I came to know about Ted Chiang and his work after movie Arrival. I bought The story of your life and others on kindle to give it a read. I like sci-fi and thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. This book is not your everyday bad alien fighting book. This book has 8 short stories and every story is different. I am listing the stories from book below.
- Story of your life - My favorite story and Arrival movie is based on this story. In this story a linguist tries to communicate with aliens. Story is about how it works and impacts her life and people around her. A fascinating story and you need to give couple of read to understand everything that is going on in the story.
- Tower of Babylon - My second favorite story from the book, this story make you think about religion and religious beliefs. I still can’t visualize how that tower was built, but it is a sci-fi for a reason.
- Liking What you see: A Documentary - This short story asks a question “what will happen if everybody looks same”. Very interesting read and I will love to see this turned into a movie.
- Division by Zero - How a mathematician goes insane when she finds that she can prove something that deemed impossible in mathematics. Another great read.
- Hell is the absence of God - Another sci-fi story that asks questions about religious beliefs. This story also has angels.
- Understand - A therapy gone wrong and we have a super human with high cognitive functioning.
- Seventy-Two letters - Story about magic and robots.
- The Evolution of Human Science - As the name says, a short sci-fi story about the evolution of human science.
I liked this book very much and I am looking forward to read more from Ted Chiang.