- Paperback: 320 pages
- Publisher: Small Beer Press; NONE edition (Oct 26 2010)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1931520720
- ISBN-13: 978-1931520720
- Product Dimensions: 21.3 x 13.7 x 2.3 cm
- Shipping Weight: 358 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
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Amazon Bestsellers Rank:
#65,854 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #57 in Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction > Anthologies
- #65 in Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction > Short Stories
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
This marvelous collection by one of science fiction's most thoughtful and graceful writers belongs on the bookshelf of anyone interested in literary science fiction.
Collected here for the first time, Ted Chiang's award-winning stories--recipients of the Nebula, Sturgeon, Campbell, and Asimov awards--offer a feast of science, speculation, humanity, and lyricism. Standouts include "Tower of Babylon," in which a miner ascends the fabled tower in order to break through the vault of heaven; "Division by Zero," a precise and heartbreaking examination of the disintegration of hope and love; and "Story of Your Life," in which a linguist learns an alien language that reshapes her view of the world. Chiang has the gift that lies at the heart of good science fiction: a human story, beautifully told, in which the science is an expression of the deeper issues that the characters must confront. Full of remarkable ideas and unforgettable moments, Stories of Your Life and Others is highly recommended. --Roz Genessee --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Here's the first must-read SF book of the year. Chiang has acquired a massive reputation on the basis of very few pieces of short fiction. This collection contains all six previously published tales, including the Nebula Award-winning "Tower of Babylon," plus a new story, "Liking What You See: A Documentary." It's rare for a writer to become so prominent so fast. In this case, though, the hype is deserved. Chiang has mastered an extremely tricky type of SF story. He begins with a startling bit of oddity, then, as readers figure out what part of the familiar world has been twisted, they realize that it was just a small part of a much larger structure of marvelous, threatening strangeness. Reading a Chiang story means juggling multiple conceptions of what is normal and right. Probably this kind of brain twisting can be done with such intensity only in shorter lengths; if these stories were much longer, readers' heads might explode. Still, the most surprising thing is how much feeling accompanies the intellectual exercises. Whether their initial subject is ancient Babylonians building a tower that reaches the base of Heaven, translation of an alien language that shows a woman a new way to view her life as a mother, or mass-producing golems in an alternative Victorian England, Chiang's stories are audacious, challenging and moving. They resemble the work of a less metaphysical Philip K. Dick or a Borges with more characterization and a grasp of cutting-edge science.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Customer Reviews
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Great Writer,
Ce commentaire est de: Stories of Your Life: and Others (Paperback)
I only just finished reading this book on my Kindle. I was in awe as I read these stories. First, they are excellent, but in addition, they are incredibly well written. I would commend anyone who wants to be a published author to read this book. Study how a master does it. Be amazed.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great short sci-fi!,
By A Customer
Ce commentaire est de: Stories of Your Life and Others (Paperback)
Possibly the best collection of SHORT science fiction that I have ever read! All of the stories are engrossing and intellectually stimulating.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Hard SF,
By
Ce commentaire est de: Stories of Your Life and Others (Paperback)
To my taste, Ted Chiang is SF's preeminent working hard SF writer, and one of the best creators of thought experiments the genre has ever seen. He doesn't write much, and so far all he's produced has been short fiction; it's hard to imagine his particular techniques--and his focus on following premises to their logical conclusions, and not a word farther--working at greater length. I especially recommend him to people who like Connie Willis' "At the Rialto" and "Schwartzenchild Radius"; like Willis, he is very fond of structuring stories as the living exemplars of scientific theories. Depending on how you look at the stories, they are either using science as a metaphor for human experience--or using human experience as a metaphor for science.There's one weak story here, "Understand," which wastes a very intriguing Flowers for Algernon/Camp Concentration-like setup of the creation of superintelligent beings on a cliched contest for supremacy among supermen: the notes indicate this was the earliest written, if not the earliest published. The earliest published was "Tower of Babylon," a matter-of-fact SF-like practical recounting of the construction of the Tower of Babel; it won a Nebula award. Other stories include "Seventy-Two Letters," a similarly SFnal investigation of a fantasy premise (What if medieval theories of human reproduction were true? And the answer is: If Nature hadn't invented DNA, humans would have had to); "Hell Is the Absence of God," a cruel, utterly matter-of-fact story set in the universe of fundamentalist Christianity; "Division by Zero," the story of a mathematician who learns mathematics is not true; and "The Evolution of Human Science," a scientific article wondering what's left for humans in a future where posthuman evolution (a la Ken MacLeod) has succeeded. My two favorites are "Story of Your Life" and "Liking What You See: A Documentary." I especially recommend "Story of Your Life" to any story-structure geeks reading this: it is told by a woman who learns an alien language which changes her perception of time. It is about how the knowledge of a future outcome changes our perceptions of actions; it is about grief; it is about love. It works even if you think the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is absurd. "Liking What You See: A Documentary" (the only story original to the volume) posits that a way to deliberately and reversably induce "calliagnosia"--the inability to recognize human beauty. (Studies of brain damage indicate that facial recognition is a perception skill-set that's separate from the recognition of beauty; Chiang extrapolates from there.) A college campus debates making calliagnosia mandatory for all students, and a number of parties--students pro, students anti, a student who grew up in a calliagnostic community but opted for reversal on her 18th birthday, and, of course, advertising agencies--give their responses. Clever and thought-provoking, and it very nicely uses the "ivory tower" to show that it's not possible to examine such theses thoroughly without investigating likely uses and misuses by outside forces.
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