ninaprime 's review for:

Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang

3.5

emotional mysterious slow-paced

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A mixed bag of short stories. I love the titular one, where a woman attempts to speak with an alien race and in learning their language, can better interpret the full horizon of her daughter's life. My other favorite was the last story "Liking What You See", which examined people's preoccupation with beauty through the debate around "calli", a brain implant that helps ignore that impulse. I also liked the first story "The Tower of Babylon" and "Hell is the Absence of God", stories about human desperation with spiritual underpinnings. I strongly disliked "Understand", about super-human intelligence, and "Division by Zero", which was very mathematical. "Evolution of Human Science" was too short to make an impact. While "Seventy-Two Letters" had an interesting premise around using animating language to solve human reproductive issues, the story arc was odd with an abrupt ending.