In March 2020, I was asked to give some brief remarks to contextualize a screening of Arrival on campus. I had never read "Story of Your Life," the Ted Chiang short story upon which the film was based, so I picked up his collection Stories of Your Life and Others—except the copy I ended up with had been retitled Arrival with Jeremy Renner on the cover. Since it was March 2020, the screening was ultimately cancelled, and so over five years later I've finally gotten around to reading the book (the story of my life).
Arrival by Ted Chiang |
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Collection originally published: 2002 Contents originally published: 1990-2002 Acquired: March 2020 Read: August 2025 |
Some might say (I think I said this myself in my review of his second collection, Exhalation) that Chiang writes hard sf. I don't think that's true per se, because I don't think Chiang is always concerned with rigorous science. Rather, I think what Chiang is interested in is rigorous extrapolation. Given a counterfactual idea, he wants to explore exactly how it would play out, no matter how fanciful the original idea is. Such an approach is fundamental to, for example, "Hell Is the Absence of God," which is based around the question "what if people's belief really did send them to heaven or hell, and we knew it to be factually true?" But Chiang's extrapolations aren't there just to be there; Chiang is also really good at that Miévillian doubling effect, where the story is both a really detailed extrapolation of another world, and tells us something about our own world—in the case of "Hell Is the Absence of God," he explores the operation of faith, for example. (Across his whole oeuvre, I think Chiang does this best in Exhalation's "The Lifecycle of Software Objects," which is both a really thoughtful take on how we might make genuinely intelligent AI, and a moving metaphor for the difficulties of parenting.)
Honestly, though, I found "Hell Is the Absence of God" more intellectually interesting than genuinely moving, which is probably the trap Chiang most often falls into. (Again, Chiang doesn't write hard sf, but it is definitely a fault hard can have.) On other occasions, Chiang doesn't quite land the metaphoric resonance of his sfnal idea; the core conceit of "Division by Zero" ended up coming across as a stretch. Still, Chiang even at his weakest is always attempting to do something interesting, and I think it's the kind of collection where one reader's weak story will be another reader's favorite. (The only story I flat out disliked was "Understand," a take on one of my least-favorite sf tropes, the guy who becomes a super-genius.)
For me, the two best stories in the book were "Story of Your Life" and "Tower of Babylon." The former justly gets a lot of praise. There's an interesting sfnal concept about time and perception given here (the gimmick here is about Fermat's principle, not the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis like in the film), married to a strong meditation on the kids of decisions parents must inevitably make, along with some disturbing implications about free will. Really cleverly done and told.
But I also really liked "Tower of Babylon," which essentially takes a Babylonian conception of the universe as literally true. What if there was a physical firmament in the sky, and you could build a miles-high tower that went up to it? Chiang explores this idea in a lot of ways, making it feel real with lots of small logistical details, in a story that at the same time is about faith and what it gets people to do and how it works. (I found it had much more of interest to say about faith than "Hell Is the Absence.")
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