These are amazing, more than 4 stars, and worth propping open on my steering wheel and glancing down to grab up a thought-ful of words at a time on straighaways and gentle curves. He's won enough awards that he once turned down a Hugo nomination for My introduction to the fiction of American author Ted Chiang comes with Stories of Your Life and Others , a collection of eight hard science fiction short stories published over the previous twelve years.
My anticipation was to dust off one tale in particular, 'Story of Your Life', the source material for a movie titled Arrival starring Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner that opens in the U. I dove into the collection due to Chiang's gift for Stories of Your Life and Others is a very interesting collection of stories. For me, that reduced my enjoyment of a few of the stories while others had the perfect balance for me. One story The Evolution of Human Science was only 3 pages and, therefore, too Review once I'm home.
For now, let's just say that the final story got me into trouble with some people at the train station. Now that I've had some time to reflect on all the stories I've listened to in this collection, I can honestly say that not one was bad. Sure, three were rather mediocre, but the others were either at least good or even so exceptional that they made up for the mediocre ones without much effort.
There are 8 short stories in this book: 1 Tower of Babylon 2 Understand Arrival by Ted Chiang is an ebook I picked up from the library because everyone was talking about the movie and I wanted to watch it but I like to read the books before seeing the movies, I have a thing about that.
I didn't know this was a book of short stories. Again, I have a thing about not reading blurbs if I can help it in books I have already. If I am looking for a book, that is different. This book is not a novel but a lot of short stories. Each one is drastically different and each mak There are seven stories here: Tower of Babylon was probably my favorite.
It is based on the Biblical story but with great twists and insights about human pretentious at higher knowledge and how the universe conspires silently to confound them. Understand was an interesting one, but for me ended kind of abruptly. Story of Your Life Told from the perspective of a mother remembering her child.
Absolutely heartbreaking. And it was only 50 pages. The mother, a linguist, is recruited by the government to interpret the language of an alien species, and she adopts a new perception of reality. Easily one of the best short stories ever written. The Tower of Babylon A weird and mysterious way to start the short stories collection. Rewriting legend; as always with Chiang, best prefaced with the words: 'Imagine if Shelves: ebooks, award-nominee-hugo, award-winner-hugo, award-nominee-nebula, award-winner-nebula, multiple-award-nominee, multiple-award-winners, 6-star-books, all-time-favorites, award-nominee-locus.
Simply put, this is the single best collection of short fiction science fiction or otherwise that I have ever read. While my personal favorite is 'Hell is the Absence of God,' each and every story has something memorable, something original and something brilliant to offer. If you have not experienced Mr. You will be very glad you did. Ted Chiang is a genius! This anthology is total brain candy. Although some of them are quite dense for my taste, it makes you think and re-read the paragraphs so that you can have a thorough grasp of what he's actually trying to say.
Although this is tagged as 'sci-fi', it lingers more on 'hard science' since it discusses scientific theories and other jargons, which is also esoteric, by all means. For centuries, you What's there to say about Chiang that all the others don't say? His writing is deceptively excellent: I would call him a writer's writer, because the flat evenness of his prose may strike a reader as boring unless they have tried to write No accounting for taste especially your own.
This book has had rave reviews and not from the usual sources. It has won a few well regarded awards. And I hated it. The overall writing style I found to be flat. The characterisation was awful. Has this author ever met another human and talked to them? It has the same warmth as an IT support manual. Quite a bit of science fiction is not exactly literary but it more than makes up for it by exploring ideas.
This collection of short stories had ideas but He lives near Seattle, Washington. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are. Please follow the detailed Help center instructions to transfer the files to supported eReaders.
Saxton Comp Review 19e Download Torrent ». You'll give me a sudden, brief hug, and your hair will smell of apples. Sorry, I was distracted.
What did you say? Hossner here? It hasn't. Look for anything that might help us. Has there been any indication of what the heptapods want? Of what they value? Burghart, the linguist at the Fort Worth looking glass, spoke up. They maintain that they're here to observe, and they maintain that information is not tradable.
I know that the heptapods have occasionally stopped talking to us for brief periods. That may be a tactical maneuver on their part. Yet when humans thought about physical laws, they preferred to work with them in their causal formulation. I could understand that: the physical attributes that humans found intuitive, like kinetic energy or acceleration, were all properties of an object at a given moment in time. And these were conductive to a chronological, causal interpretation of events: one moment growing out of another, causes and effects created a chain reaction that grew from past to future.
