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Nicolas Stellwag

Stories of Your Life and Others - Ted Chiang

/ 2 min read

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I’ve recently started reading some fiction again and thought it would be nice to briefly write down what I think about the books here, mainly as a log of what I enjoyed and what not for myself. I will still try to keep the notes free of spoilers.

Stories of Your Life and Others is a collection of 8 short stories, so I will add the missing sections as soon as I’ve read the respective story.

Btw, I purchased the book based on this recommendation.

Tower of Babylon

A story about a miner working on building a tower to god. The beginning is a bit lengthy, but it’s getting more exciting towards the end. The plot twist is kind of predictable, overall not the best story I’ve ever read.

Understand

Explores the concept of a superintelligent human being. Reads a bit like Flowers for Algernon. I enjoyed this a lot, although I’m not totally sure if the ending has any deeper meaning or is just a cool, nerdy idea.

Division by Zero

About a mathematician who proves arithmetic inconsistent. In contrary to reviews online, I haven’t found this particularly good to be honest.

Story of Your Life

It’s about an encounter with aliens that think ”teleologically”, meaning not in terms of sequential (and therefore temporal) causal chains, but perceptions of all events’ purposes simultaneously.

It also deals with some questions about knowing the future. If you know the future, can you act on your knowledge to avoid some parts of it? In principle the answer should be ”yes”, but then your knowledge about the future would be wrong. What if it’s definitely right? Do you still have free will then? Luckily, I don’t think we will have to face these questions.

I feel like this would have easily been my favorite one out of the book so far, hadn’t I accidentally watched the movie adaptation a few weeks prior. (The movie sucks by the way, at least compared to the short story.)

Seventy-Two Letters

A novella in which people can animate golems using Kabbalistic names. A problem is discovered: Human family lines have a fixed depth. I would put this among the top stories of the book so far, especially the ending was nice.

The Evolution of Human Science

tbd

Hell Is the Absence of God

tbd

Liking What You See: A Documentary

tbd