Stories of Your Life and Others

4.5/5

A thought-provoking and dense collection of sci-fi short stories. As a brief note up-front, there is nothing explicitly tying these stories together - each tale stands alone in its own unique setting and with new characters. However, you can expect each story to feature strong internal consistency and distinct but open-ended social discussion, with a lesser focus on individual people.

Chiang's writing style at first seems to conform to hard sci-fi conventions, where a plot is driven by or has a new technological development (or novum) based in known science principles. It makes sense that Chiang has a computer science degree, but I was honestly surprised that he did not have an even more academic background. This is due to the in-depth explanations and ingenuous utilisations of often high-level scientific and mathematical concepts featured in all his stories. When the technology or concept seems to be mundane, the story takes over with some intriguing outcomes and effects on individuals explored.

This is also why I believe Chiang's writing often falls into the soft sci-fi classification as well, which explores societal aspects and human emotions in the foreground of an alternative world (or alterity). There are two stories especially in Story of Your Life and Others which are more fantastical than sci-fi (Tower of Babylon and Hell is the Absence of God), but all the stories in both his collections have some sort of social commentary being explored, with some more on the surface than others.

This is Chiang's strength, as he links deep scientific connections with philosophical discussions in often brain-breaking stories. As a reader, I was surprised at how much time I needed to complete his works. Not only are you meeting new characters and a unique setting, but you have to understand and then keep track of the technology's implications as well as the narrative - and this introductory phase is repeated for each story! This is not at all a knock on Chiang's writing style or the collection, but an acknowledgement that this cannot be approached with the same reading style as that of a typical novel.

I certainly enjoyed the mind-blowing aspect of his storytelling, and the diversity of ideas featured. From fables, world-views and existentialism to CIA action, agency and choice, each story was written slightly differently and distinct in its purpose. After completing the Exhalation collection I'll be moving on to some longer-form sci-fi (which removes the breaks mentioned above), but I whole-heartedly recommend even just a few of Chiang's stories to a curious sci-fi/ fantasy reader. If you do decide to read all of his works, it shouldn't be a time-consuming task but will likely require short breaks between stories so that you are able to absorb the narrative and social deliberation displayed.

Just like the more recent Ted Chiang short story collection I read recently, Exhalation, this is a mix of beautifully told stories with scientific/philosophical leanings (Tower of Babylon, Story of Your Life, Hell is the Absence of God) and some other stories that feel like term papers with a bit of a narrative wrapping (Understand, Division by Zero, Seventy-Two Letters).

I think it's totally worth reading for the former stories, and the latter aren't bad either, just can become tedious or hard to follow at times.

Some really good and some really okay stories: From best to worst

Tower of Babylon 5/5
The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate 5/5
Understand 5/5
Exhalation 5/5
What's Expected of Us 5/5
Division by Zero 4/5
Story of Your Life 4/5
The Lifecycle of Software Objects 4/5
Hell is the Absence of God 4/5
Seventy-Two Letters 2/5
Liking What You See: A Documentary: Got bored never read to the end