I was hooked from the very beginning with the first story “Tower of Babylon” a version of the classic Babel tale where human beings have built a tower to take them to the vault of heaven. What if angels were real? What if we could no longer see beauty? Ted Chiang’s fiction is quite heavy on the science, but equally so on topics of religion and philosophy. Many of these stories contain these kinds of “what if” questions, which I personally love. The two separate stories intersect brilliantly, and we are left with the question, “If you had knowledge of what’s to come, would you attempt to change it?” The reader is compelled to continue along to figure out how Louise appears to have knowledge of her personal future. The story alternates between Louise and her future husband working on understanding the aliens’ languages with Louise speaking to her future daughter. These beings, referred to as heptapods because of their seven limbs, have a different language for both written and spoken words. It is narrated by Louise, a linguistics expert, who is asked by the military to help as translator between humans and aliens who have landed on Earth. Beautifully written and highly thought-provoking, it explores the argument of free will vs. Many of you may be familiar with “Story of Your Life,” the short that is the basis for the sci-fi film Arrival. I’m definitely putting it on my list of movies to watch. All of them were intelligently written, and I’m still wrapping my head around the deep philosophical questions they asked. Ted Chiang’s Stories of Your Life and Others was so brilliant, that I loved nearly every single story in this collection.
Whenever I read a collection of short stories, I typically have one or two favorites.
0 kommentar(er)
