This new edition of Ted Chiang's masterful first collection, Stories of Your Life and Others, includes his first eight published stories. Combining the precision and scientific curiosity of Kim Stanley Robinson with Lorrie Moore's cool, clear love of language and narrative intricacy, this award-winning collection offers listeners the dual delights of the very, very strange and the heartbreakingly familiar.
Stories of Your Life and Others presents characters who must confront sudden change—the inevitable rise of automatons or the appearance of aliens—while striving to maintain some sense of normalcy. In the amazing and much-lauded title story (the basis for the 2016 movie Arrival), a grieving mother copes with divorce and the death of her daughter by drawing on her knowledge of alien languages and non-linear memory recollection. A clever pastiche of news reports and interviews chronicles a college's initiative to "turn off" the human ability to recognize beauty in "Liking What You See: A Documentary." With sharp intelligence and humor, Chiang examines what it means to be alive in a world marked by uncertainty and constant change, and also by beauty and wonder.
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“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.”
— Amazon.com, editorial review
“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.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)“Thought-provoking stories…[Chiang] puts the science back in science fiction—brilliantly.”
— Booklist (starred review)“Ted is a national treasure…Each of those stories is a goddamned jewel.”
— Cory Doctorow, author of Little BrotherChiang writes seldom, but his almost unfathomably wonderful stories tick away with the precision of a Swiss watch-and explode in your awareness with shocking, devastating force.
— Kirkus Starred ReviewTed Chiang is a celebrated science fiction writer and the author of numerous short stories, including “Exhalation,” which won the Hugo, British Science Fiction, and Locus awards. He is also the author of the novellas The Lifecycle of Software Objects and The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate. Ted lives near Seattle.
Todd McLaren, an Earphones Award–winning narrator, was involved in radio for more than twenty years in cities on both coasts, including Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. He left broadcasting for a full-time career in voice acting, where he has been heard on more than five thousand television and radio commercials, as well as television promos; narrations for documentaries on such networks as A&E, Discovery, and the History Channel; and films, including Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
Abby Craden has been a professional actress and voice artist for over sixteen years and can be heard in numerous television and radio commercials, video games, and audiobooks. She has twice won the AudioFile Earphones Award.