Stories of Your Life and Others
From the author of Exhalation, an award-winning short story collection that blends "absorbing storytelling with meditations on the universe, being, time and space ... raises questions about the nature of reality and what it is to be human" (The New York Times).
A Los Angeles Times Best Fiction Book of the Last 30 Years
Stories of Your Life and Others delivers dual delights of the very, very strange and the heartbreakingly familiar, often presenting characters who must confront sudden change—the inevitable rise of automatons or the appearance of aliens—with some sense of normalcy. With sharp intelligence and humor, Chiang examines what it means to be alive in a world marked by uncertainty, but also by beauty and wonder. An award-winning collection from one of today's most lauded writers, Stories of Your Life and Others is a contemporary classic.
Includes “Story of Your Life”—the basis for the major motion picture Arrival
A Los Angeles Times Best Fiction Book of the Last 30 Years
Stories of Your Life and Others delivers dual delights of the very, very strange and the heartbreakingly familiar, often presenting characters who must confront sudden change—the inevitable rise of automatons or the appearance of aliens—with some sense of normalcy. With sharp intelligence and humor, Chiang examines what it means to be alive in a world marked by uncertainty, but also by beauty and wonder. An award-winning collection from one of today's most lauded writers, Stories of Your Life and Others is a contemporary classic.
Includes “Story of Your Life”—the basis for the major motion picture Arrival
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Readers say *Stories of Your Life and Others* by Ted Chiang is a thought-provoking, idea-driven sci-fi collection exploring humanity through science, ...
Stories of Your Life and Others asks enormous questions about humanity through mathematics, religion, language, artificial intelligence, extraterrestrial contact, and the boundaries of human consciousness. Ted Chiang fills eight short stories with ideas that challenge you to reconsider free will, morality, beauty, faith, and the systems that shape individual choice. His writing is unlike anything I have encountered, but the science-heavy approach made this collection a miss for me.
Each story places humanity inside a different intellectual experiment. A mathematician discovers proof capable of destroying her faith in objective truth. A linguist learns an alien language that changes her understanding of time. A grieving man searches for divine love in a world where angels appear with devastating consequences. A university debates a procedure that prevents people from recognizing physical beauty. Chiang uses these alternative strange realities to examine how people respond when their beliefs, identities, or freedoms are threatened.
Story of Your Life was the most recognizable selection because it inspired the film Arrival. Linguist Louise Banks works with the military to communicate with an extraterrestrial species whose language reveals a nonlinear experience of time. The story raises moving questions about whether someone would still choose love after learning exactly how much grief it will bring. That question interested me far more than the technical scientific explanations surrounding it.
Several stories explore governments, institutions, and corporations attempting to control discoveries that could change society. These stories made me think about who receives the power to define progress. I also pondered whether individual choice survives once a new technology becomes politically or commercially valuable. Chiang presents morality as a complicated negotiation rather than a simple divide between right and wrong.
The collection gave its philosophical and scientific ideas far more attention than its characters. The short format left little space for character development. Many of the stories seemed designed to illustrate a philosophical question rather than invite a strong personal connection. I often felt as though I was reading an academic thought experiment instead of becoming absorbed in a narrative.
Chiang’s intelligence and originality are obvious. His storytelling requires concentration and will reward those who love technical speculation, philosophical puzzles, and science fiction built around complex theories. I search for rich characterization, strong emotional attachment, and an immersive plot. This made me struggle to connect with this collection of stories. Stories of Your Life and Others confirmed that science-heavy speculative fiction is not my preferred genre.
The collection made me think about humanity, morality, alien contact, and institutional control. Thought-provoking ideas were not enough to make the reading experience enjoyable. Pick this up if you enjoy science-heavy speculative fiction, philosophical questions, alien contact, and stories that prioritize ideas over character development.
Love this book. Every story was so unique. The edition I read had author notes at the end in which the author explained a little bit about his thoughts behind the story or original ideas for stories. Very, very good. If you are looking for a fresher/more modern take on sci-fi I think you will like this book too.
loved the first two stories and the last one but got lost a lot in the in betweens. sometimes chiang gets too much in the alien and quantum weeds for me to follow. enjoy his work regardless, but this was the weaker of the books i’ve read by him.
I’m just reviewing the story that arrival was based on, for a book club that a member who will go unnamed has turned into a movie club featuring occasional book. Anyway.
This story was going for profound and landed on clever, which I won’t hold against it. I enjoyed the book, but found it to be shallow.
The author explores humans penchant for cause and effect and does so by introducing an alien species whose customs differ from our own, in particular their language and approach to representing physics. He overlays that on a story about the protagonist (linguist) telling her daughter some vignettes of a life she will have after the events of the story.
Whaaaaat?
Well that’s the hook.
The aliens experience the world teleologically, which the author narrowly suggests means that they perceive not a sequence of events linked by cause and effect but all events simultaneously as part of a connected whole. This tendency displays itself in their physics (eg they treat as elementary equations the tendency of for instance light to minimize or maximize the time required to arrive at its destination) and their writing (eg whole ideas are blended together into single complex symbols with the components modified to show relationships). The author is at pains to have us understand that our causal relationship to the world and the aliens teleological one are both equally valid ways to interpret the same sensory phenomenon.
This has implications. The aliens, rather than living their life in anticipation of whatever they are working toward, have a more detached, maybe even relaxed, view of things. They see life and all of its attendant actions as a stage upon which to perform that which they already know will arrive and that they cannot alter. And they would not think of altering that outcome. That is not how they think. And that’s a big shift, if you think about it. But not so different from the experience eastern spiritual folks have. Or any Calvinist that really felt predestination. Or maybe even virtually every pre agricultural tribes-person? To me this was as much a self conscious thought experiment to imagine how real human beings have actually lived as it was an attempt to imagine something only an alien species could do. I wonder if that’s what the author intended?
