The divide between genre fiction and literary fiction is blurry at best, and sometimes the most arbitrary criteria are applied in deciding which section of the bookstore will serve as a novel's home. Despite the well-known adage, I’m convinced that some books are judged by their covers. Audrey Niffenegger's novel, The Time Traveler ' s Wife was kept off the sci-fi shelves—a remarkable achievement given its story line—but this would have been impossible if, instead of its soft-focus cover photo more suited for a childhood memoir, it had one of those gaudy pulp fiction monstrosities that most time travel stories are given. The same could be said of Slaughterhouse Five and Time ' s Arrow .
I’m even more distressed, however, by the fate of genre stories that are as well written as literary fiction, but are exiled in the science fiction ghetto—where they are forced to peddle their sophisticated wares to adolescents and Trekkies. In this regard, few authors have been more unfairly treated than Ted Chiang. He should be writing for The New Yorker and interviewed in The Paris Review . But those periodicals seem blissfully unaware of this richly talented writer; instead, his lovingly crafted work shows up in Asimov's or The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction . Needless to say, when The Best American Short Stories are selected each year, or the O'Henry Awards handed out, Chiang is out of the running.
But readers, you shouldn't let your own mind be ghettoized by the blindness of the reigning arbiters of taste. Chiang is the real deal. His debut book Stories of Your Life and Others is one of the finest collections of short fiction I have read in the last decade. These tales possess the imaginative frisson that is a trademark of the best conceptual fiction, but also bespeak a confident prose style and a willingness to take chances in tone and narrative structure that one rarely encounters in genre writing.
The premises here are often quite simple. "The Tower of Babylon," the opening story in the book, takes a familiar Old Testament account and turns it into a postmodern fable similar to what one might find in José Saramago or even Franz Kafka . Along the way, Chiang constructs an alternative cosmology that is both frightening and fanciful: as his workers erect higher and higher levels of the tower they have built to reach heaven, they gradually rise above the level of the sun, the moon and the stars. Eventually they run into a granite-hard ceiling to the universe—and need to call for miners who can break through the rock barrier and reach the divine presence beyond.
"Hell is the Absence of God" also takes its starting point from scripture. Here the visitations of angels are an everyday event, but fraught with danger—their appearance is akin to a natural disaster, with as many casualties as miracles left in their wake. The story is provocative and extravagant…and likely to inspire heated discussion about the nature of evil, the meaning of love, and the underpinnings of belief.
You may walk away from these stories without any clear sense of Chiang's own religious leanings, but he clearly believes in the power of Logos , the creative energy latent in the Word. Several of the stories in this collection approach this concept, each in a different way. In "Seventy-Two Letters," Chiang offers his personal variant on Steampunk lit—here he envisions an industrial England powered not by steam or coal, rather by golem servants, each empowered with a piece of parchment with a magical combination of characters. Instead of Intel Inside , they have Incantations Inside . New magical spells lead to new technologies, and companies patent permutations of letters the way biotech firms lock up genetic markers and strands of DNA.
In his story "Understand," Chiang adapts the storyline of Daniel Keyes' Flowers for Algernon , envisioning a medical treatment that creates a super-intelligent human being. We follow this newly-minted genius as he battles with healthcare professionals, government agents, and eventually an even more intelligent rival. Again the Logos makes its appearance: one of the man's obsessions is to create a new language that will help him understand not only his own inner workings, but perhaps even the nature of existence. Chiang is operating at multiple levels here, as in so many of his stories in this collection: "Understand" can be read as a bizarre variant of hard-boiled crime fiction or for its speculative daring in re-imagining the boundaries of consciousness and knowledge.
As these abbreviated plot summaries make clear, Chiang pursues bold, sometimes outlandish storylines. Another tale in this collection describes the mental anguish of a great mathematician after she proves, with the most rigorous logic, that 1 = 2. In "Story of Your Life" Chiang even presents an alternative way of conceptualizing time and causality—showing how radically different our existences might be if we perceived events as teleologically-driven. Of course, this is a science fiction story not a philosophical treatise, so Chiang embeds his alternative worldview into a tale about creepy aliens arriving from another galaxy. Imagine a cross between Fermat's last theorem and The War of the Worlds , and you will get some idea of the flamboyant hybrids this author has created.
Even so, such thumbnail descriptions hardly do justice to the riches of the stories themselves, which are not just brilliantly conceived but also artfully executed. Indeed, I'm tempted to take copies of this volume out of the science fiction section of the bookstore and slip them in with the great works of literary fiction. Trust me, they won’t be out of place. In the meantime, do yourself the favor of making the acquaintance of Chiang's work. This author, whose tales come back again and again to the power of the Word, has also made a compelling case for the power of his own words.