When reading “Tower of Babylon,” the first story in Ted Chiang’s Stories of Your Life and Others, I found myself feeling a sense of deja vu. The story is a take on the familiar story of an absurdly high structure, here abutting the heavens, and the people working on it. As it turns out, I had encountered the story for the first time when it was published in OMNI in the early 90s; that Chiang’s work can leave that kind […]