Book #152 of 2016:
Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
Science-fiction is generally concerned with exploring the unknown: potential future technologies, or alien lifeforms, or anything else that could perhaps be possible. And there’s some of that in this collection of stories from Ted Chiang, but the strongest entries are more fantastical in nature, as in his version of the Tower of Babel myth that presents a biblical cosmology as fact and shows men building a brick structure up past the stars. Like Philip Pullman, Chiang paints vivid alternate realities for his fictional sciences, and the results blur the line between sci-fi and fantasy. For although he spins beautiful dreams like the best fantasists, Chiang’s work remains focused on the big questions that define science-fiction.
★★★★☆
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