Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang

I’ve been meaning to read this short story collection for a while because I love the movie Arrival (2016) but I finally picked it up because a MeetUp book club is going to meet about it. Overall, I really enjoyed it and the ways it blended technology and philosophy. It’s a very smart story collection and needs some thinking time to ponder over the questions it raises in each of the stories. To best review it, I thought I might break it into groups of stories:

Tower of Babylon, Seventy-Two Letters and Hell is the Absence of God

All three of these primarily deal with religion and honestly… my knowledge of religion is a bit too limited to fully grasp some of the philosophical implications of the stories. Seventy-Two Letters was the easiest to grasp, and of the three stories I think Hell is the Absence of God was the weakest.

Understand

This story had an interesting premise and a good middle but kind of a goofy ending. The ending made me take the rest of the story and its ‘meaning’ less seriously, unfortunately, because I think it could’ve been much better.

Division by Zero

The story itself didn’t seem to connect as much with the format that the story was in, which was my favorite part. The format was very fun and engaging.

Story of Your Life

This is the one that Arrival (2016) is based on. Absolutely the best story in the collection, very clever and engaging despite the ultimately tragic ending. I may be biased as a person with a linguistics degree but this story is just so, so good. If you don’t read any of the others, read this one.

The Evolution of Human Science

Again, the format was really clever, but I also enjoyed the content despite it being only three pages! This was originally published in a science journal and is formatted like an opening to a science journal a universe different to ours, which was very cool.

Liking What You See: A Documentary

Hitting it out of the park again with format, I know I keep saying that but the formatting of some of these stories was much better than the content. This one matched, with a sort of documentary transcript style. I thought it had a very interesting philosophical question at the center of it and enjoyed the way various reveals unfolded throughout it.

Despite knowing the journey and where it leads, I embrace it and welcome every moment.