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Stories of Your Life and Others

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4.3/5
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Publication date
  
July 2002

Originally published
  
July 2002

Publisher
  
Tor Books

4.3/5
Goodreads

Language
  
English

Media type
  
Print (hardcover)

Author
  
Ted Chiang

Country
  
United States of America

Stories of Your Life and Others t0gstaticcomimagesqtbnANd9GcQG4XNio02n2r8FdU

Original title
  
Stories of Your Life and Others

Pages
  
333 pp (first edition, hardback)

ISBN
  
0-7653-0418-X (first edition, hardback)

Genres
  
Science Fiction, Speculative fiction

Awards
  
Locus Award for Best Collection

Similar
  
Ted Chiang books, Locus Award for Best Collection winners, Science Fiction books

stories of your life and others review


Stories of Your Life and Others is a collection of short stories by Ted Chiang originally published in 2002 by Tor Books. It collects Chiang's first eight stories. All of the stories except "Liking What You See: A Documentary" were previously published individually elsewhere.

Contents

This was reprinted in 2016, as a movie tie-in edition for the adaptation of "Story of Your Life" as the film Arrival and also called "Arrival".

Contents

  • "Tower of Babylon" (originally published in Omni) (Nebula Award winner)
  • "Understand" (originally published in Asimov's)
  • "Division by Zero" (originally published in Full Spectrum 3)
  • "Story of Your Life" (originally published in Starlight 2) (Nebula Award and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award winner)
  • "Seventy-Two Letters" (originally published in Vanishing Acts) (Sidewise Award winner)
  • "The Evolution of Human Science" (a.k.a. "Catching Crumbs from the Table") (originally published in Nature)
  • "Hell Is the Absence of God" (originally published in Starlight 3) (Hugo Award, Locus Award and Nebula Award winner)
  • "Liking What You See: A Documentary"

    • Reception

    Reviewing the book at the SF Site, Greg L. Johnson said that this collection shows why Chiang's stories continue to win awards. Johnson wrote that "it will not take readers new to these stories very long to appreciate their quality and beauty". He added that science fiction relies on short fiction writers to "examine new ideas and push the boundaries of the field", and Chiang has demonstrated he is "more than up to that task".

    English fantasy author China Miéville wrote in a review in The Guardian that Chiang's stories in this collection "unfold with a logic that is ineluctable and compassionate". Here "humanism is inextricable from rationalism", and "it is the rationalism of the characters – and the writer – that makes them emotional and human". Miéville said that despite the extensive use of mathematics, physics and language in the stories, they are infused with a "profound humanism" that makes "the most abstruse philosophical conjectures ... resonant and emotional".

    Foreign editions

  • Serbia – Priče tvog života (Booka, 2016)
  • China – 《你一生的故事》 (Science Fiction World, 2004 ; Yilin Press, 2015)
  • Czech Republic – Příběhy vašeho života (Plus, 2011)
  • Poland – Historia twojego życia (Solaris, 2006)
  • France – La Tour de Babylone (Denoël, 2006)
  • Spain – La historia de tu vida (Bibliópolis, 2004)
  • Israel – סיפורי חייך (Opus, 2003)
  • Brazil – História da sua vida e outros contos (Intrínseca, 2016)
  • Turkey – Geliş (Monokl, 2017)
  • Republic of Korea – 당신 인생의 이야기 (행복한책읽기, 2004; 엘리, 2016)

    • References

    Stories of Your Life and Others Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA