A review by whoischels
Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang

challenging mysterious reflective tense fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

Almost all of these stories have at their core just...really great ideas. Chiang's stories are imaginative and really precisely and cleverly build worlds and ideas. The stories are very well contained and paced, with just enough room to imagine them in a longer form (such as...the movie Arrival). The ideas they explore are thought-provoking and often haunting, and I think I'll remember them for quite a while. 

Tower of Babylon - 5

• Very haunting and fantastic imagery. Like reading a Denis Villenueve movie. One might expect a setting-focused story like this to lend itself to flowery writing, but Chiang has a very sparse and precise style which expertly leads you to visualize and be awed by the size of the titular tower.

Understand - 4

• A heady exploration into what someone medically imbued with a superior level of intelligence might experience. Chiang clearly thought about this a lot. The way he writes a superintelligent character is very believable. The slide from shock and surprise to snowballing deductions and
  evasive actions to avoid the government and other superintelligent people
  is surprisingly gradual and steady in such a short form.

Division by Zero - 3

• A good story about how people cope when life destroys their ability to believe in a core value. Only a three because it doesn't stand out to me as much as the others. 

Story of Your Life - 5

• I saw Arrival before I read this story so I knew all the plot twists in advance. The reveal time line for the delivery of the narrative slides into place so perfectly the first time you read/watch this story. Oddly, I think the movie portrayed the linguistic details a little better than the short story did. Nonetheless, I'm a big fan of both versions.

Seventy-Two Letters - 4

• Golem fiction and the philosophical ramifications of it, but with a literal twist. Takes place in a bourgeoisie  steampunk version of the Industrial Age, a unique twist on an alternative history setting that I've not encountered in media.

The Evolution of Human Science - 3

• Not my favorite story. Probably because I'm not familiar with the tics and trends of scientific papers. 

Hell is the Absence of God - 5

• End of Evangelion Mad Max type shit, with extra focus on What It All Means. In this story, Heaven and Hell are real and so are angels, the biblically accurate kind. When they come to earth, some people are ruined and some people are blessed. Both can be a struggle to deal with.

Liking What You See: A Documentary - 4

• A light fare format for a dark idea: neuro-technology that turns off how you register the attractiveness of other people. Chiang does a comprehensive job of collecting and imagining all the possible opinions people might have on a technology like this in a college setting.