Stories of Your Life and Others

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Ted Chiang

Global Evaluation: 4.5 out of 5
Global Difficulty: 3.5 out of 5
Insight: 5 out of 5

One Sentence Summary

“Stories of Your Life and Others” is a collection of science fiction short stories by Ted Chiang that explores deep philosophical and scientific questions through imaginative and thought-provoking narratives.

Best quote from the book

“Our children will remember a world that will be nothing like the world we knew; they’ll grow up with memories of a world that never existed. And yet, we’ll all be gone, but part of us will live on in them.”

Extended summary and Personal Opinion

As all my friends already know, I’m not a big fan of fiction nor scientific fiction books. This book was given to me as my birthday gift from one of my closest friend as “I know your tastes, but try to give it a try”. Indeed, to my surprise, I wasn’t disappointed. I can safely say that no other fiction book managed to engage me as this one; the book is a collection of science fiction short independent stories by Ted Chiang that explores different deep philosophical and scientific questions.

This book was for me a constant brain teaser and it some stories became really addictive; among the topics developed there’s the evergreen theme of an alien contact, the enquiry of a world in which beauty would be canceled by our brain and everyone would be equally attractive, the development of new languages, the rewriting of our own scientific laws restarting not from a causalistic point of view but a casualistic one. Not forgetting on the others side the nature of consciousness, the power of language, the limits of human understanding, and the impact of technology on society.

The thing that really appreciated the most about the book is the questioning of the fundamental rules and concepts that drives our human lives. Most often, the most striking and difficult things to see are the one that we see every day and are exactly the ones that are questioned in this book. What if we start challenging them?

What if we were living in a society where everyone is equally beautiful?
What if we had to rediscover our own physical and mathematical laws? We would probably have the same equations once again, but would we read them the same way?
Would our fundamental principles the same? Would the conservation of energy still the fundamental theorem of the principle of minimal action?
Would we start communicating again in the same way if we had to reinvent our languages and our alphabets? It is in general true that the more a tool or a technology is widespread (like for example our alphabet), the more is difficult to substitute. But what if someone else already did on another planet and we had to find a common language for communicating?
What if the criterions for accessing heaven where completely different from the ones that we think? What if good and evil where absolute concepts that differ from the ones we developed in our societies?

All in all an absolute timeless masterpiece.

P.S. I discovered recently that The Guardian ranked Stories of Your Life at number 80 in its list of 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. I am not surprised at all.

I would recommend this book:

To the 18 years old high school student that is scared about mathematics and hard sciences in general, so that he can see how beautiful this topic can be with.
To the scientist who want to re-learn the concept of zero and learn some beautiful anecdotes about the history of science
To the philosophers of science who want an introductory book to the concept of infinity
To the the gifts amateurs out there that want to see the old famous problems under a new light

Books I will read afterward

Regarding the concept of ethics, moral and the existence of angels, I would recommend the Netflix series “The good place”

Concerning the principle of least action, I would recommend the book of Feynman “7 brief lessons”

About alien interaction there’s absolutely “Hitch hikers guide to the galaxy”.

About the vanishing concept of beauty it reminded me a lot about 1984, even if the book of Ted Chiang focus more on the pluralistic point of view of this proposal.