This new edition of Ted Chiang's masterful first collection, Stories of Your Life and Others , includes his first eight published stories. Combining the precision and scientific curiosity of Kim Stanley Robinson with Lorrie Moore's cool, clear love of language and narrative intricacy, this award-winning collection offers listeners the dual delights of the very, very strange and the heartbreakingly familiar. Stories of Your Life and Others presents characters who must confront sudden change--the inevitable rise of ...
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This new edition of Ted Chiang's masterful first collection, Stories of Your Life and Others , includes his first eight published stories. Combining the precision and scientific curiosity of Kim Stanley Robinson with Lorrie Moore's cool, clear love of language and narrative intricacy, this award-winning collection offers listeners the dual delights of the very, very strange and the heartbreakingly familiar. Stories of Your Life and Others presents characters who must confront sudden change--the inevitable rise of automatons or the appearance of aliens--while striving to maintain some sense of normalcy. In the amazing and much-lauded title story (the basis for the 2016 movie Arrival ), a grieving mother copes with divorce and the death of her daughter by drawing on her knowledge of alien languages and non-linear memory recollection. A clever pastiche of news reports and interviews chronicles a college's initiative to turn off the human ability to recognize beauty in Liking What You See: A Documentary. With sharp intelligence and humor, Chiang examines what it means to be alive in a world marked by uncertainty and constant change, and also by beauty and wonder.
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I am new to the work of Ted Chiang; his collection "Stories of Your Life and Others" was lent to me by a friend when we realized that I tend to read science fiction written exclusively by women. (not on purpose, it's just turned out that way for some reason...) Each of the eight stories included in the collection is astounding in its completeness and uniqueness. Chiang has a consistent style of prose but beyond that he leaps from idea to idea nimbly and each story makes its own universe and point of view. What impresses me most about Chiang's work here is the pairing of hard science with thoughtful characterization of his protagonists. These are incredibly delicate, personal stories of love, loss, desire, and hope. Most of all, I am surprised at how accessibly he writes about complicated scientific principles that would normally be miles above the head of a non-scientist. Call me converted (but I'm still not giving up Bujold, Norton, or McCaffrey).
