Excessive Candour
Caught Like Theseus

For a while, reading Ted Chiang is like staring too long at the execution of a stone face on vellum. It is not a warm face, it does not absorb the sun, or your gaze, it is a philosopher-king face, a boddhisatva face: There seems no way in. But then something catches your eye. Maybe you notice that the face has been executed in one continuous unicursal line that never leaves the page, and so you're caught like Theseus, and you follow the line down through shade and fractal till nothing can be seen but insides, where it is bigger than you could have guessed, and the Minotaur has you.

You have begun to read a story by Ted Chiang. You will not be able to find your way out again until he has finished. It is a most extraordinary feeling. I was myself forced by circumstances of travel to read piecemeal some of the tales assembled in Stories of Your Life and Others—which contains everything Chiang has published in the 12 years of his career—and each time I stopped before finishing I had the strange sensation that I had not truly left the story at all. That I could not truly leave before the end.

This is not supposed to happen after the age of 12 or so, 12 being the Golden Age of Story. It is certainly not supposed to happen with tales so seemingly remote from normal human sensations as the earlier work assembled here. The continuing mystery of the work of Ted Chiang is that, like some Minotaur Aleph out of Jorge Luis Borges, it holds the attention.

Here is a stab at a tale or two.

Life stories that live and breathe

Like most of his work, "Tower of Babylon" (1990), which is his first published story and which won a Nebula Award, takes place in a kind of pocket universe—a universe small enough and coherent enough to be run by rules it is possible for a very brilliant mind to discover. This may in fact be one way of getting at the mystery of the hypnotic grasp these tales maintain: that the protagonist of almost all of them makes it his or her life's work to succeed at a task far too difficult for us to attempt, but which we can at least follow: the task of understanding how the world works. In "Tower of Babylon," young Hillalum, a miner from Elam, is ordered to go with his mates to the great city, where the eponymous tower, under construction for centuries, has reached the vault of heaven. His skills will be necessary to dig through the vault, and to reach God's kingdom. Much of the tale is given over to a thoroughly thought-through description of the techniques that have been evolved over generations in order to construct the tower, which can be climbed by an unburdened human in about one and a half months; and to the human ecologies which have taken root up along the spine of the ever-growing artifact.

Elam reaches the top, and participates in the engineering works necessary to pierce the vault of heaven. Our SF assumptions at this point—it is almost certain we are meant to wonder whether or not Elam has been busy penetrating the outer walls of a vast generation starship—are gratifyingly disabused. At the end of the tale we are left at the beginning of the tale, though maybe one spiral up: for the world of Hillalum is as cyclical as coral, as immaculately overdetermined as an insect's palace.

"Understand" (1991) mixes together two SF topoi—the child superman who grows up despised of men to rule the world, out of A.E. Van Vogt's Slan and its offspring; and the child or young man whose intelligence is artificially augmented, at the risk of collapse into idiocy, as in Daniel Keyes' Flowers for Algernon or Thomas M. Disch's Camp Concentration—but then, with the sweet impassive implacability that marks Chiang's work from start to finish, continues minutely to trace its hero's unstoppable increasing grasp of the meaning of the world: until nemesis.

"Story of Your Life" (1998) again plays a game too austere for most of us to understand—an argument I for one could not begin to master, that Fermat's "Principle of Least Time" infers a purposive mathematics whose requirement that an end be aimed for further infers a world whose ends can be perceived. This argument feeds, with a clarity too deep for tears, into a description of First Contact through the eyes of a woman linguist who, by learning the purposive language of the aliens, begins to understand the ends of her own life, Whorf wrought to the uttermost. The life signaled by the title is not hers but her daughter's; the story is addressed to her, from a point in sequential time that may be before or after her death: a datum hardly relevant in a world so worded that "one needed knowledge of the effects before the causes could be initiated."

Deadly devotion makes a heavenly hell

If these tales, even "Story of Your Life," lack something, it may be a full execution of the spiraling growth of intimacy between lives led and life understood. The most savagely affecting story in the book, and therefore in Chiang's work to date, is the one in which fate and understanding are most implacably interwoven. "Hell Is the Absence of God" (2001), which never raises its voice for an instant, may be the most devastating exposure of the putative nature of religion that has ever been penned. Its strategy is the strategy that underlies all of Chiang's stories: that of taking a premise about the nature of the world to be the case, and unpacking it.

In the world of "Hell" God does in fact literally exist, as do his angels, whose visitations upon the Earth are like plane crashes—those in the path of an angel landing are very likely to be maimed or killed, though at the same time, arbitrarily, miracles can occur. The protagonist of the tale, Neil Fisk, has been happily married for some time. Although he believes in God—in this story not to believe in God would to be like not believing in water—he does not love him. Then his wife is killed in an angel visitation, and the witnesses of her death confirm that she is one of the three casualties whose soul has been accepted into heaven. But only those who love God can go to heaven; those who do not love God go to hell, which is a precinct below reality, easily viewable. God cannot perceive those who go to hell. Therefore they remain in hell forever.

Through excruciations and epiphanies, gains and losses and turnarounds, and through an utterly uncontrovertible witnessing on his part of the nature of the deity, Neil comes to love God, and therefore himself becomes capable of ascending to heaven, where his beloved wife (God is real) really awaits him. His witnessing of the reality of God has inevitably proven fatal—actually to witness heaven, which opens when an angel bursts into the world, is to burn to ashes like Semele—but he loves God, and those who die loving God in this fashion go to heaven. But in Neil's case, inscrutably (God is God, go figure), this does not happen. He goes instead to hell. God, being absent from hell, forever, cannot perceive Neil. But Neil, having witnessed the reality of God, cannot stop perceiving the absence of God, and is in constant agony from the absence of God, forever. Moreover, because to see God is to love God, Neil cannot even stop loving God, forever. "That is the nature of true devotion."

The rest of Stories of Your Life and Others is almost as good as the terrible clarity exposed here like a Theatre of Memory you cannot forget, just like Neil. For the nature of true devotion of the stories of Ted Chiang is that they only stop when they are finished. We are not allowed to shut the book till then.