Ted Chiang
I’m a fan!
One of the reasons I like science fiction as a genre is because of its ability to broaden thinking horizons. This is speculative fiction at its best! Each of the eight stories is different yet wonderful in their own right, because they explore realms not just with imagination but with humaneness.
What makes it even more fascinating is that unlike the usual hits in the genre, none of the stories are set in the future. In fact one is based on the Tower of Babel, another is more aligned to steampunk and the others seem more an alternate present than an alternate future. What is common among all these though is that the reader doesn’t really feel the temporal shift. Somehow the author normalises it in the first page itself!
“Tower of Babylon” explores philosophy as much as it does architecture. “Understand” is a thriller whose ending you’re always trying to guess. One need not be cognizant of mathematics and its theorems to appreciate “Division by Zero”, which sets mathematical paradoxes in real life scenarios. “Story of your life” is a constrained version of the movie “Arrival” (it was based on this) and the concept is magnificent. My favorite is “Seventy-Two letters” which is a wonderfully layered work – robotics, human rights, societal change, creation – all make it to the narrative in tandem and provides a fantastic ending! In all of three pages, “The evolution of human science” manages to create a new perspective about meta-human advances. Angels are common fare in “Hell is the absence of God” and it somehow brings both spirituality, the supernatural and rationalism together in splendid style. “Liking What you see: A Documentary” would have been my favourite if not for “Seventy-Two letters” for its sensitivity and brilliance in bringing out the nuances of “lookism” and how it affects our perceptions.
As you might have observed, the subjects range from language to physics and mathematics to artificial intelligence to theism to society, but the quality of the story remains consistent. And that’s quite a feat!
