These collections of short stories by Ted Chiang are amazing. He wrote the story the movie Arrival is based on - and many of his other stories are even better!
Published in 2002 & 2019; the stories inside have won all the major sci-fi short story awards many times over.
Brent: 4 stars. Truly incredible ideas about potential future technology, alternate worlds, mythology, and the morality of it all - engrossing and impressive.
Cody: 5 stars. Ted Chiang’s work is everything I want in sci-fi: fascinating and precisely executed postulations on our existence and the nature of the universe, that also deliver exciting narrative arcs and powerful emotion.
Here's the setup:
Since both of these books are short story collections, we’re just going to do a high-level summary here.
Ted Chiang is a technical writer in the software industry as a vocation, and writes fiction “when he gets an idea.” Having published only 18 short stories and novellas, he has nonetheless won 4 of each major science fiction award (Locus, Hugo, Nebula) and the Jack Campbell Award. His stories have the quintessential “what would our world look like if we changed this thing?” They also often invert that principle and use a totally alien world as a pastiche to deeply explain one scientific or philosophical idea from our world.
Chiang writes a lot of different “types” of stories. He has biblical/mythological stories, fantasy stories (often set in Victorian times), and then the more traditional science fiction or alien world stories. The beauty of his writing is that he is able to convey highly intellectual and existential concepts to us readers at a visceral level, all while making those explanations and metaphors make sense in the context of the story and characters.
And for those who don’t know, the titular novella of his first collection, Story of your Life, is the basis for the excellent 2016 film, Arrival.
Hugonauts' Thoughts:
Most short story collections are hit and miss, with a few good stories and a lot of duds. Not the case with Ted Chiang! He only writes about one story every two years, and says he only writes when he has a really fascinating idea; you can tell from the results. These are pretty incredible books from front to back.
The stories are not only entertaining, Chiang also illustrates, explains and reframes myriad scientific concepts through the stories. The titular story of his second collection, Exhalation, provides maybe the most intuitive explanation of entropy we've ever read, and it illustrates how our minds and identities are a pattern of connections between neurons as well. Brent touts it as the most interesting short story he has ever read. Story of Your Life includes an exploration of Fermat's Principle of least time - a mind-bending principle that really helps you break down how light and time work, how it’s not intuitive, and how it is a bridge to conceptualizing what existing as a 4th dimensional being might feel like.
He also masterfully illustrates and examines the moral implications of a number of future technologies that seem likely to be invented. The story The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling is our favorite in that category, wherein he examines what the world will be like when every moment of everyone's life is recorded perfectly, with software to help with recall those video memories. Chiang compares it to the introduction of written language in oral societies - and reminds us that written language is a technology as well.
There are also several stories that are more fantasy than sci-fi - but frankly those stories are just as good. Chiang is a believer in 'hard' fantasy, meaning the rules of the world are well-defined, and explores what would be possible in a universe with those rules. Our favorite story of that type is Omphalos, set in a universe where young earth creationism is true. Or maybe Tower of Babylon. Or maybe The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate. Seriously, too many to choose from.
If you haven't read these yet, pick them up, they are so fun and smart and human all at once! Both collections are excellent, start wherever you’d like. No doubt in our top three short story collections of all time.
Related Books
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The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories - Ken Liu
Ken Liu's family-centered short story collection has some of the strongest emotional pull of any genre-fiction we've ever read.
I, Robot - Isaac Asimov
Some argue the stories of I, Robot are Asimov's best work, and we aren't necessarily disagreeing. Learn the three laws of robotics, and see if you can figure out the mystery of their unintended consequences.
Welcome to the Monkey House - Kurt Vonnegut
Vonnegut's clever and silly tales are from the early years of sci-fi, but pack wonderful ideas to mull nonetheless. A delightful read.
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