Stories of Your Life and Others

Stunning short stories. Chiang plays so elegantly with belief, loss, religion, science, and wonder. I was utterly captivated.

Precise rating: 4.5 ⭐

This book was absolutely brilliant! I can't get over how much I actually liked every single story. But “Story of Your Life” and “Liking What You See: A Documentary” were definitely the highlights!

Tower of Babylon
4.5 ⭐
Read it to my boyfriend over Discord, we both enjoyed it a lot and had a nice discussion about it afterwards!

Another incredible book by Ted Chiang. I couldn't put it down. He's quickly become one of my all-time favorite authors.

Short story anthology. I really loved Ted's other book of short stories so I decided to give this one a read. These contain his earlier works (from the 90s) as well as the short story that inspired the acclaimed sci-fi movie Arrival.

I think he's definitely improved in his storytelling over time, so some of his earlier work is boring in comparison (one was very mathy and about how 1+1=2, another where a guy became a super genius and then it was just explaining how he was outwitting the government, felt kind of dry).

The movie Arrival I enjoyed more than the actual short story as well, it had more of an emotional impact but definitely big kudos for inspiring such an awesome movie.

The last couple were the best. Like one where all of humankind technically already “exists” in an unborn state, because if you zoomed in on sperm close enough, you could see the sperm for its children, and so on (sounds stupid but I think it's partially based on what people used to think). Also one where angels literally walk the earth and people chase them around like storm seekers chase after tornados, often with dangerous consequences.

I'll give this one a 4 overall since it does have some good stories.

This was really excellent. A couple of the selections weren't great for me, but the rest more than made up for them. I loved Arrival and wanted to read that story (and the rest) and it did not disappoint.

Just WOW! Came for “Stories of Your Life” but was blown away by the others in the collection, as well. Definitely going to be looking into other collections of his work.

These stories really stick with you. What a treasure of a collection! “Story of your Life” will definitely stick with me forever in a way the movie (also amazing) simply will not. This collection was actually not as hardcore sci-fi as I thought. Much of it was a meditation on the power of language, with science fiction being the tool he uses to discuss these ideas in. I highly recommend this collection to any lover of fiction, genre aside.
Except the math ones. The math ones are very mathy. I liked them, but they are probably not as universally appreciated as ones like Tower of Babylon or the others.

Torre di Babilonia 3Capisci 5
Divisione per zero 4Storia della tua vita 5
Settantadue lettere 4L'evoluzione della scienza umana 4
L'inferno è l'assenza di Dio 5Amare ciò che non si vede: un documentario 5

La genialità insita in questi racconti è sorprendente, mi sono ritrovato a riflettere su questioni a cui raramente si pone molta attenzione perché sono per lo più molto fantasiose perciò molto astratte. Mi ha lasciato molti interrogativi e un po' di infelicità se devo essere sincero, è un autore con una fervida immaginazione ed una potente voglia di mettere in crisi l'esistenza del suo lettore. Consigliato a tutti.

“Storie della tua vita” di Ted Chiang è una raccolta di racconti di fantascienza che mi ha suscitato reazioni contrastanti. Sebbene il libro sia lodato da molti lettori e critici, personalmente ho dato una valutazione mediocre nei confronti di questa opera.

Un aspetto positivo del libro è la profondità dei temi affrontati. Ted Chiang esplora questioni filosofiche complesse, come il libero arbitrio, la teoria del linguaggio e l'interazione tra scienza e fede. I suoi racconti sono ben ricercati e si basano su premesse interessanti, che offrono spunti di riflessione approfonditi.

Tuttavia, uno dei principali difetti del libro è la sua mancanza di accessibilità. Alcuni racconti sono eccessivamente complessi e astratti, rendendo difficile per il lettore comune comprenderne appieno il significato. La scrittura di Chiang è densa e talvolta eccessivamente tecnica, il che potrebbe alienare i lettori meno esperti di fantascienza o con minori competenze scientifiche.

Inoltre, il tono generale dei racconti può risultare freddo e distante, mancando di una componente emotiva che permetta al lettore di connettersi appieno con i personaggi o le situazioni presentate. Ciò può rendere l'esperienza di lettura piuttosto distante e poco coinvolgente.

In definitiva, “Storie della tua vita” può essere apprezzato dagli amanti della fantascienza più impegnativa e concettuale, ma potrebbe non essere adatto a chi cerca una lettura più accessibile e coinvolgente. La raccolta ha sicuramente i suoi meriti, ma personalmente mi aspettavo un maggiore coinvolgimento emotivo e una maggiore chiarezza nella narrazione.

