stories of your life

Dec 19, 2022

Earlier this year I was introduced to the weird, mind-bending world of Ted Chiang, through Stories of Your Life and Others, which includes the namesake novella Story of Your Life–the basis of 2016 sci-fi thriller Arrival. I’m also halfway through Exhalation, the other book of short stories and novellas from the author.

For an active engineer in the world of AI, who’s read up a little on math and causality, every story in the book (that I’ve read so far) is a dark, beautiful, and bizarre mind-twister. Like Black Mirror on a steroid high. The book is not “rigorous,” either technologically or philosophically. Many points are deliberately vague. But I believe this is part of the charm: using so many concepts that are so eerily familiar to weave a tech dystopia that is troubling at a much more fundamental level than X-Files and Black Mirror combined. All of Chiang’s stories land a punch in the gut. For me the only recent similar experience was with Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, which I finished with a big lump in my throat.

Raw human emotion, the edge of insanity, and the blurry edge between math, languages, computers and philosophy: all themes woven together in a dark place. Although, I don’t think Arrival even comes near doing justice to the written material, and I wish there was a movie for each story.