Each story has a unique starting point, and feels like a world or novel unto itself despite their short page counts. Chiang’s stories can be described as rigorous world-building 1⁠, taking seriously premises such as the Kabbalah ( “72 Letters”) or intelligence enhancement ( “Understand”) or self-consistent time loops ( “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate”) or a mechanical clockwork universe ( “Exhalation”) or the problem of evil in a universe where God exists ( “Hell Is the Absence of God”) and extending them logically, written in a lucid streamlined prose that (like Gene Wolfe’s) seems simple & easy unless one has tried to write like that oneself, but ( Greg Egan with a heart) use those worlds & concepts to examine and build up a powerful emotional point. Most are collected in his 2002 anthology Stories of Your Life and Others ( my review).

Ted Chiang is an American SF author of short stories & a novella, noted for both the high quality and rarity of his writings. This holistic view of the universe as an immutable ‘block-universe’⁠, in which events unfold as they must, changes the protagonist’s attitude towards life and the tragic death of her daughter, teaching her in a somewhat Buddhist or Stoic fashion to embrace life in both its ups and downs. The alien race exemplifies this other, equally valid, possible way of thinking and viewing the universe, and the protagonist learns their way of thinking by studying their language, which requires seeing written characters as a unified gestalt. Instead, what appears to be precognition in Chiang’s story is actually far more interesting, and a novel twist on psychology and physics: classical physics allows usefully interpreting the laws of physics in both a ‘forward’ way in which events happen step by step, but also a teleological way in which events are simply the unique optimal solution to a set of constraints including the outcome and allows reasoning ‘backwards’. At no point does the protagonist travel in time or enjoy precognitive powers, interpreting the story this way leads to many serious plot holes, it renders most of the exposition-heavy dialogue (which is a large fraction of the wordcount) completely irrelevant, and genuine precognition undercuts the themes of tragedy & acceptance.

However, movie viewers often misread the short story: “Story” is not a time-travel movie.

One of Ted Chiang’s most noted philosophical SF short stories, “Story of Your Life”, was made into a successful time-travel movie, Arrival, sparking interest in the original.

Ted chiang's story of your life