I enjoyed all of the novellas in this collection, but Stories of Your Life and Towers of Babylon are exceptional. Both spellbinding must reads.

I wish there were more Ted Chiang stories to read! The creativity, variety and quality of his work is really inspiring.

Every story in this collection left its distinct aftertaste. I didn't find the style mind-bending. However, his plots are strong, really really strong.

I really liked Story of Your Life, Babylon, and Hell is the Absence of God, but Understand and the math-related one really fell flat for me; I just didn't fit the story engaging or the characters interesting.

Only the second book I've not been able to finish. I can't stay awake. It's a textbook disguised as a collection of stories. No humour. No character development. No heart.
Interesting ideas written by someone that fails to capture my imagination.
I enjoyed Babylon, but everything else felt pretentious.
Sorry. Highly rated, but for reasons I don't understand

Fantastic read even if you saw the movie. Probably even better if you didn't. I just make a calendar entry to read this book once a year. It does change the perception of the world as we know it.

4.5

I think this book is a work of genius and instantly made Chiang one of my most respected authors. Reading it made me feel like when I'm having a conversation with someone clearly smarter than me, and right as I'm able to make myself feel better by saying that they're just “book smart,” they reveal themselves to be more creative and perceptive as well.

The main reason I didn't give it 5 stars is unfair; the stories worked too well on me, so each left me feeling sad or unsettled in a way I couldn't shake for several days. I still don't understand “Division by Zero” at all, for instance, but it left me feeling shaken for reasons I don't understand and can't explain.

Ted's short stories are as close to perfect as I can imagine - nobody packs this much heart and imagination so efficiently

A wonderfully diverse collection of stories, dealing with multiple complex yet accessible topics in a very engaging manner.

Although I am not a great fan of short stories, my experience has been that speculative fiction can be an exemplar of the positives of the format.

I enjoyed a lot reading Mr Chiang's stories - at times very thought provoking, at others simply fun to read.

Ted Chiang escreve bem daquele jeito que deixa a gente triste por nunca ser capaz de chegar num nível assim. As histórias de História da sua vida e outros contos variam bastante em temática e comprimento, mas todas são muito bem escritas — ou traduzidas, mas aposto que ficaria igualmente impressionado no original.

Really solid, smart sf. A little ponderous, and I found Ted Chiang's “voice” to be a little homogenizing (basically all the characters sounded the same), but the range of his ideas was great - this short story collection spans a very imaginative set - and one of his stories is, imo, one of the best sf short stories ever written. Simply masterful!

Brief notes about some of the stories:

- Understand: This is basically Flowers for Algernon: a first-person account of a dude with brain damage who, through some hand-wavey magical medicine, becomes a super-intelligent mega-brain genius. The difference here being that, this time, the protagonist is basically an asshole (whereas Charlie was a sweetie). Fine.

- Division by Zero: Meh. An academia power couple has angst because the Mathematician Wife has stumbled upon a painful, foundational inconsistency in ALL DA MATHS. I would have been into this in grad school, when having deep, philosophical reactions to foundational mathematical principles was something I considered fun/cool instead of kinda tedious? It was fine. 1+1 = 1, omg.

- Seventy-Two Letters: This was a hoot. What an imaginative idea! A kinda steampunk story with a pleasantly creepy vibe. The world is weirdly skewed, and Chiang does a good job of slowly revealing how this world is different from our own: words - specifically, Hebrew letters arranged in various ways - (inexplicably?) give “life” to clay-based automata. Or sort of. It's 19th century London, and an industry rises up of automatons that can carry shit, clean shit, and do other mindless chores. Protagonist is a “nomenclator” - a scientist (?) who comes up with the Hebrew words that power these automata. He has lots of labor sensitivities (Industrial Revolution being what it is!) and wants to make a self-replicating automaton that can be cheaply distributed to all English households and thus de-industrialize the landscape. Yeah, I wasn't sure about his reasoning either, and neither are his factory worker buddies. Also there is some drama about “mega-foetuses”, and the inevitable Frankensteinean ambitions to make a true automata: an actual person! That can procreate other people! Definitely a hoot. One of my favorite stories in the collection.

- Story of Your Life: This is the short story that turned into the movie Arrival. I found Arrival overly intellectual and overly solemn - i.e. classic mid-2000s literary sf! - and so I wasn't super pumped about the story. But I found reading the story a “second” time to be oddly enlightening. While the movie seemed to be mostly about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (the theory that language “creates” our reality), the short story was much more free will vs. seeing the future. As is cliche for this sf issue, there is a dead child and lots of regret. The ultimate idea is that, even when you can see your sad, tragic future, you still choose it to still feel the feelings - the highs and lows. As I was sobbing at the (super sad) final section, I realized - omg - THAT'S WHAT I'M DOING RIGHT NOW. I knew the ending (of this story), but I still went through the motions of reading it and still felt the feelings afresh! If not more deeply! So that was an interesting meta moment.

