Ted Chiang's first published story, "Tower of Babylon," won the Nebula Award in 1990. Subsequent stories have won the Asimov's SF Magazine reader poll, a second Nebula Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, and the Sidewise Award for alternate history. He won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1992. Story for story, he is the most honored young writer in modern SF.
Now, collected here for the first time are all seven of this extraordinary writer's stories so far--plus an eighth story written especially for this volume.
What if men built a tower from Earth to Heaven--and broke through to Heaven's other side? What if we discovered that the fundamentals of mathematics were arbitrary and inconsistent? What if there were a science of naming things that calls life into being from inanimate matter? What if exposure to an alien language forever changed our perception of time? …
Ted Chiang's first published story, "Tower of Babylon," won the Nebula Award in 1990. Subsequent stories have won the Asimov's SF Magazine reader poll, a second Nebula Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, and the Sidewise Award for alternate history. He won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1992. Story for story, he is the most honored young writer in modern SF.
Now, collected here for the first time are all seven of this extraordinary writer's stories so far--plus an eighth story written especially for this volume.
What if men built a tower from Earth to Heaven--and broke through to Heaven's other side? What if we discovered that the fundamentals of mathematics were arbitrary and inconsistent? What if there were a science of naming things that calls life into being from inanimate matter? What if exposure to an alien language forever changed our perception of time? What if all the beliefs of fundamentalist Christianity were literally true, and the sight of sinners being swallowed into fiery pits were a routine event on city streets? These are the kinds of outrageous questions posed by the stories of Ted Chiang. Stories of your life . . . and others.
Review of 'Stories of Your Life and Others' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
A collection of unrelated stories that explore themes that are almost unheard of in current day sci-fi. The ability that Ted Chiang demonstrates in creating new universes, some of them based on western mythology is amazing. In some stories it even allows for a jump into mythological metaphysics and biogenesis, all the while creating a raft of coherence that allows the reader to see the story not as a magical fantasy but as a otherworldly sci-fi experience. The only thing bad is that this is just one book and not 5 or 6, but as an experimental collection of stories I could not allow myself but to have it rated right at the top.
Review of 'Stories of Your Life and Others' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
I have not read a short story collection in a good while. What an amazing thing! Much more varied than a novel. Great pace too. My only objection is that the next story starts right away, before you even had time to fairly contemplate the previous one. (Sure, I could theoretically stop before turning the page.)
Tower of Babylon: My favorite! I never looked at this legend as sci-fi, but it is! It is all about a super-human engineering feat. Why it is done, how it is done, what is accomplished. Really awesome, I would love to read more stories set in this world, or similar worlds.
Understand: Starts out paralleling [b:Flowers for Algernon|18373|Flowers for Algernon|Daniel Keyes|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1367141311s/18373.jpg|3337594] but the focus is examining what a super-human intelligence could be like. It is interesting to think about this, but I never find it fulfilling to read about it. I think a lesser …
I have not read a short story collection in a good while. What an amazing thing! Much more varied than a novel. Great pace too. My only objection is that the next story starts right away, before you even had time to fairly contemplate the previous one. (Sure, I could theoretically stop before turning the page.)
Tower of Babylon: My favorite! I never looked at this legend as sci-fi, but it is! It is all about a super-human engineering feat. Why it is done, how it is done, what is accomplished. Really awesome, I would love to read more stories set in this world, or similar worlds.
Understand: Starts out paralleling [b:Flowers for Algernon|18373|Flowers for Algernon|Daniel Keyes|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1367141311s/18373.jpg|3337594] but the focus is examining what a super-human intelligence could be like. It is interesting to think about this, but I never find it fulfilling to read about it. I think a lesser mind is incapable of really understanding a superior mind. It can be as accurate as a small child imagining what an adult thinks like. That is no obstacle to making a fun story: it is fun, with some cool ideas.
Division by Zero: Very cool. It is a great example of the overall strengths of Ted Chiang: good personal drama, creative narrative, and a thought-provoking plot based on real science.
Story of Your Life: A.k.a. "Arrival". I watched the movie earlier this year, and I did not know it was based on a story. I liked the movie. The short story has a great element (refraction) that is missing from the movie. (I guess it would not work well with test audiences!) But the movie also has good additions that are missing from the short story. (Cool spaceships instead of a bland screen. Aliens spitting out the pictures instead of drawing them. Explanation for why they came.)
Seventy-Two Letters: Another sci-fi set in a past era! Again I loved it. I want this to be a genre! You can combine sci-fi and fantasy in two ways: put fairytale stories in space (Star Wars-style) or put scientific stories in fairy-land. I am an immediate fan of this second option!
The Evolution of Human Science: Very short. Interesting setup (again, super-human intelligences), but no interesting insights.
Hell is the Absence of God: Sort of interesting setup (angels randomly dishing out miracles and breaking stuff). Sort of interesting personal stories. But makes no sense. Does it make sense? Please tell me if this made sense to you. I think the point may be that this makes no sense. But that does not make a very satisfying read.
Liking What You See: A Documentary: I like the experimentation with narrative techniques. This time it is a series of interviews for a documentary. The subject is "calliagnosia", where you flip a switch in your brain and reversibly turn off the part responsible for evaluating how pretty a face is. Interesting setup (we may have this sort of technology one day) and a lovely examination of it. We see so many different viewpoints, arguments for and against, it is great.
What's Expected of Us: Very short, but awesome. It distills the core question of all time-travel sci-fi into a small device you can put on a keychain and 3 pages of text.
My copy had three extra stories beyond the above! How cool.
The Merchant and the Alchemist: Basically the same as What's Expected of Us but in 30 pages and set in ancient times. It does not make any use of the ancient setting though, other than flavor. It has a few interesting, but not very novel time-travel stories.
