I would like to nominate a short story by Ted Chiang called:
Story of Your Life, this has recently been made into a movie called
Arrival starring Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner and Forest Whitaker.
This short story is available in the collection:
Stories of Your Life and Others, a collection of 8 short stories by Ted Chiang.
Description of
Story of Your Life (from me):
Quote:
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Two threads run through this story: a woman remembering her daughter growing up; and the woman being called as a linguistic expert to try and communicate with aliens that have landed. These two threads are related in an unexpected way.
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Description for the book
Stories of Your Life and Others (from Kobo):
Quote:
With his masterful first collection, multiple-award-winning author Ted Chiang deftly blends human emotion and scientific rationalism in eight remarkably diverse stories, all told in his trademark precise and evocative prose.
From a soaring Babylonian tower that connects a flat Earth with the firmament above, to a world where angelic visitations are a wondrous and terrifying part of everyday life; from a neural modification that eliminates the appeal of physical beauty, to an alien language that challenges our very perception of time and reality. . . Chiang's rigorously imagined fantasia invites us to question our understanding of the universe and our place in it.
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I think Ted Chiang is one of the best science fiction writers of recent years. (This collection is not all science fiction, or not really.) He writes things from a human perspective rather than hard science, and this makes them very approachable even if you are not normally a science fiction enthusiast. My only complaint is that he doesn't write enough. I would be happy to discuss any and all of the stories in this collection, but the
Story of Your Life at 55 pages (approx 18k words) is probably complex and deep enough to keep us busy. If we end up twiddling our thumbs then stories:
Understand,
Hell is the Absence of God and
Liking What You See: A Documentary are all excellent.
Amazon US,
Amazon US, film tie-in edition,
Amazon UK,
Amazon CA,
Amazon AU
Kobo US,
Kobo UK,
Kobo CA,
Kobo AU