And these were conductive to a teleological interpretation of events: by viewing events over a period of time, one recognized that there was a requirement that had to be satisfied, a goal of minimizing or maximizing. And one had to know the initial and final states to meet that goal; one needed knowledge of the effects before the causes could be initiated. I was growing to understand that, too.
You'll be three. We'll have gotten as far as getting you bathed and into your jammies, but no further than that. You'll be standing at the bookshelf, pulling down a video to watch: your latest diversionary tactic to keep away from your bedroom.
God, somebody please shoot me. I'll pick you up and carry you under my arm to your bed, you wailing piteously all the while, but my sole concern will be my own distress. All those vows made in childhood that I would give reasonable answers when I became a parent, that I would treat my own child as an intelligent, thinking individual, all for naught: I'm going to turn into my mother. I can fight it as much as I want, but there'll be no stopping my slide down that long, dreadful slope. Was it actually possible to know the future?
Not simply to guess at it; was it possible to know what was going to happen, with absolute certainty and in specific detail? Gary once told me that the fundamental laws of physics were time-symmetric, that there was no physical difference between past and future. I liked to imagine the objection as a Borgesian fabulation: consider a person standing before the Book of Ages, the chronicle that records every event, past and future.
Even though the text has been photoreduced from the full-sized edition, the volume is enormous. With magnifier in hand, she flips through the tissue-thin leaves until she locates the story of her life. She finds the passage that describes her flipping through the Book of Ages, and she skips to the next column, where it details what she'll be doing later in the day: acting on information she's read in the Book, she'll bet one hundred dollars on the racehorse Devil May Care and win twenty times that much.
The thought of doing just that had crossed her mind, but being a contrary sort, she now resolves to refrain from betting on the ponies altogether. There's the rub. The Book of Ages cannot be wrong; this scenario is based on the premise that a person is given knowledge of the actual future, not of some possible future.
If this were Greek myth, circumstances would conspire to make her enact her fate despite her best efforts, but prophecies in myth are notoriously vague; the Book of Ages, is quite specific, and there's no way she can be forced to bet on a racehorse in the manner specified.
The result is a contradiction: the Book of Ages must be right, by definition; yet no matter what the Book says she'll do, she can choose to do otherwise. How can these two facts be reconciled? They can't be, was the common answer. A volume like the Book of Ages is a logical impossibility, for the precise reason that its existence would result in the above contradiction. Or, to be generous, some might say that the Book of Ages could exist, as long as it wasn't accessible to readers: that volume is housed in a special collection, and no one has viewing privileges.
The existence of free will meant that we couldn't know the future. And we knew free will existed because we had direct experience of it. Volition was an intrinsic part of consciousness. Or was it? 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? I stopped by Gary's office before leaving for the day.
Did you want to grab something to eat? He shut down his computer and gathered some papers together. Then he looked up at me. I'll cook. We just need to go shopping for the ingredients. It won't take a minute.
I almost lost him when he abruptly turned in to a parking lot. It was a gourmet market, not large, but fancy; tall glass jars stuffed with imported foods sat next to specialty utensils on the store's stainless-steel shelves. I accompanied Gary as he collected fresh basil, tomatoes, garlic, linguini. My gaze wandered over the shelves— peppermills, garlic presses, salad tongs—and stopped on a wooden salad bowl. When you are three, you'll pull a dishtowel off the kitchen counter and bring that salad bowl down on top of you.
I'll make a grab for it, but I'll miss. The edge of the bowl will leave you with a cut, on the upper edge of your forehead, that will require a single stitch. Your father and I will hold you, sobbing and stained with Caesar Salad dressing, as we wait in the emergency room for hours. I reached out and took the bowl from the shelf. The motion didn't feel like something I was forced to do.
Instead it seemed just as urgent as my rushing to catch the bowl when it falls on you: an instinct that I felt right in following. Two very different utterances; in fact, they were probably mutually exclusive within a single household.
Yet either was a valid interpretation; only context could determine what the sentence meant. Consider the phenomenon of light hitting water at one angle, and traveling through it at a different angle.
Explain it by saying that a difference in the index of refraction caused the light to change direction, and one saw the world as humans saw it. Explain it by saying that light minimized the time needed to travel to its destination, and one saw the world as the heptapods saw it. Two very different interpretations.
