Chiang's first collection contains eight stories written between 1990 and 2001, each constructed around a premise worked out with unusual rigour. It won multiple awards and established his reputation despite the small volume of his output.
Story of Your Life, which became the film Arrival, concerns a linguist learning an alien language whose written form is non-sequential, which changes how she perceives time. Chiang builds the story around Fermat's principle of least time in physics and the question of whether a language that presents events simultaneously would produce a different relationship to causation and to choice. The story's emotional weight comes from what the narrator knows about her daughter's life while telling it.
Tower of Babylon follows miners ascending a tower to reach the vault of heaven in a universe built on Babylonian cosmology, worked out consistently. Understand concerns a man whose intelligence is enhanced beyond human range and the consequences. Division by Zero concerns a mathematician who proves that arithmetic is inconsistent. Hell Is the Absence of God takes a world where divine intervention is observable and examines what faith means under those conditions. Liking What You See addresses a technology that suppresses the perception of physical attractiveness.
Chiang's method throughout is to take a premise and follow it without cheating. The characters exist to inhabit the consequences, which some readers find cold. The story notes explain the origin of each premise. It is the most concentrated collection of conceptual fiction available and the title story is the best known piece of short science fiction of its period.
Readers who want rigorously constructed conceptual fiction, including the best-known science fiction short story of its period.
No entry holds this book yet. It reached the reference because someone recommended it.
Chosen by shared topics, the entries that hold them, and the people who recommended both.