- Liking What You See: A Documentary: A fun, fake oral history about a near future where, to combat “lookism” (the statistical likelihood that better-looking people get treated better by society), neurologists have developed a minimally invasive procedure that gives people mild face-blindness. A local college debates where to have everyone have this procedure done, to basically create a lookism-free campus. This was pretty fun, and obviously reminds the reader about all the various older people who variously critique the “special snowflake PC culture” of younger people at liberal arts colleges. Chiang makes a good argument for both the pro-procedure and anti-procedure groups, and it's a nice, dystopian, Black Mirror-ish moral fable.

- Hell is the Absence of God: AHHHH, THIS. THIS. I read this story back in 2008 and it has stayed with me since then, it is MASTERFUL. It's the story that put Ted Chiang on the map for me, and it's the story that inspired me to write The Good Deaths stories (yo, if anyone wants to buy Part I, plz let me knowwww). The idea is wonderful: Chiang envisions an alternative reality where evangelical Christianity is Literally True. The angels of God come blasting out the sky like natural disasters, dispensing with miracles (you! no more cancer!) and causing havoc in a pretty indiscriminate, random way. When people die, witnesses can see their literal souls flying up to Heaven or falling down to Hell. Hell can occasionally be glimpsed when the ground turns translucent: and Hell doesn't look so bad? It's just a place where the angels and God don't appear. The way that everyone deals with this seemingly amoral but inscrutable and all-powerful deity is wonderful. Protagonist is a recently-widowed dude whose wife dies during one of the angel visitations (she gets fatally injured by exploding Starbucks windows); her soul flew up to heaven, since she was a devoted, God-loving nice lady. Protagonist, however, has always been kinda meh about the whole destructive, amoral God business, and fine with going to hell, but now - wracked with grief over his dead wife! - needs to fall in love QUICK with God so he can earn his way into heaven. Baaahhh. IT'S SO GOOD. I think what I love about it is that, even in a world where “faith” is a moot point, the mysteriousness of our lives - the problem of evil, of randomness - would actually not at all be solved by the literal presence of an all-powerful deity. I ALSO admired Chiang's ability to wrap this essentially non-theistic argument in a story that FEELS strongly, especially in the end, like a moral fable. So many emotions in the end! It's like a Grimm Bros. tale, very wtf and very wonderful.

“Freedom isn't an illusion; it's perfectly real in the context of sequential consciousness. Within the context of simultaneous consciousness, freedom is not meaningful, but neither is coercion; it's simply a different context, no more or less valid than the other. It's like that famous optical illusion, the drawing of either an elegant young woman, face turned away from the viewer, or a wart-nosed crone, chin tucked down on her chest. There's no “correct” interpretation; both are equally valid. But you can't see both at the same time.”

I picked it up because of the movie and I'm very grateful for that. I would have missed out on some fantastic stories and ideas that kept me at the edge of my seat. My favorites were:

• Story of Your Life (naturally)
• Understand • Liking What You See: A Documentary • Tower of Babylon • Hell Is the Absence of God

I also enjoyed the author's notes explaining how each story came to be. This was highly neat.

First read in 2003; then again (natch) after Arrival. The collection is hit-or-miss: some of the stories did nothing for me, but the hits... wow.

maybe I'm just not a fan of the genre but other than Stories of Your Life, none of the stories in this collection were that great. second best was Tower of Babylon which was a fun concept but I'm not sure the twist worked (trapped inside torus world?).

Understand could have been great if the author had the diction to write in a style of a super intellectual egomaniac who didn't care what normals thought. but the story was just a blowhard bragging about his abilities (in mostly high school grad level vocab - oh yeah, he's SUPER smart!).

The worst: Seventy-Two Letters, which was a convoluted mess with a story that went nowhere

like I said, maybe SF isn't my thing, but these stank.

I absolutely loved this collection of stories. Inspiring, beautiful, not-so-sci-fi that it was disconnected from our world.

What I also loved about these stories is that they made me think about my own world and and I wanted to share these conversations and thoughts with those around me.

I think my favourite story was ‘Story of Your Life' (made in to the film The Arrival) closely followed by ‘Tower of Babylon'. But even the short short, ‘The Evolution of Human Science' was superb, right down to the very first opening paragraph!