"Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang [pdf]

[+] impostervt|12 years ago|reply

I highly recommend his collection, "Story of your Life, and others". Probably the best SF collection by a single author I've ever read.

http://amzn.com/1931520720

[+] huxley|12 years ago|reply

The novella "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" is a great longer Ted Chiang piece, hard to find nowadays but Starship Sofa did an audiobook reading of it (starts at about 2:03 mark):

http://www.starshipsofa.com/blog/2008/03/23/aural-delights-n...

They also did a good one of "Exhalation":

http://www.starshipsofa.com/blog/2009/02/27/starshipsofa-bsf...

[got a 404 on Exhalation but found it on Escape Pod: http://escapepod.org/2009/04/10/ep194-exhalation/ ]

[+] gommm|12 years ago|reply

Thank you, The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate was really enjoyable. I found it on archive.org http://web.archive.org/web/20080214145811/http://www.sfsite....

[+] osipovas|12 years ago|reply

My personal favourite by Ted Chiang is The Lifecycle of Software Objects. I'm certain a technology paralleling the digients will arrive.

[+] mercurial|12 years ago|reply

It just blew my mind. It's well written, and one of these thought-provoking pieces you keep thinking about for quite a while. In a very different setting, but still bubbling with interesting ideas, consider Blindsight [1] by Peter Watts. It's available for free online (CC-licensed) and well worth your time.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel)

[+] gwern|12 years ago|reply

See also: Lagrangians, the Principle of Least Action, Greg Egan's "Infinite Assassins", and _Qualia the Purple_

[+] edanm|12 years ago|reply

Could you perhaps give links to these? Some of them don't easily come up with a quick Google search.

[+] networkjester|12 years ago|reply

I loved "Understand" by Ted Chiang; thanks for sharing this one!

[+] packetslave|12 years ago|reply

Hmm, a PDF hosted on a random personal web site at a University in Brazil. Seems legit.

Can we please not post links to stolen (presumably-)copyrighted materials here?

If you'd like to compensate the author, consider buying the collection it's published in: http://www.amazon.com/Stories-Your-Life-Others-Chiang/dp/193...

[+] crapshoot101|12 years ago|reply

Story of Your Life is one of the greatest short stories I've ever read. I don't think there's an author in sci-fi who I hope writes a full length novel more than Chiang.

16 comments