The physical universe was a language with a perfectly ambiguous grammar. Every physical event was an utterance that could be parsed in two entirely different ways, one casual and the other teleological, both valid, neither one disqualifiable no matter how much context was available. Humans had developed a sequential mode of awareness, while heptapods had developed a simultaneous mode of awareness. 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. I have a recurring dream about your death. In the dream, I'm the one who's rock climbing—me, can you imagine it?
We're just a few feet below a ledge where we can rest, and you won't wait until I've climbed up to it. You start pulling yourself out of the pack; I order you to stop, but of course you ignore me.
I feel your weight alternating from one side of the pack to the other as you climb out; then I feel your left foot on my shoulder, and then your right. I'm screaming at you, but I can't get a hand free to grab you. I can see the wavy design on the soles of your sneakers as you climb, and then I see a flake of stone give way beneath one of them. You slide right past me, and I can't move a muscle. I look down and see you shrink into the distance below me.
Then, all of a sudden, I'm at the morgue. An orderly lifts the sheet from your face, and I see that you're twenty-five. I was just startled; I didn't recognize where I was for a moment.
When you're three and we're climbing a steep, spiral flight of stairs, I'll hold your hand extra tightly. You'll pull your hand away from me. We'll repeat that scene countless times during your childhood. I can almost believe that, given your contrary nature, my attempts to protect you will be what create your love of climbing: first the jungle gym at the playground, then trees out in the green belt around our neighborhood, the rock walls at the climbing club, and ultimately cliff faces in national parks.
I finished the last radical in the sentence, put down the chalk, and sat down in my desk chair. I leaned back and surveyed the giant Heptapod B sentence I'd written that covered the entire blackboard in my office. It included several complex clauses, and I had managed to integrate all of them rather nicely. Looking at a sentence like this one, I understood why the heptapods had evolved a semasiographic writing system like Heptapod B; it was better suited for a species with a simultaneous mode of consciousness.
For them, speech was a bottleneck because it required that one word follow another sequentially. With writing, on the other hand, every mark on a page was visible simultaneously. Why constrain writing with a glottographic straitjacket, demanding that it be just as sequential as speech? It would never occur to them. Semasiographic writing naturally took advantage of the page's two- dimensionality; instead of doling out morphemes one at a time, it offered an entire page full of them all at once.
I could use Heptapod A more easily as a result, though it was still a poor substitute for Heptapod B. There was a knock at the door and then Gary poked his head in. Gary stepped inside and closed the door. He pulled me out of my chair and kissed me. I smiled. You worked on this project just to get me into bed. I remember when you'll be a month old, and I'll stumble out of bed to give you your A. I'll lean over your crib, lift your squalling form out, and sit in the rocking chair to nurse you.
I have to admire your utter commitment to that statement; when you cry, you'll become outrage incarnate, every fiber of your body employed in expressing that emotion. It's funny: when you're tranquil, you will seem to radiate light, and if someone were to paint a portrait of you like that, I'd insist that they include the halo. But when you're unhappy, you will become a klaxon, built for radiating sound; a portrait of you then could simply be a fire alarm bell.
At that stage of your life, there'll be no past or future for you; until I give you my breast, you'll have no memory of contentment in the past nor expectation of relief in the future. Once you begin nursing, everything will reverse, and all will be right with the world. NOW is the only moment you'll perceive; you'll live in the present tense.
In many ways, it's an enviable state. The heptapods are neither free nor bound as we understand those concepts; they don't act according to their will, nor are they helpless automatons. What distinguishes the heptapods' mode of awareness is not just that their actions coincide with history's events; it is also that their motives coincide with history's purposes. They act to create the future, to enact chronology.
Freedom isn't an illusion; it's perfectly real in the context of sequential consciousness. Within the context of simultaneous consciousness, freedom is not meaningful, but neither is coercion; it's simply a different context, no more or less valid than the other. It's like that famous optical illusion, the drawing of either an elegant young woman, face turned away from the viewer, or a wart-nosed crone, chin tucked down on her chest.
But you can't see both at the same time. Similarly, knowledge of the future was incompatible with free will. What made it possible for me to exercise freedom of choice also made it impossible for me to know the future.
Those who've read the Book of Ages never admit to it. A diplomatic negotiator was having a discussion with the heptapods there, with Burghart acting as translator. The negotiator was describing humans' moral beliefs, trying to lay some groundwork for the concept of altruism.
I knew the heptapods were familiar with the conversation's eventual outcome, but they still participated enthusiastically. If I could have described this to someone who didn't already know, she might ask, if the heptapods already knew everything that they would ever say or hear, what was the point of their using language at all?
