The blurb:
With Stories of Your Life and Others, his masterful debut collection, multiple-award-winning author Ted Chiang deftly blends human emotion and scientific rationalism in eight remarkably varied stories.
From a soaring Babylonian tower that connects a flat Earth to the firmament above, to a world where angelic visitations are a wondrous and terrifying part of everyday life; from a neural modification that eliminates the appeal of physical beauty, to an alien language that challenges our very perception of time and reality, Chiang's unique imagination invites us to question our understanding of the universe and our place in it.
Ted Chiang is an incredibly precise writer, as well as an inventive one. All the prose throughout all eight of these stories is cool and considered, not a word wasted. You can appreciate the ideas and stories as well as appreciate the skill with which they're delivered.
I think the thing that impresses me the most is the range of ideas explored, from a flat-earth Babylon or the visitations of angels to a drug that boosts human intelligence (but a treatment of it that works out far more interestingly than Lucy or Limitless), or an exploration of what might happen if we found a way to switch off some aspects of our perceptions of others. And then there's Stories of Your Life, the basis for the movie Arrival—itself a work of art, but with a bunch of added bits and pieces on top of the original gem of a story.
Vastly enjoyable, one not to rush through.
Started: 5 December 2025
Finished: 12 December 2025
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