Book Review: "Stories of Your Life and Others" by Ted Chiang

When it comes to surrealist fiction, I pick my post-modern texts carefully. I don't want them to be so out there that I can't understand what's going on. My brother told me to read the first chapter of 'Neuromancer' and I have to admit that even though I understood what was happening, I didn't particularly like it. However, authors who work in the framework of the dystopian surrealist fiction subgenre tend to get me more - it just so happens that creating something incredibly mind-twisting whilst also being dystopian works on so many levels. It shows us the possibility of what could happen, or what has happened, and then gives us the ability to think about the metaphors and plausibility of the situation.

One thing I love about short stories and the anthology subgenres is that the writers can be as creative as they like with the premise, but yet they are incredibly simple plot lines. The plot can't be too extreme because then there would be no way of fitting it into such a space, but they are still just as complex and mind-bending as a novel. This is definitely true for Ted Chiang's "Stories of Your Life and Others" in which he attempts to create the world of surrealism revolving around life-changing events which come laden heavy with metaphor and meaning.

The story "The Tower of Babylon" is just what you think it is about. The construction and difficulties with reaching the top of the tower, the story is heavy in its use of atmosphere and the metaphor for danger is almost constant throughout. Within this story we definitely have moments of great tension that come from the way in which as we climb higher up the tower, there is a sense of impending doom in which the character feels in moments of dizziness and confusion as he rises up the stone walls. Each part of the story is pointing you towards the ending in which a cataclysmic event shatters the story and teaches us all a lesson about not reaching too high, but instead a theory of self-awareness. The ending to the story is just as intensely confusing as the beginning, the lack of self-awareness in not knowing how something is going to turn out is punished by the thwarting of expectation and the loss of hope.

Other stories fascinated me within this anthology as well. The story 'Seventy-Two Letters' is an alternate history (a subgenre I am really interested in) about how the human race is slowly going to die out and how everything is based on the usage of the golem. I think that this story is a wonderful example of the steampunk and the surrealist genres coming together to create something extremely confusing and yet wholly plausible in metaphor - that if we aren't careful, the human race could die out.

"The Evolution of Human Science" actually scared me a bit since it is a two and a half page story that has no characters and basically explains the difference between humans and 'metahumans' (yes, I know exactly what you're thinking) and there is a paragraph or so at the end, the line beginning 'as a result...' - if you read from there, I just hope you are as terrified as I was. It is quite a dark paragraph or so when you really stop to think about it - about how we are both responsible and irresponsible for the world we have built, a world which is slowly collapsing upon us.

In conclusion, I adored this book because I came to realise that dystopian fiction doesn't have to be set in any imagined future, it can be set in the past, it can be set whenever and yet - it can still hold heavy metaphor for our own times and tell us exactly what we're doing wrong. Whether we do anything about it is an entirely different thing altogether.