More than one story invokes ancient engineers, alchemists and scholars as stand-ins for the cultural role of the creative programmer. Software engineers now create entire worlds from scratch, building the Borgesian map over our shared reality.

For a moment, I seemed to be seeing out of my younger self’s eyes, experiencing the stories’ wonder anew.Ĭhiang’s day job is a software engineer, which is arguably the cultural role that the Medieval monk and later the Renaissance alchemist occupied previously - the universal chroniclers, arbiters and discoverers. When I revisited it a few weeks ago, I was just as surprised by it as when I had first read it.

As I grow into what she calls “literary fiction,” I find that the collection is one of the only books we still have in common. The stories were unlike anything I had ever read before, and I remember being shocked by their energetic, yet concise structures. She might have been prompted by my entirely aesthetic interest in science and technology, but I also recall that she mentioned the book on more than one occasion as one of her favorites. My mom, a science fiction author and editor, lent me her autographed copy of Ted Chiang’s 2002 anthology “Stories of Your Life and Others” when I was somewhere in middle school. I didn’t really understand anything I was reading, I just wanted somewhere to go. The workings of faraway stars felt both fantastical and fundamental, grounded in some kind of self-consistent celestial logic. I think it was this desire for built worlds that led me to also spend a great amount of time immersed in popular science books, especially the large, illustrated coffee-table kind, usually about space. I read the “Eragon” trilogy, every “Harry Potter” book, “The Lord of the Rings,” et cetera - the kind of narrative fiction that the reader lives in, at once comfortingly Manichean and vibrant. I was not precocious, and my taste was conventional. One thing I can clearly remember from my childhood and preteen years is how much I read.

Story of your life book ted chiang