Ted Chiang's first collection of short stories, and like his awesome Exhalation this is a five star read. Inventive, compelling, and really varied in genres. There's a lot of enjoyment and alpha in reading older books.
Several of the stories are award winning, with the titular one "Story of Your Life" being adapted into the excellent 2016 Denis Villeneuve film Arrival (9/10 popcorns). The adaptation kept the hugely original alien perception of time and the linguistics heroine, but tells the tale cleverly through flashbacks and I prefer the book version's very anti-Hollywood ending.
I will jump right to two much shorter short stories that made me think of the recent advances in AI powered mathematics. "Division by Zero" has a world class mathematician discovering a formal proof that maths is fundamentally inconsistent (1=2), this shatters her world, rippling through her professional and personal life. The Evolution of Human Science is by far the shortest, it fits on one page! It's fashioned as a scientific article (it was published in Nature) in a world where genetically enhanced "metahumans" advance science and technology so far beyond human comprehension that ordinary people can only hope to translate parts of it. Written in the year 2000 it hits so hard in 2026! I've touched on these themes in some blogs before, but if things go well we may see incredible advances that we will struggle to comprehend, and that make some people's worlds shatter :)
The other famous story from the collection is "Tower of Babylon", Chiang's debut story from 1990. It follows a mining crew in biblical times climbing a truly colossal Tower of Babel to break through the vault of heaven. It has a wonderful mix of real engineering chops and fantastic settings. I remember well the families that live halfway up, never seeing the floor nor the top – but being happy to be a part of God's plan. The later parts really reminded me of the movie The Time Machine (1960), based on an H. G. Wells book.
"Hell Is the Absence of God" is wild! The most unhinged, set in a world where angels really visit earth, but brutally, in great balls of fire and destruction! People are maimed all the time, and faith is tested in dark ways – you can see their version of hell just below the surface. If your partner is already there, what do you do? What if they are in Heaven, but you don't believe?
"Understand" follows a man given an experimental drug to repair his brain damage, who then takes a little more and develops hyper-intelligence. A type of Limitless scenario plays out in a fun way.
The longer "Seventy-Two Letters" is a Victorian steampunk thriller, the story is solid and the science of naming original and weird.
"Liking What You See" has what I feel was a strong idea – one that may soon play out in some ways! – but the interview style was not very engaging. It follows a university campus debating a rule that mandates "calliagnosia", a reversible neurological technology that turns off the brain's ability to perceive physical beauty – you see perfectly normally just without any attraction! As you expect it changes things.