and it sort of shows, but cool to read anyways. Everyman gets smart. Then he gets super-smart. Then he gets MEGA-ULTIMA-SUPER-smart.
Division By Zero -- mathy types, beware! This story is about the worst thing that could possibly happen to a mathematician. :O
Story of Your Life -- this is a lot of reviewers' favorite story in the collection, and though it wasn't my favorite, I can see why. Alien linguistics, physics equations, relative perception of time, and parenthood. (The alien linguistics are AWESOME.)
Seventy-Two Letters -- steampunk bringing together two premises: 'what if a lot of the stuff the Victorians believed about reproduction was actually true?' + 'SCIENCE OF GOLEMS!' The ending felt a little abrupt to me, but it was fun getting there.
The Evolution of Human Science -- super-short, but I kind of loved this one. Written in the form of a scientific journal article querying the point of scientific journals when no ordinary human scientists can understand what super-genius-meta-human scientists are saying in their articles anyway.
Hell is the Absence of God -- this one was absolutely my favorite. In this cosmology, angels regularly appear like natural disasters, miraculously healing some and damaging or killing others. The story is about a man who loses his wife in an angelic manifestation, and is beautiful and chilling and touches on a lot of my own personal Religion Issues which I am not getting into at this time.
Liking What You See - A Documentary -- I really liked this one also! Controversy on a college campus about a technique that allows you to turn off your perception of faces as beautiful or ugly.
Most of the stories in the book, though very good, were thinky/intellectual stories for me; "Hell is the Absence of God" is the only one that I felt like was talking to me. But I suspect this would vary person-to-person.
