Tildes Book Club Discussion - September 2025 - Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang

It's common of all Chiang's stories, but I particularly enjoy the way this story dives straight into the world he's devised; it's simply a fact that god, angels, miracles, and all the mess they cause are.

I'm pretty agnostic myself, so I don't approach this story from a personal lens of thinking about god/theology per se. Instead, I find it prompts me to think about morality more generally. I like that I don't find it tries to lead me to a particular conclusion, but feels sort of like a rorsach test as the different characters work through their various experiences.

...i've been a fan of ted chiang's work since he first published in omni; he's not a prolific author but his short stories are each brightly-polished gems and he's a darling of the clarion workshop with good reason....this book, his first collection, wasn't published until over a decade later, and that's pretty much been his pace of output throughout his career: each time he's published a new book i've considered myself fortunate to find it at all before it's snapped-up and sold-out...

...when i first read the tower of babylon thirty-five years ago (summer of 1990, back when magazines shipped months before their cover date), i was immediately struck by its compelling tone of biblical realism, sucked into the narrative only to have my sense of wonder unexpectedly burgeon at its revelatory depiction of cosmic topology...it's a bleak story at its heart, kind of a nihilistic take on divinity and the cosmos, which sets in stark contrast to its protagonist's purported journey and is all the stronger for that...

Tower of Babylon was one of my least favourites when I first read the book over a year ago. During my reread for this bookclub, Ive (so far?) skipped this story.

I couldn't say exactly why it didn't resonate: Maybe in part because it was the first of Chang's stories I read and I wasn't in tune with his style (i remember feeling confused and had to relisten to some bits). I think also that it's so biblical (a subject that doesn't interest me much) without giving me much more to think about. Contrast that with 'Hell is tur absence of god', which I found gave me a lot to think about morality, beyond a story of angels and heaven and god.

It has been a while, but I recall this ending in one of the most interesting 'fight scenes' I've ever read. I imagined the combatants standing perfectly still and silent, while launching abstract, memetic attacks at each other.

I'd love to hear what others have to say about their interpretation of Division by Zero. I'm intrigued by this one, but feel like I'm only on the cusp of an interpretation of it that I find satisfying.

There's the theme of Renée's math discovery that undermines mathematics, and the turmoil this causes at least those more interested in theory than application. This reminds me quite a bit of The Three Body Problem when physics 'breaks'.

I feel like there's a parallel to this with Carl's side of the story, and his sympathy, (lack of) empathy, and loss of love. It's this side of the story where I feel a little unresolved. Either I'm grasping at straws or just not elegantly connecting the threads.

Overall, I find myself comparing this story with Stories of your Life, in that they both have a narrative focus on close human connections in the face of a big sci-fiy paradigm shift in knowledge, but ultimately stories of your life lands much stronger for me.

Hands down my favourite. In Chiang's style overall, I appreciate the way he explores a given topic or idea through story, like a thought exercise. Story of your Life is the only one I feel also beautifully ties in a deep emotionality. Both times Ive listened to this story, ive sobbed by the end.

I've come across the interpretation that this story is about free will. But for me, it feels more like an allegory of the human condition, particularly love in the face of death.

(Generally), humans know we will love others in our lives, and we choose to love others, even knowing that all love faces either an end of love (the father in the story) or death (the daughter).

To me, the story's structure of the narrator recounting 'future memories' of loves that end and still carrying on that path as though a reflex parallels the human drive to love despite our 'future knowledge' of how it ends. It feels very personal and universal all at once

Reading this, it seemed like this was an opportunity to revisit the Gestalt language of Understand. The story captured the sentence summarized at the end, where events are understood not in the context of cause and effect, but as the outcome of a global action minimization phenomenon, wherein all events occur because they minimize a path-dependent propert in both the past and future.

It was in the middle that I realized that the "flashbacks" to your childhood were actually flash-forwards that served to emphasize how a... holistic understanding of a variational principal might be experiences.

It is interesting in that, in the notes section, Chiang discusses the story in the context of a fascination with the calculus of variation and explicitly disregards the aspects of light that pertain to "quantum mechanics". However, the thorny questions of path dependence and interference that arise in QM still plague physicists. In many ways, the same puzzle that Maupertuis addressed in the principle of least action describing it simply as "God's wisdom", with answers just as satisfying.

In each of these fascinating short stories, the protagonist undergoes an experience that fundamentally upends their perception of the world; either due to a shocking discovery, or because their brain was altered. Is this an intentional theme across the collection, or is it just what you get when you distill a good science fiction concept into a concise story?

I love how his stories are both conceptual and grounded. He always has a big "out there" idea that the story is centered around, but then he explores how that out-there idea affects real-world, everyday people and experiences.

It makes his stories feel both unfamiliar and familiar at the same time, because the stuff he's talking about often isn't recognizable (e.g. tower that scrapes the sky, aliens communicating with us, angels coming down from heaven, changing our neural processing of faces, etc.), but the connective tissue within those stories is immediately resonant.

I don't know if it's because I was primed by seeing Arrival or if it was because I read the story in a single setting while giving platelets, but I thought "Story of Your Life" was the strongest one in the bunch. The ending got me a little choked up. I thought it was one of the more beautiful sci-fi stories I've ever read.

I also really enjoyed "Liking what You See: A Documentary." I thought it was a fascinating exercise in writing about the same topic from a variety of different perspectives. I found myself agreeing with a lot of the different points made, even when they were in conflict. It reminded me of some of the best conversations I've seen on Tildes, where lots of different people are giving lots of good insights on a single topic.

Overall, I thought this was a really strong collection of stories, and I would strongly recommend Exhalation to anyone who enjoyed this. I think I actually like that collection even better, which is saying something because I loved this one!