Ted Chiang.
Stories of Your Life and Others.
Picador. 2014
rating : 3 : worth reading
review : 12 October 2025
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.
A theme running through these great short stories is a rigorous examination of what the world would be like if certain things were different: biblical physics held, homunculus theory held, angels were observable, how we perceived others could be changed, and more. This collection includes "Story of Your Life", on which the film Arrival was based; it has enough difference of feel to make it differently good.
Contents
- • Tower of Babylon. 1990
- Building a tower with biblical physics
- • Understand. 1991
- Brain restoration treatment leads to superintelligence
- • Division by Zero. 1991
- A mathematical disaster
- • Story of Your Life. 1998
- Aliens with Lagrangian rather than Hamiltonian consciousness
- • Seventy-Two Letters. 2000
- Curing imminent extinction with golem/homunculus physics
- • The Evolution of Human Science. == Catching Crumbs from the Table. 2000
- What is left for us to do when AIs can do science?
- • Hell is the Absence of God. 2001
- Angels cause natural disasters
- • Liking what You See: a Documentary. 2002
- Failing to see attractiveness
