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

I'm sorry to say this was a very mixed bag for me. I thought "Liking What You See" was asinine at best and found "Seventy-Two Letters" to be honestly offensive. But I loved "Story of Your Life" so so much and I don't think it's a coincidence that that particular story has the most well drawn characters. I'm thinking about something Chiang said in an interview with AAWW about not writing particularly to an asian american experience. I think "Liking What You See" at the very least could have been deeply improved by more fully addressing the obvious connotations of racism (in fact it was only made worse for me by there being a very throw away comment about racial discrimination). It's not that I disagree with him about it (thinking you have to write any kind of story b/c of the group you're a part of isn't what i'm angling for) but I just feel like there's something missing. maybe i'm not the audience for these stories. For me many of these felt quite dated, which is maybe a pitfall of speculative fiction.