A reasonable question. But language wasn't only for communication: it was also a form of action. For such acts, knowing what would be said didn't change anything. With performative language, saying equaled doing. For the heptapods, all language was performative.
Instead of using language to inform, they used language to actualize. Sure, heptapods already knew what would be said in any conversation; but in order for their knowledge to be true, the conversation would have to take place. I'll keep reading. That's not how the story goes. We simply give them something, and they give us something in return. Neither party tells the other what they're giving beforehand.
I asked them if we could make a request, and they said we could, but it won't make them tell us what they're giving. He was perfectly oblivious of the script, yet his responses matched his assigned lines exactly. I watched Colonel Weber turn to Gary.
If we demonstrate something to them, they'll show us their formulation of it, but they won't volunteer anything and they won't answer our questions about what they know. Weber scowled. Maybe we can arrange some kind of gift-giving ceremony. It was an ambiguity invisible to most. A private joke; don't ask me to explain it. Even though I'm proficient with Heptapod B, I know I don't experience reality the way a heptapod does. My mind was cast in the mold of human, sequential languages, and no amount of immersion in an alien language can completely reshape it.
My world-view is an amalgam of human and heptapod. Before I learned how to think in Heptapod B, my memories grew like a column of cigarette ash, laid down by the infinitesimal sliver of combustion that was my consciousness, marking the sequential present.
After I learned Heptapod B, new memories fell into place like gigantic blocks, each one measuring years in duration, and though they didn't arrive in order or land contiguously, they soon composed a period of five decades.
It is the period during which I know Heptapod B well enough to think in it, starting during my interviews with Flapper and Raspberry and ending with my death. But occasionally I have glimpses when Heptapod B truly reigns, and I experience past and future all at once; my consciousness becomes a half century-long ember burning outside time.
I perceive—during those glimpses—that entire epoch as a simultaneity. It's a period encompassing the rest of my life, and the entirety of yours. The second display screen t-hat the heptapods had provided began presenting a series of images, composed of semagrams and equations, while one of our video screens did the same.
The looking glass tent was crowded with people; Burghart from Fort Worth was here, as were Gary and a nuclear physicist, assorted biologists, anthropologists, military brass, and diplomats. Thankfully they had set up an air conditioner to cool the place off. We all crowded around the heptapods' second screen, trying to glean some idea of the images' content as they went by.
In a previous exchange, the heptapods had given us informations about ourselves that we had previously told them. This had infuriated the State Department, but we had no reason to think of it as an insult: it probably indicated that trade value really didn't play a role in these exchanges. It didn't exclude the possibility that the heptapods might yet offer us a space drive, or cold fusion, or some other wish-fulfilling miracle.
Gary nodded. He smiled and poked me. Truthfully, I wished the heptapods had given another xenobiology lecture, as they had on two previous exchanges; judging from those, humans were more similar to the heptapods than any other species they'd ever encountered. Or another lecture on heptapod history; those had been filled with apparent non-sequiturs, but were interesting nonethe-less.
I didn't want the heptapods to give us new technology, because I didn't want to see what our governments might do with it. I watched Raspberry while the information was being exchanged, looking for any anomalous behavior.
It stood barely moving as usual; I saw no indications of what would happen shortly. There is, though, no moralistic Sturm und Drang; while he emphatically problematises the theology that underpins its world, Chiang does not descend to the finger-wagging one might expect from a liberal intellectual.
Instead, the story revolves around real people attempting to get on with real lives in this universe - one in which virtue is not necessarily rewarded, in which a serial rapist and murderer can be glimpsed ascending to heaven because he has seen God's light, while a good man who does not love God will be cast out.
The outrage of the adolescent crisis of faith is here redignified and reinvigorated as the genuine and profound moral questioning it is. Theology of the most punitive kind is treated as science to be investigated. From this counterintuitive, even ornery starting point, Chiang has the story, and all his stories, unfold with a logic that is ineluctable and compassionate. Ted Chiang has been publishing novellas and novelettes for a little more than a decade, and has published fewer than ten stories during that time.
Nevertheless, Nick Gevers selected Chiang as one of the top ten contemporary SF and fantasy short story writers in a December article which appeared at Locus Online. With sharp intelligence and humor, Chiang examines what it means to be alive in a world marked by uncertainty, but also by beauty and wonder.
An award-winning collection from one of today's most lauded writers, Stories of Your Life and Others is a contemporary classic. Search for:.
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