Stories of Your Life and Others [Paperback]

There's one weak story here, "Understand," which wastes a very intriguing Flowers for Algernon/Camp Concentration-like setup of the creation of superintelligent beings on a cliched contest for supremacy among supermen: the notes indicate this was the earliest written, if not the earliest published. The earliest published was "Tower of Babylon," a matter-of-fact SF-like practical recounting of the construction of the Tower of Babel; it won a Nebula award. Other stories include "Seventy-Two Letters," a similarly SFnal investigation of a fantasy premise (What if medieval theories of human reproduction were true? And the answer is: If Nature hadn't invented DNA, humans would have had to); "Hell Is the Absence of God," a cruel, utterly matter-of-fact story set in the universe of fundamentalist Christianity; "Division by Zero," the story of a mathematician who learns mathematics is not true; and "The Evolution of Human Science," a scientific article wondering what's left for humans in a future where posthuman evolution (a la Ken MacLeod) has succeeded.

My two favorites are "Story of Your Life" and "Liking What You See: A Documentary." I especially recommend "Story of Your Life" to any story-structure geeks reading this: it is told by a woman who learns an alien language which changes her perception of time. It is about how the knowledge of a future outcome changes our perceptions of actions; it is about grief; it is about love. It works even if you think the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is absurd.

"Liking What You See: A Documentary" (the only story original to the volume) posits that a way to deliberately and reversably induce "calliagnosia"--the inability to recognize human beauty. (Studies of brain damage indicate that facial recognition is a perception skill-set that's separate from the recognition of beauty; Chiang extrapolates from there.) A college campus debates making calliagnosia mandatory for all students, and a number of parties--students pro, students anti, a student who grew up in a calliagnostic community but opted for reversal on her 18th birthday, and, of course, advertising agencies--give their responses. Clever and thought-provoking, and it very nicely uses the "ivory tower" to show that it's not possible to examine such theses thoroughly without investigating likely uses and misuses by outside forces.