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Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang

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Stories of Your Life and Others

by Ted Chiang

Length 10 hours 23 minutes

Language English

Narrators Abby Craden & Todd McLaren

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Bookseller recommendation

“I have read in several places that Ted Chiang is one of the most important voices in modern science fiction and after reading this book I fully agree with this statement. Stories of Your Life is a collection of short stories that for the most part were originally published in magazines. Each of the stories dealt with wildly different subjects, proving Chiang’s versatility as an author. And each story was deeply compelling and filled with truly original ideas. My favorite kind of science fiction is the kind that forces you to put the book down occasionally and ponder the implications of the ideas being presented. This collection had no shortage of these moments. Another one of my favorite issues in science fiction is linguistics and communication difficulties, the title story that was made into the film Arrival, did a wonderful job at addressing this issue and presented fresh concepts that I will be considering for some time to come. The best books are the ones that keep you thinking for months on end and I have no doubt that this book has had that effect on me. I don’t want to give away the premises of these stories because I found them surprising throughout and wouldn’t want to deprive you of a similar experience. Highly recommended!”
— Jean-Paul • Space Cowboy Books

Summary

This new edition of Ted Chiang's masterful first collection, Stories of Your Life and Others, includes his first eight published stories. Combining the precision and scientific curiosity of Kim Stanley Robinson with Lorrie Moore's cool, clear love of language and narrative intricacy, this award-winning collection offers listeners the dual delights of the very, very strange and the heartbreakingly familiar.

Stories of Your Life and Others presents characters who must confront sudden change—the inevitable rise of automatons or the appearance of aliens—while striving to maintain some sense of normalcy. In the amazing and much-lauded title story (the basis for the 2016 movie Arrival), a grieving mother copes with divorce and the death of her daughter by drawing on her knowledge of alien languages and non-linear memory recollection. A clever pastiche of news reports and interviews chronicles a college's initiative to "turn off" the human ability to recognize beauty in "Liking What You See: A Documentary." With sharp intelligence and humor, Chiang examines what it means to be alive in a world marked by uncertainty and constant change, and also by beauty and wonder.

Fiction Science Fiction