Trish's Reviews > Stories of Your Life and Others

Review once I'm home. For now, let's just say that the final story got me into trouble with some people at the train station. *lol*
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Now that I've had some time to reflect on all the stories I've listened to in this collection, I can honestly say that not one was bad. Sure, three were rather mediocre, but the others were either at least good or even so exceptional that they made up for the mediocre ones without much effort.

There are 8 short stories in this book:
1) Tower of Babylon
2) Understand
3) Division by Zero
4) Story of Your Life
5) Seventy-Two Letters
6) The Evolution of Human Science
7) Hell Is the Absence of God
8) Liking What You See - A Documentary

The first was good but not outstanding, the second and third were mediocre, the fourth (which is the basis for the movie Arrival that is now in theatres and the reason I read this book) was spectacular, the fifth was mediocre again, the sixth was as good as the first, and the last two were as fantastic as the fourth.

For this review I'd like to focus on the three stories I found exceptional.
Stories of Your Life: As a linguist, I was delighted to find a story where a linguist is the most important person. Because I can tell you from personal experience (and yes, I'm totally biased) that linguistics is NOT boring. Quite the contrary. Nevertheless, I often see people's eyes glaze over when I try to explain why not. To see Hollywood making linguistics popular (hopefully) is therefore a dream come true. The story did not progress the way I had expected but the concept as well as the execution were so stunningly beautiful that I'm still marvelling at both. Also, the emotional and moral implications are very heavy (in the best of ways). And the process of establishing communications with the aliens was fairly realistic (fairly because we're talking about aliens, realistic definitely in Terran terms like when the author explains the importance and difference between written and spoken language).
Here is a link a friend here on GR posted, showing the opinion of a linguist who saw the movie (beware of spoilers!): http://gizmodo.com/what-arrival-gets-...
I, personally, haven't read the article yet since it contains spoilers to the movie (which seems to be slightly different from the book so I wanted to wait) so I will get into more detail after having seen the movie.
Hell Is the Absence of God: The story was fantastically sarcastic - or at least I chuckled and laughed out loud at it. It shows very clearly why I could never be religious and everything that is wrong about religion (which means some people should probably not read it). Again, very intelligently executed too. Also, which is very important especially with such a topic, the reader is not forced to accept the author's opinion because he doesn't exactly show it - instead we have all the facets and are given the choice whether we hold with this or that character in the story and the respective world view.
Liking What You See - A Documentary: This was by far the funniest. A very important story especially nowadays that so many groups of people claim the moral high-ground, are constantly offended by everything so they constantly cry "ban this" or "ban that" and voluntarily hand over their rights and freedoms because they are desperate to feel "safe" (aka they are addicted to the illusion of being safe). I was very impressed with the different POVs here.

Some of the ideas used in this book aren't new but the way they were presented was always intelligent (yes, even in the mediocre stories). What I also liked was that there were two narrators alternating in narrating the stories (except for in the last one where they both narrated together, depending on who "spoke").
Although every story was completely different from the others, the characters were always true to life, their fates moving, and every situation was portrayed in a sort of 360°-examination; I suspect so as not to influence the reader opinion-wise.

Overall, this little collection proves that the author knows a lot about science and classic scifi themes and that he has a great talent for writing and making readers think critically about the world around them. I'm not surprised his stories have won several different awards and am now impatient to see the movie Arrival!