Review — Stories of Your Life and Others (Arrival) by Ted Chiang

This collection of science-fiction short stories explores human society in another light than you may have encountered in other classic sci-fi books (and surprisingly few aliens). The stories lead the characters into having experiences that change their state of mind or shift their understanding of the world while asking broader questions about society and the human condition. Amongst its themes, we find religion, language and communication, human enhancement, and how science interacts with these.

The science of language

As I mentioned, language plays a prominent role in many of the short stories featured in this book and is used in many different ways in each story. In one story, a man comes out of a coma with heightened intelligence because of the hormone therapy that helped heal his brain. He decides to create his own language to make sense of the world he now sees because existing languages are not complex enough to grasp or explain his perception of it. The task is a great one — it ends up being a three-dimensional pattern language, unintelligible to anyone but him. Another story with a similar thread explains that gene manipulation has created metahumans. They have their own communication channel and language, which is almost untranslatable into existing languages –therefore, all their…