This is a review based on part of Stories of Your Life, because I got about halfway through and couldn't take it anymore. The opening story, The Tower of Babylon, is excellent and arresting, full of the ideas that bring me to speculative fiction.

We then lead The Tower of Babylon behind and get story after story of theoretical fiction. Every story deals, in some capacity, with mathematics. Everything becomes more technical (not surprising, given Chiang's day job is as a technical writer), and each story's personality, such as it is, is tied into numbers and figures.

To someone with a mind like Chiang's, maybe this would be as fascinating as The Tower of Babylon was to me. It's easy to see how The Story of Your Life became Arrival, but easier to see how it works better as a movie - even if the movie had not invented stakes lacking in the story. Chiang writes at a remove, more fascinated with process than people.

I may resume the rest of these later, but if the interest isn't there, there's not much point pushing through the rest.