Stories of Your Life and Others

Chiang frequently creates alternative universes in his stories. Some represent a potential reality while others include fantastical or magical elements. One can classify these stories as science-fantasy (“Tower of Babylon”), alternate history (“Seventy-Two Letters”), or magic realism (“Hell Is the Absence of God”), but their setting serves a single purpose: the author explores a unique and fantastical idea within realistic parameters.

The first story in the collection, “The Tower of Babylon” is set in a world where the ancient concept of geocentrism is a reality. The presence of the God Yahweh in the Heavenly Vault is also a true part of the story’s world. Thus, the building of the Tower becomes is more than a mere metaphor for the idea of reaching the divine; it is also a real adventure of builders and miners who toil for centuries to reach the Heavens and the seat of the God. Chiang states in the Story Notes, “The characters may be religious, but they rely on engineering rather than prayer. No deity makes an appearance in the story; everything that happens can be understood in purely mechanistic terms” (265). In this way, just as the character of Hillalum comes out the other end of the Heavens only to find himself on Earth again, so does the story utilize Biblical myth only to reinforce the reality of the scientific concept.

In “Seventy-Two Letters,” Chiang uses the ancient Hebrew myth of the golem and the once-accepted notion of preformation to create a world in which these concepts are real and fully accepted as such. Setting the story in an alternative Victorian era allows the author to investigate the uses these notions might have in an environment where humanity faces extinction. As previously mentioned, this set-up requires suspension of disbelief from readers, but it also invites them to join a mental experiment that explores different potentialities within a contemporary understanding of reality.

In “Hell Is the Absence of God,” Chiang goes even further by creating a world in all senses the same as his own, except for the presence of Angels, the manifestation of Hell, and the ascension of souls to Heaven. The author positions readers on a plane that bears all the markings of their reality, and then infuses this reality with concepts they regard as highly metaphorical. This achieves a sense of heightened awareness of what religion is and how individual and group faiths might embody themselves in reality. The combination of the real and the metaphorical achieves both a sense of wonder and a sense of familiarity, and in this intersection Chiang finds the potential to create new meaning.  

A strong thematic line in several of Chiang’s stories is the idea that human intelligence, in the sense of both intellect and knowledge, can be a source of power that characters use and sometimes abuse. In “Understand,” both Leon and Reynolds gain unimaginable powers of intellect after receiving Hormone K, and the way they deal with the newly acquired abilities speaks to the fundamentally ambivalent ethical nature of intelligence. As mentioned before, the ambivalence of seemingly positive traits is one of Chiang’s main thematic preoccupations. Leon’s deep understanding of how reality works allows him to “weaponize” his intelligence, and the way he gains knowledge and uses it to serve his selfish impulses shows readers that intelligence holds no inherent morality. Rather, characters infuse intelligence with additional meaning. Reynolds utilizes his intelligence to save the world from itself, sacrificing those he believes to be of little use to society as a matter of routine.

In “Division by Zero,” Renee’s intelligence allows her to discover both the beauty of mathematical order and the crucial flaw in the design that renders everything else in her life meaningless. She becomes a danger to herself and to her relationship with Carl, whose lack of understanding results in a lack of empathy. Renee’s intelligence brings about the implosion of both her career and her marriage.

Similarly, in “The Evolution of Human Science,” the knowledge that human scientists pursue and the intelligence they gain leads to the creation of metahumans, whose intellect is vastly superior to the scientists who made them. Again, metahumans’ intelligence is dangerous precisely because it is devoid of ethical regard, aiming purely at gaining knowledge and pursuing technological advances.