kalaniwilliams 's review for:

Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang

5.0

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Normally when I'm reading something really special, I find myself wondering what it was like to be around when that book came out. Nothing against current literature, I'm probably just bad at finding it. This was as incredible as anything I've ever read. Chiang's stories propose scenarios and ask what the world would be like if it worked in certain ways. He creates incredibly rich worlds and plays by the rules he makes. But in these stories with such exquisite world building, the humanity is never lost. At the end of the day, his stories are about people.

Many of his stories also inhabit something that feels like a genre I've never seen [Tower of Babel, 72 Letters, Hell is the Absence of God]. I don't know what to call it, maybe "historical sci-fi"? Not in a steampunk way, but in a way that takes historical points of view or understandings of how the world worked and asks, what if the world really did work that way? What would that world be like? What stories could we tell? I'm just in awe, the conceit of each of his stories is worthy of being remarkable on their own, but the stories never lack for content or humanity- he always sticks the landing.

I'm really looking forward to reading Exhalation as soon as I can!