Stories of Your Life and Others
Ted Chiang's first collection gathers eight stories, each one a patient, logically thorough working-out of a single speculative premise. A linguist who learns an alien language that changes how she experiences time lives through her daughter's life in the wrong order, in the story that became the film Arrival. A programmer discovers that mathematics itself has been proven inconsistent and realizes there is nothing to salvage. A tower of Babylon built by a pre-scientific civilization reaches the vault of heaven, and a miner tunneling through it finds something he was not prepared for. A man takes a drug that makes him steadily more intelligent. Published between 1990 and 2002 and collected in 2002, the book established Chiang as the rare science-fiction writer whose stories work equally as thought experiments and as quiet personal dramas.
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What you might want to know about Stories of Your Life and Others
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Ted Chiang's first collection includes eight stories of careful big-idea sci-fi, among them Story of Your Life, in which a linguist deciphers an alien language that changes the way she experiences time.
Yes. The 2016 film Arrival is based on Story of Your Life, the title novella in Ted Chiang's collection Stories of Your Life and Others (2002). The film is widely considered one of the best science fiction adaptations of the 21st century.
Ted Chiang has published two short story collections: Stories of Your Life and Others (2002) and Exhalation (2019). Both are widely cited among the best in modern science fiction.
Stories of Your Life and Others was written by Ted Chiang, published in 2002 by Vintage.
Stories of Your Life and Others is 317 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Stories of Your Life and Others takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
Stories of Your Life and Others is a standalone novel by Ted Chiang, not part of a series.
Stories of Your Life and Others is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.