Stories of Your Life and Others (2002)

Great stuff. Methodical working out of ideas, the way science fiction should but often doesn't ( )

Just amazing. I'm not sure if these are short stories or novellas, but whatever they are, they are wonderful. Chiang is a highly imaginative and learned writer (or so I imagine, since many of his ideas are way over my head). His style is detailed and lucid. Each story pulls the reader along in a calm but inexorable manner. Chiang's work seems to resist genre - falling somewhere between science fiction and magic realism. Sometimes, it has an age-bending, steam-punkish quality. Highly recommended. ( )

Originally published as “Stories of Your Life and Others,” this science fiction anthology includes “Story of Your Life,” the basis for the film “Arrival.” All eight stories are stand-outs; many have won major awards. Some of the stories require characters to confront sudden change, but the anthology presents views of a world marked by uncertainty as well as by beauty and wonder.

Each imaginative, thought-provoking story will keep readers enthralled as the pages turn, delivering the reader at the final page much too soon. These are stories to be savored, mind-blowing stories, stories that will haunt readers long after they’ve closed the book.

Highly recommended. ( )

I'm still not quite half through half these stories, but this won't be a collection I soon forget. ( )

Are you familiar with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis? Back in the day when I was in college I remember writing a paper on applying this language paradigm to coding. It was so long ago I don’t really remember what I wrote, but I still remember agreeing with the fact that coding could also be a fitting subject to the Sapir-Whorf wisdom… Thinking it over once again, and being a “more mature human being” (meaning: “being advanced in years”), I still think we can draw some parallels between natural and programming languages. For starters, the way both types of languages are built allow coders to adapt and shift their ways of thinking more fluidly as they learn new programming languages than as they learn new spoken languages. It is that diversity that allowed me to both grow individually as a programmer and further advanced my own tastes when it came to choosing my favourite programming languages.

The rest of this review can be found on my blog. ( )