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

5.0

A beautiful, very moving story that I happened across in the "Year's Best SF 4" anthology edited by Hartwell. The story is about sixty pages long, making it a novella I suppose, but it goes very fast, and you can read it easily in one engrossed sitting. Aliens come to earth; they are peaceful, and not especially curious, neither hostile nor especially friendly. A linguist learns their complicated language, which is based on Fermat's principle of least time; one interpretation of this principle is, a ray of light always knows where it will go; in this way, the aliens always know what they will say, but they must say it anyway in order for their saying of it to be true. The linguist learns the language, and gains a similar ability. She knows that soon she will have a chance to make a baby with a man she loves, even though she knows in advance what will happen throughout the child's life, including a very painful event when the child reaches age 25.

It's crafted very well, and filled with a lot of interesting science and math and linguistics -- but nothing dense or dull -- just interesting and cool -- and also many moving, lovely, true images of raising a growing girl from infancy, through childhood and teen years, into her early twenties.

Gotta admit I got dust in my eye at the end. Strong recommendation. This was a very fortunate find in the Free Library on my block. This is a story I will come back to.