Book Review: The Story of Your Life (by Ted Chiang)

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The "Story of Your Life" is the science-fiction story which the Arrival film was based on. It was a very good read. Back in November, before the movie was released, I read it in less than 2 hours, in one breath.

[Spoilers ahead.]

The first couple pages of the book had some weird/mixed usage of the past future tense. Right at that first page, you get the idea that something is not right and this is going to be an interesting read. And as you keep reading, the story drops on you more clues, and you feel both smart and awed, when you first piece together that Gary was indeed the linguist's (Louise) first husband, and the daughter is not dead yet due to the climbing accident.

Ted Chiang gives a lot of credit to the readers' intelligence. I liked that a lot. I also liked that I had to google and learn several things while reading the story. I googled to learn about "Fermat's principle", "teleology", "ideograms", and some related linguistic terms.

I was pretty shaken after finishing the story. It contributes to the Freewill and Fate debate in philosophy and theology from a science-fiction perspective. (Time is an illusion, and with an altered perception, you can experience time in an orthogonal axis, and freewill becomes irrelevant/pointless.) The story is at the same time very emotional because the parentship thread is very well woven into the story.

Ted Chiang writes a very tight story. No, actually, he calculates, computes, and weaves the story. Amused by this first story, I read couple other stories from him. I also liked "The Alchemist's Gate", which was written like a Sufi story, again exploring the concept of fate, and free will.  Ted seems to be obsessed about these concepts, and must have been thinking very deeply about them. This  story also made subtle and thoughtful "what if" cases about these concepts. This story also had a strong technical side interwoven with a moving emotional side.

Wikipedia says Ted Chiang has been working as a technical writer in the software industry. I would be interested in reading the manuals he writes.

Related links:
Hacker News Discussion 
How I wrote Arrival 
Wolfram's blog on the symbolic language created for the movie 
Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut was also an excellent book playing with the freewill and fate ideas.

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