Exhalation: Pretty cool! It is about mechanical robots that live in an enclosure which they perceive as the universe. They forgot how it started. They are powered by air (argon) pressure. The story is about how they realize the pressure difference will vanish over time and they can do nothing against it. It is largely the same for us with entropy. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_an_expanding_universe is a great read.
The Lifecycle of Software Objects: A story about virtual pets written (apparently) by a person who has never seen a computer. This is the longest and weakest story. If you have used a computer you will be in anguish on every page when they do things that do not make sense or do not do things that make sense. And even if someone can ignore these mistakes, what is the point of this whole story?
Review of 'Stories of Your Life and Others' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
If you ever get your hand on only one or two volumes of Philip K. Dick's collected short stories you will realize not only that they are much better than his novels, but that he has invented any Sci Fi scenario you have ever seen in any movie or show, and much more. And has has been unchallenged in this until Ted Chiang started writing. His stories are different though, exploring fascinating, masterful ideas that challenge our notions of what life is and then drilling in deeper to shed light on the thoughts from as many angles as he can. His stories draw upon a full view of science including sociology, linguistics, engineering, even religious studies to an appreciably heretic degree (or should I see secular sarcastic, since heresy would require the actual existence of God/unicorns/the tooth fairy). There's no other recommendation but read this!
Review of 'Stories of Your Life and Others' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
What a surprising gem of a book. I loved how most of the stories tweak some foundational underpinning of what it means to be human and explores how that change would play out. I also really enjoyed the cadence of several stories as well. The short, couple paragraph vignettes made it surprising easy to bounce around some of the ideas he was exploring in my own head.
Review of 'Stories of Your Life and Others' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
You've probably heard some hype about how great this collection is. Guess what? It is all true. This is so good that it makes you re-evaluate those books you've been reading-- maybe they weren't as good as you thought they were.
Review of 'Stories of Your Life and Others' on 'Storygraph'
3 stars
Ted Chiang artfully takes our world, changes one thing and asks "What if?" What if the Tower of Babel were successful? What if we could augment our intelligence to the point where we immediately spotted the patterns in the chaos around us? What if our language determined the way we view time itself?
Many of these questions boil down to one question: What if the way we perceive the world changes the world itself? It's a fascinating question, and Chiang sets out to answer it with admirable gusto. The scenarios he imagines are complex and compelling. He manages to tease out a number of surprising possibilities that aren't obvious at first. The ideas he explores are always take the reading down fascinating twists and turns.
There is some familiar territory here. As I read some of the stories I couldn't help being reminded of other stories. At times I found …
Ted Chiang artfully takes our world, changes one thing and asks "What if?" What if the Tower of Babel were successful? What if we could augment our intelligence to the point where we immediately spotted the patterns in the chaos around us? What if our language determined the way we view time itself?
Many of these questions boil down to one question: What if the way we perceive the world changes the world itself? It's a fascinating question, and Chiang sets out to answer it with admirable gusto. The scenarios he imagines are complex and compelling. He manages to tease out a number of surprising possibilities that aren't obvious at first. The ideas he explores are always take the reading down fascinating twists and turns.
There is some familiar territory here. As I read some of the stories I couldn't help being reminded of other stories. At times I found myself thinking about [book:Flowers for Algernon|18373], and [author:Kurt Vonnegut|2778055]'s "Harrison Bergeron". While Chiang may be covering familiar territory, may be asking questions authors have asked before or pointing out similar problems, the way explores those questions and problems never fails to go in new and interesting directions.
The stories themselves are mixed. In some, the third person narration is so matter-of-fact and flat, that I found myself imagining them being read in the affectless voice John Cale uses to narrate The Velvet Underground Song "The Gift."
In some, the characters are little more than an empty vessel that Chiang uses to explore an interesting idea, but they take on no real life of their own. I never really felt invested in them as characters.
Exploring ideas as completely as Chiang does here is difficult, doing it while also creating fully-fledged characters is rare. It's still more rare in short stories, where it is hard to do both of those things well. And yet, Chiang succeeds at least twice. Both "The Story of Your Life" and "Liking What You See: A Documentary" both manage to strike this balance.
I'm looking forward to reading more of Ted Chiang's work.
Review of 'Stories of Your Life and Others' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
This is like a mix of the best parts of Rod Serling, Jorge Luis Borges, and Michael Crichton. Accessible, thought-provoking, and thoroughly entertaining across a wide range of subjects. I can't think of anyone to whom I wouldn't recommend this book very highly.
Review of 'Stories of Your Life and Others' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
This book is a good collection of hard science fiction short stories. The scientific ideas and Ted Chiang's way of presenting them is excellent, but in my opinion, the pace of the stories drags at times. None-the-less, the ideas presented here are excellent and I would recommend this book to all sci-fi lovers.
Review of 'Stories of Your Life and Others' on Goodreads
3 stars
Clever premises on the boundary of technology and philosophy and some thoughtful writing approaches, but almost none of these fully clicked for me - would recommend "Division by Zero" and "Story of your Life".
Review of 'Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
Speculative, thought-provoking scifi, reminiscent of both Greg Egan and Borges. The titular story is fantastic; of the rest, some are stronger than others, but they all made me think. If you want to read a story that conceptualizes golems as von Neumann machines, then, my friend, this is your lucky day.
Review of 'Stories of Your Life and Others' on 'Goodreads'
No rating
(I've only read the novella, Story of Your Life. Still need to find the other stories in this collection.)
Beautiful writing. Great concepts.
I wonder if it was written with pure functional programming in mind -- the descriptions of the nonlinear writing are very similar to what it's often like to program functionally (although we still reason about functional programs linerally in the end.. mostly).
