Stories of Your Life and Others and over 1.5 million other books are available for Amazon Kindle . Learn more

Have one to sell? Sell yours here
Sorry, this item is not available in
Image not available for
Colour:
Image not available

 
Start reading Stories of Your Life and Others on your Kindle in under a minute.

Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here, or download a FREE Kindle Reading App.

Stories of Your Life and Others [Paperback]

Ted Chiang
4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)

Available from these sellers.


Formats

Amazon Price New from Used from
Kindle Edition £9.22  
Hardcover --  
Paperback £11.55  
Paperback, Aug 2003 --  
Amazon.co.uk Trade-In Store
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Visit the Books Trade-In Store for more details. Learn more.

Book Description

Aug 2003

This new edition of Ted Chiang's masterful first collection, "Stories of Your Life and Others," includes his first eight published stories plus the author's story notes and a cover that the author commissioned himself. Combining the precision and scientific curiosity of Kim Stanley Robinson with Lorrie Moore's cool, clear love of language and narrative intricacy, this award-winning collection offers readers the dual delights of the very, very strange and the heartbreakingly familiar.

"Stories of Your Life and Others" presents characters who must confront sudden change--the inevitable rise of automatons or the appearance of aliens--while striving to maintain some sense of normalcy. In the amazing and much-lauded title story, a grieving mother copes with divorce and the death of her daughter by drawing on her knowledge of alien languages and non-linear memory recollection. A clever pastiche of news reports and interviews chronicles a college's initiative to "turn off" the human ability to recognize beauty in "Liking What You See: A Documentary." With sharp intelligence and humor, Chiang examines what it means to be alive in a world marked by uncertainty and constant change, and also by beauty and wonder.

Ted Chiang is one of the most celebrated science fiction authors writing today and is the author of numerous short stories, including most recently "Exhalation," which won the Hugo, British Science Fiction, and Locus awards. He lives near Seattle.

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought


Product details

  • Paperback: 333 pages
  • Publisher: Orb Books; 1st edition (Aug 2003)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0765304198
  • ISBN-13: 978-0765304193
  • Product Dimensions: 20.8 x 14 x 2.3 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,634,261 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, and more.

Product Description

Review

"Shining, haunting, mind-blowing tales...this collection is a pure marvel. [Ted] Chiang is so exhilarating so original so stylish he just leaves you speechless. I always suggest a person read at least 52 books a year for proper mental functioning but if you only have time for one, be at peace: you found it."--Junot Diaz

"Meticulously pieced together, utterly thought through, Chiang's stories emerge slowly...but with the perfection of slow-growing crystal."--Lev Grossman

"United by a humane intelligence that speaks very directly to the reader, and makes us experience each story with immediacy and Chiang's calm passion."--China Mieville

"Ted is a national treasure...each of those stories is a goddamned jewel."--Cory Doctorow, "BoingBoing"

"Confirms that blending science and fine art at this length can produce touching works, tales as intimate as our own blood cells, with the structural strength of just-discovered industrial alloys."--"Seattle Times"

"Chiang derides lazy thinking, weasels it out of its hiding place, and leaves it cowering."--"Washington Post"

"Essential. You won't know SF if you don't read Ted Chiang."--Greg Bear

"Chiang writes seldom, but his almost unfathomably wonderful stories tick away with the precision of a Swiss watch--and explode in your awareness with shocking, devastating force."--"Kirkus Reviews" (Starred Review)

"The first must-read SF book of the year."--"Publishers Weekly" (Starred Review)

"He puts the science back in science fiction--brilliantly."--"Booklist" (Starred Review)
--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Book Description

Here are eight astonishing science-fiction stories that explore the boundaries between science and religion, between determinism and our ability to choose, between words and the entities they describe. Here are stories of conceptual breakthrough … of making sense of the universe and our place in it. ‘What a pleasure it is to read Chiang … Can he be the best SF writer to come down the pike in the past thirty years? I honestly believe that he is’ Harry Harrison ‘Superb and thought-provoking. I could run out of superlatives trying to describe Chiang’s work. Stories of Your Life is the best collection of short stories, novellas and novelettes I have ever read … Ted Chiang will blow you away with this astonishing collection’ The Alien Online --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Inside This Book (Learn More)
Browse and search another edition of this book.
Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
Search inside this book:

What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?


Customer Reviews

4 star
0
2 star
0
1 star
0
4.8 out of 5 stars
4.8 out of 5 stars
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully Crafted 2 Mar 2005
Format:Paperback
This has to be one of the best SF short story collections I've read in a long while. The concepts and McGuffins that drive the plots- from the disproving of arithmetic to an industrial revolution based around golems to a society that can prevent the perception of beauty- are novel and intricately thought out. Moreover, they provide a motor for human drama that stops them simply becoming cold philosophizing and makes them genuinely moving. Ted Chiang feels completely in control of his story-telling, relying on ingenuity and subtle writing, rather than bombastic fireworks, to incite wonder. Read it if at all possible!
Comment | 
Was this review helpful to you?
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Breathtaking 6 Dec 2012
By Runmentionable TOP 1000 REVIEWER
Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase
This might just be the best single-author SF collection I've ever read. Chiang isn't a typical SF author in at least two ways - he won the Nebula award for his first published story, and in over twenty years he's published fewer than twenty stories, in marked contrast to the genre's usual manic overproduction - but what a shame there aren't more like him. There are eight stories in this collection, namely:

