Stories of Your Life and Others
Chiang's 2002 debut collection includes "Story of Your Life" (the basis for the film *Arrival*). Every story takes a single idea to its logical conclusion with philosophical precision and genuine human feeling. The most intellectually rigorous short SF of its generation.
Flat affectless prose is the complaint echoed most, one widely repeated line giving the narrative voice “the warmth of an IT support manual” and adding there is “no wit to the stories.” Chiang is to detractors “a writer of artificial ideas and philosophical concepts” first, with characters barely registering as people. Seventy-Two Letters crams golems and naming magic and genetic determinism into one story without room for any of them. Understand telegraphs its ending. And several stories run on theology or magic dressed as science, which readers feel misrepresents the hard-SF label.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
