According to his author biography, Chiang attended the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop in 1989. The first few stories in this collection are from the first couple of years after that, and they have the generic and derivative quality of a new writer. Chiang really came into his own around the turn of the century; "Story of Your Life," which the movie Arrival was based on, is from 1998, and the strong stories in the second half come from after 2000. His more recent collection Exhalation is even better.
My favorite story in Stories of Your Life is "Hell Is the Absence of God," which takes place in a world where angelic visitations are common and not universally positive occurrences. The original "Story of Your Life" provides a clearer scientific basis for the alien's abilities and a better sense of how humans might be capable of seeing the world from their perspective, but the denouement is still perplexing. It's not that learning their language enables time travel (the impression I got from the movie), but that it enables us to remember the future like we remember the past.
My favorite story in Stories of Your Life is "Hell Is the Absence of God," which takes place in a world where angelic visitations are common and not universally positive occurrences. The original "Story of Your Life" provides a clearer scientific basis for the alien's abilities and a better sense of how humans might be capable of seeing the world from their perspective, but the denouement is still perplexing. It's not that learning their language enables time travel (the impression I got from the movie), but that it enables us to remember the future like we remember the past.
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