Books

Short works

Books : reviews

Ted Chiang.
Stories of Your Life and Others.
Picador. 2014

With Stories of Your Life and Others, his masterful first collection, multiple-award-winning author Ted Chiang deftly blends human emotion and scientific rationalism in eight remarkably diverse stories, all told in his trademark precise and evocative prose.

From a soaring Babylonian tower that connects a flat Earth with the firmament above, to a world where angelic visitations are a wondrous and terrifying part of everyday life; from a neural modification that eliminates the appeal of physical beauty, to an alien language that challenges our very perception of time and reality, Chiang’s rigorously imagined fantasias invite us to question our understanding of the universe and our place in it.

Ted Chiang.
Exhalation.
Picador. 2019

rating : 3 : worth reading
review : 30 July 2023

From the acclaimed author of Stories of Your Life and Others, the basis for the Oscar-nominated Arrival, the long-awaited second collection of stories, each of which remakes speculative fiction in its own unique fashion.

A great collection of short stories, ranging from fantasy to SF settings, but all rock hard SF extrapolation.

Contents

The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate. 2007
A time gate interacts with the frame story
Exhalation. 2008
A robot examines its working brain to understan why time is slowing down
What's Expected of Us. 2005
What if someone proved we have no free will?
The Lifecycle of Software Objects. 2010
A robot might need 20 years of real world experience to become adult
Dacey's Patent Automatic Nanny. 2011
What can go wrong with robots looking after children
The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling. 2013
On having a perfect digital memory, that contradicts ones own organic memory
The Great Silence. 2015
Parrots and the Fermi Paradox
Omphalos. 2019
They have proof of Creation, but it's not quite what they think it is
Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom. 2019
What if you could see what happened in parallel worlds to parallel you?