All the stories are about being human, and dealing with the extraordinary. The knowledge is only part of it: you don’t have to be a computer scientist to be pulled along by the scientific dilemma in ‘Understand’ because it is utterly human. Stories of Your Life and Others (the original title of the collection known as Arrival) will expand your mind relentlessly. ‘Liking what you see: A documentary’ hauls us right back to the hard stuff by theorising about gnosias that prevent our brains’ perceptions of beauty, and other human things. It won four awards, including a Nebula and a Hugo: it’s the story I liked least. ‘Hell is the absence of God’ relies a little bit on OT theology but is otherwise fairly ground-level sf. ‘The evolution of human science’ is a three-page short short about how humans can continue to work on science when metahuman science has long since outstripped human understanding. ‘Seventy-two letters’ (a Sidewise Award winner) is about two (not one but TWO, darn it) invented pseudo-sciences in an alternative Victorian England. ‘Story of your life’ (the story the film was made from, and the winner of three awards including a Nebula) is about linguistic theory. ‘Division by Zero’ is about maths, really intimidatingly high-level maths. ‘Understand’ is about accumulating intelligence and quantitative cognition. ‘Towers of Babylon’ (a Nebula Award winner) is about Bronze Age architecture that can build a tower to Heaven. I’ve finished all the stories in that collection now. I’d heard of Ted Chiang, but only vaguely. I spotted the book in the bookshop because of the Amy-Adams-in-a-spacesuit cover, and was surprised to see that a whole film had been based on a short story. I haven’t seen Arrival, but I wanted to read the book because the story as told to me by someone who had seen the film interested me greatly.

Ted chiang short stories