For my first book review of this blog, the last book I completed in 2023, I bring you a short story collection. To be completely honest, I don’t know that I knew this was a short story collection when I put it on my reading list. Not that I have anything against short stories. After all, they’re… well… short. But what did I think about this collection? Am I a fan? How do I rate a book of short stories if there are any I didn’t like? Were there any I didn’t like? Read on and find out!
Stories of Your Life and Others
Author: Ted Chiang
Pages: 286
Format: Paperback
Published: June 14, 2016
Publisher: Vintage
View on Goodreads
Date Completed: December 31, 2023
My rating: 
Synopsis
This book collects a total of eight short stories; seven were previously published between 1990 and 2001, and the final story is new to this volume. The stories are:
- “Tower of Babylon” – What if God hadn’t stopped the construction of the Tower of Babel and humanity was able to continue construction for centuries?
- “Understand” – What if there was a medical treatment that one of the side effects was opening a person’s mind to how the mind works? What would he do with that ability?
- “Division by Zero” – Two peoples’ lives are connected by discovering that all of mathematics is essentially an illusion.
- “Story of Your Life” – The basis for the film “Arrival,” this is a non-linear story about love, loss, and learning to communicate with an alien species.
- “Seventy-Two Letters” – In a world where automata are part of everyday life, how far is too far when giving these things human-like abilities and the ability to recreate themselves?
- “The Evolution of Human Science” – Are we, so-called normal humans, now less than metahumans?
- “Hell is the Absence of God” – Is unfailing devotion to God truly enough to get you into Heaven no matter how you’ve lived your life? Is there no way to avoid going to Hell for some?
- “Liking What You See: A Documentary” – Are we better off not being able to see beauty? Is perception something that schools or governments should be able to regulate?
These stories run the gamut of sci-fi and speculative fiction and touch heavily on both science and religion. Religion may not even be the most apt of descriptions. Perhaps supernatural would be better.
Thoughts
My favorite stories took really interesting ideas and expanded them out into fully-fledged ideas. I really enjoyed the author’s notes on the stories at the end of the book, in which he wrote of the seeds of each story and how he worked them into what we eventually got. The stories evoked all sorts of emotions, from wonder and awe, to sadness, from feelings of superiority to feelings of eternal inferiority.
A couple of the stories were not really to my taste. While I found something to enjoy reading in each, “Division by Zero” was not my cup of tea. I’m not sure if it went too far with the math for me or went on too long or what it was exactly. “Seventy-Two Letters” was similar in that regard. I thought the concepts were interesting, but by the end of the story, I was ready to move on to the next.
Conclusion
Overall, this was a fantastic collection of stories that I flew through between Christmas and the New Year. When I finished the book, I was so deep in thought as to what I should rate it that I ended up taking a little nap. When I woke up, I was still pondering some of the ideas from the last two stories, which, to me, is a sure fire way to earn an emphatic 5 stars. I highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys science fiction, speculative fiction, or otherwise thought-provoking stories.