Tower of Babylon
Understand
Division by Zero
Story of Your Life
Seventy-Two Letters
The Evolution of Human Science
Hell is the Absence of God
Liking What You See: A Documentary

They're all completely different from each other, seven of them are masterpieces by any reasonable standard and the other ("The Evolution of Human Science"), a short-short, is damned good as short-shorts go. Despite their difference from each other, Chiang's stories are all characterised by lucid prose, deep humanity and amazing inventiveness. Way back in the seventies, Ed Ferman and Barry Malzberg produced an anthology, "Final Stage", which attempted to be the "ultimate" SF anthology, by asking authors associated with particular SF themes to produce the definitive story in that category. The results then were patchy at best, but damned if Chiang hasn't pretty much done the job single-handedly.

In other words:

"Tower of Babylon", though you may not spot it at first, is an absolutely classic space exploration narrative, albeit one where the cosmology is utterly different from our own universe. "Understand" is a gripping riff on superhuman powers, so smartly done it takes a while to notice it's kinda Prof X versus Magneto writ large. "Division by Zero" is a New Wave story, in which scientific theory is a metaphor for a very human problem (a distant relative of Pamela Zoline's "The Heat Death of the Universe", for those with long memories). "Story of Your Life" combines the first contact, alien language and conceptual breakthrough motifs to shattering, somewhwat Tiptree-esque, effect. "Seventy-Two Letters" mashes up Steampunk with the "what if magic was a logical, rigorous science" idea. "Liking What You See: A Documentary" is clever social satire notable for its compassion to people on both sides of the argument. As for "Hell is the Absence of God", it's absolutely sui generis - is it SF, slipstream, fantasy, fabulation, magical realism, New Weird or what? It doesn't matter. It's a brilliant, totally original idea and a profoundly moving story.

But then they're all moving. What differentiates Chiang from almost all the other SF writers out there is not just how wild yet well-worked his ideas are (which is plenty), but also how well he integrates them into human dilemmas involving characters you genuinely feel for. There's no-one like him, and he's displaced Howard Waldrop - who's been in place for over twenty years - as my choice for a Desert Island single-author collection.

PS Please note there's a very minor, slightly annoying formatting issue with the Kindle edition (it randomly prompts you to click to footnotes).
Comment | 
Was this review helpful to you?
6 of 8 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Marvellous short SF 1 Jun 2004
Format:Paperback
For those who enjoy the mind-boggling SF of Greg Egan, you must try this fantastic collection of short stories and novellas by US-based Ted Chiang. Where Egan concentrates on biology and physics at the bleeding edge of the imaginable, Chiang focuses on mathematics, linguistics and religion. A brilliant collection - 'Story of Your Life' and 'Hell is the Abscence of God' in particular are marvellous, marvellous stories.
Comment | 
Was this review helpful to you?
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
Were these reviews helpful?   Let us know
Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars Sparkling and Brilliant
This is one of the best books I've stumbled upon for a very long time. Ted's ideas are brilliant, his use of language is exquisite and the stories stick in the mind. Read more
Published 4 days ago by A. Ojo
5.0 out of 5 stars excellent sci-fi
Some of the most interesting and exciting ideas-based sci-fi I've ever read. Chiang explores the philosophy of mathematics, science, linguistics, and ponders a lot of fantastic... Read more
Published 4 days ago by Capnmat
5.0 out of 5 stars Astounding!
Exceptionally intelligent writing from a brilliant author. Each story is unique and thought provoking. Read more
Published 8 months ago by Parmenides
5.0 out of 5 stars One of my favourite SF short story writers
Synopsis/Background:

Ted Chiang is a brilliant science fiction short story author, but unfortunately, he publishes very infrequently. Read more
Published on 16 Aug 2010 by L. R. Richardson
3.0 out of 5 stars Stories of their hype
Readable collection of short stories, but not too amazing overall. Found it all a bit tame and a sort of Twilight Zone for maths students, without the twists - in fact most endings... Read more
Published on 9 Aug 2010 by Chairman Paulo
5.0 out of 5 stars A perfect collection of perfect stories!
This book collects Ted Chiang's output from his first published story, 1990's "The Tower of Babylon", to 2001's "Hell is the Absence of God", plus "Liking What You See: A... Read more
Published on 18 Oct 2009 by Murray
5.0 out of 5 stars Gems
An excellent collection of intelligent and entertaining stories - every one a gem.
Published on 1 Jan 2004 by Mr. N. L. Asher
Search Customer Reviews
Only search this product's reviews

Customer Discussions

This product's forum
Discussion Replies Latest Post
No discussions yet

Ask questions, Share opinions, Gain insight
Start a new discussion
Topic:
First post:
Prompts for sign-in
 


Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
Search all Amazon discussions
   
Related forums


Listmania!


Look for similar items by category


Feedback