I recently finished Ted Chiang\u2019s first short-story collection, Stories of Your Life and Others<\/em><\/a>, and after a long fallow period I think I\u2019m in love with science fiction again. This collection\u2019s thrills comes from the working out of an idea. Chiang can make your mind turn a corner\u2013and stop and stare in awe. It is true that his characters are perfunctory at best. I can\u2019t even complain that they\u2019re all the same person, because none of them feel like actual people. They\u2019re spaces in which events take place which illustrate certain imaginable possibilities or ideas. But those possibilities are themselves so rooted in human longings, hopes, and fears that the stories (almost) never feel chilly.<\/p>\n The title story is the basis for the film Arrival<\/em>, but I would like to tell you about three and a half others. The book starts with \u201cTower of Babel,\u201d a delightful weird, hard story about builders trying to reach Heaven. \u201cSteampunk\u201d has always been a sort of cutesy, misleading word (what is punk about it really, for one thing) but you will still get some of the flavor of this story if I say it is steampunk but for pyramids. These characters assume that their world is explained by religious doctrine, and they build their lives in the crevices of this doctrine; as always human ingenuity flourishes in the spaces around the hard truths. There\u2019s a touch of casuistry here (what can I get away with?), and the kludgey, sincere worship which leads to questions like, \u201cIs a muskrat a fish for purposes of Friday abstinence?\u201d<\/p>\n Several of these stories look at the off-label uses of religious truths or mystical practices. Once the supernatural has rules, it risks devolving into technology. \u201cTower of Babel,\u201d by contrast, is about the mystery which remains after all experiment and exploration. After all diligence is exhausted, either an encounter\u2013or, equally shattering, an absence.<\/p>\n \u201cSeventy-Two Letters\u201d takes place in a world where many abandoned theories of natural philosophy\u2013or mysticism\u2013really work. Human conception occurs when the homunculus encapsulated in a man\u2019s sperm meets the vital forces of the nurturing ovum. Names animate clay. Factory workers conduct industrial sabotage against the golem\/robots who might be about to steal their jobs. The whole world is so enthrallingly weird! And then the actual story turns out not to be about meaning (the meaning of names\/words, the meaning of what makes life), it\u2019s really more of a puzzle story with a solution. The rabbi who wishes only to contemplate the names must cede his place to the inventor. The inventor\u2019s solution does have a poetic resonance\u2013you can say that we ourselves are made of ladders of words\u2013but the story is not about that resonance, I think.<\/p>\n Even the most disappointing (for me) story suggests Chiang\u2019s great strength. \u201cLiking What You See: A Documentary\u201d is a preachy tale about the injustice of physical beauty. The \u201cdocumentary\u201d conceit means it\u2019s all dialogue, making it impossible to ignore the flimsiness of Chiang\u2019s people. But even in this heavyhanded story there\u2019s a brief bit about how people in this world can have the same neural responses to individual cows, or different makes of car, that they have to human faces. And I felt like a door had opened onto a story that would fascinate me<\/em>: What if people thought they had disabled their response to human beauty, but they\u2019d only disabled their response to the beauty of those they could recognize as human? What if suddenly the only facial beauty they could see was that of people they\u2019d previously dehumanized?<\/p>\n And all these stories are like that\u2013doors opening onto strange new questions, which you might get to explore but which will provoke you even if all you get to do is glimpse.<\/p>\n My favorite thing in this was \u201cHell Is the Absence of God.\u201d This is a ferocious tale about a world where angels appear all the time, visions of Heaven and Hell are commonplace, and miracles strike like lightning bolts, bringing disaster as well as healing. I\u2019ll be thinking about it for a long time.<\/p>\n God\u2019s character can be discerned from His miracles. We know that miraculous pregnancies happen, but in spite of some exxxxxtremely unapproved Irish legends, there are no miracle abortions. The miracles we trust in as Christians are miracles of healing and beauty. There are weird and troubling aspects of some of them: Why were the Gerasene swine made sacrificial lambs? Did they accept that as an honor<\/a>, that this was to be their role in the possessed man\u2019s liberation? And I admit I just don\u2019t know what to make of Elisha and the bears<\/a>. But as a general rule miracles, in our actual world, don\u2019t hurt people; they don\u2019t injure bystanders; they have a discernible relationship to the natural law, and in fact help us see the outlines of this law, the outlines of our own nature. I included a miracle in Punishment<\/em><\/a> and I am still not 100% sure it really works, because miracles have, I think, patterns, because they express truths about the beauty and happiness which God wants for us.<\/p>\n But notice that little bit I threw in about Elisha. \u201cHell Is the Absence of God\u201d is about a world where God is totally unyoked from the natural law. God\u2019s miracles seem to have very little relationship to any plan God might have for our happiness. And this is how Christian practice feels a lot of the time. We trust that He wants our happiness, but does that mean this<\/em> is what happiness is? If God is love\u2026 is this what love means?<\/p>\n There are so many places where my own faith suddenly stumbles from the sun-dappled meadows, where He leadeth me beside the sweet waters, and into a night full of blank starless ravines and huge rough outcroppings with no intelligible shape. \u201cHell Is the Absence of God\u201d is a story about human-scale kludges, about gambles and best guesses; but it takes place in a God-scale world.<\/p>\n Angel with extremely sharp sword via Wikipedia.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I recently finished Ted Chiang\u2019s first short-story collection, Stories of Your Life and Others, and after a long fallow period I think I\u2019m in love with science fiction again. This collection\u2019s thrills comes from the working out of an idea. Chiang can make your mind turn a corner\u2013and stop and stare in awe. It is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1071,"featured_media":13149,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[131,164,84,1449],"class_list":["post-13146","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-art","tag-it-is-very-dark-you-are-likely-to-be-wrestled-by-an-angel","tag-its-the-luck-of-the-draw-its-the-natural-law-its-a-joke-its-a-crime","tag-science-fiction-double-feature","tag-ted-chiang"],"yoast_head":"\n