Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang (3 stars)

A collection of short SF stories by Ted Chiang. Some great, some meh. As with all short stories, I found myself wishing the good ones were full novels.

Hard to give an overall score, but 3 stars seems about right.

Tower of Babylon

Great buildup, sucky ending. I felt like this could have gone somewhere very unusual, but just didn't. I loved the idea of people living their entire life on the tower, and everything being locally grown or imported via the month-long human-powered slog up the tower.

Understand

A riff on Flowers for Algernon: super-intelligence via medical operation. Despite overuse of the word 'gestalt' and a tendency to run at the mouth like an overenthusiastic philosophy student, I enjoyed this story. This made me laugh:

Penetrating computer security is really quite dull; I can see how it might attract those who can't resist a challenge to their cleverness, but it's not intellectually aesthetic at all.

The idea of being able to reprogram your mind, and mount attacks on others using sensory inputs was pretty awesome. Also given essentially limitless intelligence, your comprehension is far beyond anyone else in the world. Do you help the 'normals' and their trivial problems, or do you work on really interesting problems they can't even comprehend?

Division by Zero

The idea of creating a proof that contradicts the most basic parts of mathematics is interesting but I felt like this should have gone somewhere more interesting than the personal impact on the mathematician who made the discovery.

Story of Your Life

Very clever use of story structure, and a great idea here. These aliens were everything I wished Vinge had brought to the Tines and Spiders. Rather than the very close-to-human language, history, and technological development of Spiders/Tines the heptapods have a completely different view of the universe, physics, and mathematics, that nevertheless describes the same concepts, just in a different way. Louise gradually comes to this understanding by analysing the complex and very foreign language structure of the heptapods, which should be interesting for anyone with a bent for linguistics.

When the ancestors of humans and heptapods first acquired the spark of consciousness, they both perceived the same physical world, but they parsed their perceptions differently;

We experienced events in an order, and perceived their relationship as cause and effect. They experienced all events at once, and perceived a purpose underlying them all. A minimizing, maximizing purpose.

Spoilers ahead.

To me the idea of predestination where every person has an obligation to exercise their free will to bring about exactly the future outcome seems completely improbable. Could you exercise your free will to bring about the death of a loved one? What happens if you don't?

What if the experience of knowing the future changed a person? What if it evoked a sense of urgency, a sense of obligation to act precisely as she knew she would?

Seventy-Two Letters

The idea of using different Golems for transport, mining, construction and as the basis of technology was interesting. As was the bizarre notion that all future generations are contained within an ova. The story itself didn't impress me.

The Evolution of Human Science

Super-short, but interesting idea. The human race is split in two by technology called Digital Neural Transfer, which could be a near-future version of the Internet. Those who have DNT are incomprehensible to those who don't, and all research and innovation is conducted over DNT.

human parents of a metahuman child face a difficult choice: to allow their child DNT interaction with metahuman culture, and watch their child grow incomprehensible to them; or else restrict access to DNT during the child's formative years, which to a metahuman is deprivation like that suffered by Kaspar Hauser.

Hell is the Absence of God

The world is regularly visited by Angels which cause seemingly random miracles, gross disfigurement, death and natural disaster. People get regular glimpses of heaven and hell, and can see which direction their loved ones go. Fascinating world. Loved the story but I thought the ending should have been stronger.

Liking What You See: A Documentary

Fascinating meditation on the power and manipulation of physical beauty for personal and corporate gain. Brain modification technology allows people to disable their perception of beauty in a human face, with all sorts of interesting consequences. Reactions of those who have had 'calli' all their life and turn it off at 18, and those who turn it on later in life after living normally.

So calliagnosia by itself can't eliminate appearance-based discrimination. What it does, in a sense, is even up the odds; it takes away the innate predisposition, the tendency for such discrimination to arise in the first place.

I have to admit that when I read the following passage I immediately equated 'spex' to Google's Project Glass, which has the potential to change our world radically in good and not so good ways like this.

What prompted us to do this now was the release of a spex version of Visage. That's the software that, when you look at people through your spex, show you what they'd look like with cosmetic surgery. It became a form of entertainment among a certain crowd, and a lot of college students found it offensive.