So where does that leave our mother/daughter story? Well, the daughter that has not yet been conceived will die tragically at twenty five (she falls off the face of a mountain at a national park. Seriously. That’s how he wrote it. I imagine he leaned back from the old typewriter and smiled a real sense of authorial gravitas after tossing that one off). The protagonist knows her kid dies young and still goes through every step of conceiving, raising, and ultimately burying this kid. This despite her awareness of her daughters early and no-doubt-the-author-intended-tragic-and-not-bizarrely-unseriously-written-death. No, the protagonist conceived her child in some sense because of that outcome. Performing the activities is what gives them value, not creating them and certainly not optimizing them, whatever that could mean. How exactly does that work or feel? What would it be like to live in that word? Any sane person immediately wonders. And the author? Completely silent. This the same author who won’t stop inserting interesting but distracting scientific minutia into every other paragraph. But as to like the main point of the story, not going to bog us down in that.
It’s a fascinating idea and it’s fun to think about. But I think the author has taken an important idea and given it an superficial treatment.
The author does not help us understand how an honest to god human being would make this transformation. What it would feel like. What she would struggle with as she learned to conceive of time and events differently. There is no understanding of humanity here. The author wrote a clever premise and a then tells us the logical end point that results from it. Ironically, he flattens a potentially broad and multifaceted experience and chooses to relate only cause and effect. He literally falls subject to the same bias he describes in the story.
I hope that his readers take the premise and do more with it than he did. Maybe that’s how this sort of story is supposed to work.
Three stars. Something here, but ultimately the author is writing about humans that are so remote from the ones I know that it might as well be a story about two alien species.
PS. Good lord this author cannot write dialogue in general and in particular anything romantic. Twelve year old doing a first draft that got a D- in remedial language arts terrible. Can someone just go back and fix these sections now that the story is famous? I feel like decent stories with glaring weaknesses should get a free intervention from a writer with differing skills.
This story was going for profound and landed on clever, which I won’t hold against it. I enjoyed the book, but found it to be shallow.
The author explores humans penchant for cause and effect and does so by introducing an alien species whose customs differ from our own, in particular their language and approach to representing physics. He overlays that on a story about the protagonist (linguist) telling her daughter some vignettes of a life she will have after the events of the story.
Whaaaaat?
Well that’s the hook.
The aliens experience the world teleologically, which the author narrowly suggests means that they perceive not a sequence of events linked by cause and effect but all events simultaneously as part of a connected whole. This tendency displays itself in their physics (eg they treat as elementary equations the tendency of for instance light to minimize or maximize the time required to arrive at its destination) and their writing (eg whole ideas are blended together into single complex symbols with the components modified to show relationships). The author is at pains to have us understand that our causal relationship to the world and the aliens teleological one are both equally valid ways to interpret the same sensory phenomenon.
This has implications. The aliens, rather than living their life in anticipation of whatever they are working toward, have a more detached, maybe even relaxed, view of things. They see life and all of its attendant actions as a stage upon which to perform that which they already know will arrive and that they cannot alter. And they would not think of altering that outcome. That is not how they think. And that’s a big shift, if you think about it. But not so different from the experience eastern spiritual folks have. Or any Calvinist that really felt predestination. Or maybe even virtually every pre agricultural tribes-person? To me this was as much a self conscious thought experiment to imagine how real human beings have actually lived as it was an attempt to imagine something only an alien species could do. I wonder if that’s what the author intended?
So where does that leave our mother/daughter story? Well, the daughter that has not yet been conceived will die tragically at twenty five (she falls off the face of a mountain at a national park. Seriously. That’s how he wrote it. I imagine he leaned back from the old typewriter and smiled a real sense of authorial gravitas after tossing that one off). The protagonist knows her kid dies young and still goes through every step of conceiving, raising, and ultimately burying this kid. This despite her awareness of her daughters early and no-doubt-the-author-intended-tragic-and-not-bizarrely-unseriously-written-death. No, the protagonist conceived her child in some sense because of that outcome. Performing the activities is what gives them value, not creating them and certainly not optimizing them, whatever that could mean. How exactly does that work or feel? What would it be like to live in that word? Any sane person immediately wonders. And the author? Completely silent. This the same author who won’t stop inserting interesting but distracting scientific minutia into every other paragraph. But as to like the main point of the story, not going to bog us down in that.
It’s a fascinating idea and it’s fun to think about. But I think the author has taken an important idea and given it an superficial treatment.
The author does not help us understand how an honest to god human being would make this transformation. What it would feel like. What she would struggle with as she learned to conceive of time and events differently. There is no understanding of humanity here. The author wrote a clever premise and a then tells us the logical end point that results from it. Ironically, he flattens a potentially broad and multifaceted experience and chooses to relate only cause and effect. He literally falls subject to the same bias he describes in the story.
I hope that his readers take the premise and do more with it than he did. Maybe that’s how this sort of story is supposed to work.
Three stars. Something here, but ultimately the author is writing about humans that are so remote from the ones I know that it might as well be a story about two alien species.
PS. Good lord this author cannot write dialogue in general and in particular anything romantic. Twelve year old doing a first draft that got a D- in remedial language arts terrible. Can someone just go back and fix these sections now that the story is famous? I feel like decent stories with glaring weaknesses should get a free intervention from a writer with differing skills.
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