"Calliagnosia" makes me forget omake? Stories of Your Life, and Others by Ted Chiang

(tags science fiction, speculative fiction, religion, writer, book, short story, recommend)

I really wish that Ted Chiang (Wikipedia entry) writes more. He is a truly excellent writer. I recently bought the 2003 paperback book of Stories of Your Life and Others at my favorite non-Japanese bookstore called Random Walk (ランダムウォーク 神戸元町店). The book was just the luck of the draw because I wanted to relax in science fiction English. But after reading the whole thing, to put it mildly, I am blown away. It is an excellent selection of science fiction and speculative fiction, each short story truly a "nugget of gold". This is one sci-fi book I want to lend to normal non-sci-fi people, it's that good. Go buy his book now!

Chiang sticks to our planet (no space-faring humans), and our near future or alternative-present, and/or incorporates elements of what we usually think of as magical/mystical ("Seventy-Two Letters") or religious ("Hell is the Absence of God"), into each of his cohesive sci-fi stories. They leave you satisfied with the range of questions and viewpoints they generate.

Acutally I experienced deja-vu (all over again ahaha) when reading his first story "Tower of Babylon", since I originally read it in Omni Magazine back in the 1990s. At least I think so, it was so long ago.

The one story I liked the most was the "Liking What You See: A Documentary", which revolves around "What if you could turn off your beauty sense" when looking at faces through a simple medical procedure, and the long term consequences of growing up with it off. The procedure was called "calliagnosia" (shortened: "calli") which is an invented word meaning volitional (facial) beauty-blindness, in other words, you block your own "natural prejudice" to a beautiful or ugly face. He turns it up a notch by interspersing the advertising industry reactions, and personal spam-blocker-like spectacles, creating an escalating war of making you respond to advertising, both commercial and natural. He explores all facets of calli and non-calli while interweaving human duplicity in the plot.

Definately this is what I need to rid myself of my anime and game addiction! If I could become desensitized to those perfect liquid "girly" eyes (see Reimu from Touhou sample below), etc. Function over form!

I learned from links over on the his Wikipedia entry that he has written less than 10 stories over a decade, most of them were nominated for high-level science fiction story awards such as the Hugo Award or the Nebula Award. Through some interviews I learned that he has been a technical document writer for programmers (Thanks SF Site!). Gosh, he's targetting me with his (non-fiction) writings! Ha ha.

You can checkout samples of his short stories from the link-tracking site Free Speculative Fiction Online. "Understand" (thanks Infinity Plus) was a mind-over-matter, order-from-chaos whirlwind on the improvement of the human condition. I really wanted the story to continue. "Division by Zero" (thanks Fantastic Metropolis) is for the pessimistic logician and theoretical computer scientist in all of us. His one page "What's expected of us" featured in Nature Magazine 2005/07, also takes a sci-fi familiar subject such as "time travel" and succinctly pits it against "fate". From the latter: "Civilization now depends on self-deception. Perhaps it always has." Stirring words indeed. But go buy his book already!