Ted Chiang is one of Science fictions hot new authors and this collection is a fairly good example of why. The short stories collected here were written from 1990 to 2001 and show a great deal of innovation. From the opening “Tower of Babylon” to the closing “Liking What You See” you are at all times surprised by Chiang’s range both, of subject matter and also human emotional experiences. Some of the stories are really quick reads the shortest of them coming in at just over two pages, but in each of them you feel Chiang is playing around with a specific Sci-fi trope or idea and using it to create a new discussion. Also worth noting the titular “Story of Your Life” has been made into a movie titled “The Arrival” that was directed by Denis Villenueve of Dune fame, and went on to be nominated for eight academy awards in 2016. Pretty Amazing.
Thoughts overall? Stories of Your Life and Others is sometimes outstanding, sometimes thought provoking, always fresh, my personal favorite was the nerd-duel “Understanding” or the masterful Victorian Era society (read “whitewashed”) portrait presented in “Seventy-Two Letters”. Chiang proves speculative fiction still has a lot to offer in terms of subject matter, innovation, and creativity. He also doesn’t hesitate to break the third wall it seems, though in this collection it usually only added humor or spiced things up a bit. Definitely worth a re-read as Chiang’s strategy seems to be to take big ideas and old formulas and saturate them with multiple layers of meaning. When this works it really shows how much room there is for mixing human narratives with the exploration of ideas in the Sci-Fi genre and how much potential there still is for writers to explore these themes.
Recommended for fans of social criticism or thought provoking Sci-Fi.