Stories of Your Life & Others - Ted Chiang

[ms-mmelissa.livejournal.com]

Stories of Your Life & Others boasts an incredible pedigree and came to me highly recommended from a wide variety of individuals. Virtually every story in the book has been previously published by a big name literary magazine (Asimov's, Omni, etc) and have won awards. I came to the book with high expectations and was left  disappointed. 

The problem with Stories of Your Life is one that is often levelled at sci-fi writers by its detractors; the ideas are good, the writing is flat. In fact, in this case, their often isn't much of a story there at all. In Understand a man becomes hyper intelligent as a result of a clinical drug study. The story is about 40 pages long and a good 35 of those is spent simply describing the man's new found intelligence. Some conflict does eventually arise (a great conflict in fact), but is quickly dealt with in the last few pages of the story. This is pretty much the problem with the rest of the stories in the book. Chiang may be great at coming up with new worlds and interesting concepts, but he is flat out terrible at building a story. 

There are a few stories in the collection that manage to escape this tendency of Chiang's to get lost in the science of things. Tower of Babylon, based on the bible story of the Tower of Babel, is interesting and gripping and comes together in a great way. Story of Your Life is messy, but the execution is interesting, even if it's not perfect. 

One thing I did appreciate about the book is that there is a section of notes in the back where Chiang talks a little bit about the inspiration behind each story. They're never more than a few paragraphs long, but I thought they were a great addition to the book.

Comments

[jain]

Thanks for posting such a detailed review of this book. I'm about halfway through it right now and am loving it, and I'd been wondering why one or two of my Goodreads friends weren't as enthusiastic about it as I am (as indicated by rating it 3-stars, with no reviews to explain the rating). Your perspective makes a lot of sense; I don't really share it (though I'll admit that a lot of the dramatic tension for me in "Understand," for instance, derives more from my personal history as an SF reader [I was constantly comparing it to Flowers from Alegernon as I read it] than from the story itself: the end result feels plot-driven to me, but understandably might not to other readers [either because they haven't read FfA, or because having read it doesn't positively affect their reading of "Understand"]), but now I'm not so puzzled at other readers' lack of enthusiasm for the book.

[ms-mmelissa.livejournal.com]

A 2/3 star rating is about in line with how I felt about the book. Glad you found the review helpful!

[jinian.livejournal.com]

Wow, I had no idea there were people who didn't love Ted Chiang. Thanks for expanding my horizons.

[ms-mmelissa.livejournal.com]

To be fair I tend to mostly read literary fiction so I am coming at this from a different perspective than his average reader. Still, I was pretty surprised at how praised he is after actually reading the stories. I have read well-regarded sci-fi writers whose work really justified their reputation. Chiang just didn't do it for me.