338 pages
English language
Published Nov. 21, 2015
Stories of Your Life and Others is a collection of short stories by American writer Ted Chiang originally published in 2002 by Tor Books. It collects Chiang's first eight stories. All of the stories except "Liking What You See: A Documentary" were previously published individually elsewhere. It was reprinted in 2016 as Arrival to coincide with the adaptation of "Story of Your Life" as the film Arrival. Chiang's second collection, Exhalation: Stories was released in 2019.
This is one of those science fiction books that really manage to blow your mind with the possibilities that the writer proposes. As a short story collection, you're always left out wanting more of the stories. But they are as long as they have to be.
Tower of Babylon: Tale about the construction of the Tower of Babylon. A bit boring.
Understand: Interesting tale about intelligence enhancement.
Division by Zero: What happen when everything that you believe in turns out to be false?
Story of you life: The better so far. I love how the process to understand the aliens is described.
Seventy two letters: A boring tale about the kabbalah made science.
The evolution of human science: what happen when superhumans make human science irrelevant.
Hell is the absence of god: Funny story about angels seen as natural catastrophes.
Liking what you see - a documentary: I like when science fiction show ideas that makes me uncomfortable.
Went slowly through this book, but it was a really nice read. The one part that I don't like about Chiang's writing is that the stories always seem to end abruptly, and don't really follow through.
