Ted Chiang is a gift that keeps on giving!

Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang has been on my reading list since I read his more recent work, Exhalation, a couple of months ago. As a person who has always been out of touch with film (and entertainment in general for that matter… yes I’m ashamed), I didn’t even know there was an award-winning film (The Arrival, 2016) that was based on Ted Chiang’s story until halfway through my last book!

The verdict? This book was just as amazing as the other one! It’s safe to say that I’m now a big fan of Chiang’s. The stories can feel mind-bending at the beginning, but after a couple of pages, my mind starts flexing muscles that I didn’t know it had. Before I know it, I completely forget about the world I know and my mind wanders freely like a shapeless current.

Re-learning the joy and value of imagination

Stories of Your Life and Others is a collection of short stories that all explore many different kinds of what-if’s about the world we live in. The question “What if the world was …?” is a popular enough one that, not only has it been explored in many other sci-fi or dystopian future novels, but all of us have probably had our own such wonderings. (e.g. “What if animals could understand everything that we are saying?”)

What stands out about Ted Chiang’s explorations of these questions is that they are incredibly creative yet grounded in realistic sharpness, and is delivered so eloquently.

For example, one story explores a kind of cognition that is fundamentally different from the one that we humankind have. Not everyone can tackle such profound questions and deliver it so beautifully! Other examples include a story that explores what the world would look like in the presence of so-called “superhumans”, and, one of my personal favorites, one that explores what would happen if we invented a piece of technology that can remove lookism (discrimination based on one’s level of attractiveness) entirely. Would people adopt such technology? What are some new issues that would emerge? etc. etc. What makes things even more interesting is that the stage of these stories are not always set in the future, as with many sci-fi/dystopian novls, but sometimes in the middle ages or several centuries BC.

Come to think of it, I had never put too much thought into these types of questions (“What if the world was …?”) since I entered adulthood. I was quick to shrug it off with lame responses like “Well that kind of world couldn’t possibly exist for XYZ reason”. Having read both Exhalation and Stories of Your Life and Others, I find myself opening up more and more to these imaginative explorations. Once we recognize the improbable and miraculous nature of the world that we currently live in, it’s actually not too difficult to imagine another world where the rules of the universe are entirely different. In fact, these thought experiments are not only intellectually stimulating but also offer incredibly useful insights that help us learn about ourselves.