Ted Chiang’s stories are extraordinary. I first read them when doing a deep dive into speculative short fiction to teach a class, and was blown away. Chiang doesn’t publish often, but when he does he scoops up just about every award going. He uses science fiction to grapple with some of the universal questions of the age, and while sometimes I find his stories research-heavy (I felt I needed a linguistics degree to grasp ‘Story Of Your Life’), they are always original and thought-provoking. I chose ‘Tower of Babylon’ because of how imaginatively Chiang retells this biblical myth. It’s beautiful.
In the story, the citizens of Babylon have spent centuries building a tower up to the sky. Hillalum, a miner from Egypt, has been hired to pierce through the final vault to get to Heaven on the other side. I was right there with him on his four month climb up the tower to the final point, where I was terrified that he was going to let loose another Flood to sweep away the world. Spoiler alert: the world and Hillalum survive, but what a journey.
First published in 1990 by Omni. It was collected in Chiang’s Stories of Your Life and Others, Orb Books, 2002
A Personal Anthology 