"Stories of Your Life and Others" by Ted Chiang

There’s a single, consistent, through-line that binds this short story collection together: Chiang’s exploration of some fundamental aspect of our reality being altered or broken. “Story of Your Life”, the titular title of the collection, is about the perception of time. “Understand” presents a man whose intelligence has so dramatically increased that his perception of reality is incomprehensible to a normal man. “Division by Zero” has a character’s sense of purpose annihilated by the realization of a theorem that mathematically proves numbers as being arbitrary. “Liking What You See: A Documentary" investigates a world in which individuals have the ability to disable their perception of beauty.

These stories, and the others which I did not mention, are also about other things, of course, but it’s the exploration of these ideas and how they impact the world and characters that made this collection so compelling to me. (From this perspective of challenging reality, the first story, “Babylon,” is the weakest, although I did quite enjoy it.) It’s an interesting throughline, even when not the main focus, because its presence is always palpable if you look for it. “Seventy-Two Letters” offers a world where the very nature of things can be deciphered, and where preformation is correct. I do wonder if the genesis for a lot of these stories was the idea, “what if [strange scientific or religious concept] was real?” This consistency in origin which I am arbitrarily assigning was a large aspect of what made the collection so interesting to me; it gives an obvious and interesting lens through which to view the stories and their worlds.

I really don’t feel like I can do the various premises justice. Not only does Chiang have interesting ideas, but almost all of them are explored through the perspectives of characters that are being affected or changed, and it makes an incredibly compelling vehicle for the concepts to arrive in. I also quite enjoyed the story notes at the end of the book, offering a couple of paragraphs on each story.

As with every short story collection, I did not love every story, but unlike most others there were no stories that I actively disliked. You do have to accept what Chiang is bringing to the table; this style of storytelling, especially for “Seventy-Two Letters” and “Understand” are not for everyone. But I felt like I was able to take something meaningful, or at least, got something to think about, from every story. My favorite two are unquestionably “Seventy-Two Letters” and “Story of Your Life”. The former was not without its flaws — compared to its contemporaries it feels unfocused — but it offers a poignant message and warning about how classism and eugenics can be brought into scientific study if they are not actively guarded against. “Story of Your Life” is probably the most famous of these stories, as it was the basis for the 2016 film Arrival and consequently was the reason I read this collection in the first place. I’m glad I did; many of these stories will linger with me for a while.