![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() When I revisited it a few weeks ago, I was just as surprised by it as when I had first read it. As I grow into what she calls “literary fiction,” I find that the collection is one of the only books we still have in common. The stories were unlike anything I had ever read before, and I remember being shocked by their energetic, yet concise structures. She might have been prompted by my entirely aesthetic interest in science and technology, but I also recall that she mentioned the book on more than one occasion as one of her favorites. My mom, a science fiction author and editor, lent me her autographed copy of Ted Chiang’s 2002 anthology “Stories of Your Life and Others” when I was somewhere in middle school. I didn’t really understand anything I was reading, I just wanted somewhere to go. ![]() The workings of faraway stars felt both fantastical and fundamental, grounded in some kind of self-consistent celestial logic. I think it was this desire for built worlds that led me to also spend a great amount of time immersed in popular science books, especially the large, illustrated coffee-table kind, usually about space. I read the “Eragon” trilogy, every “Harry Potter” book, “The Lord of the Rings,” et cetera - the kind of narrative fiction that the reader lives in, at once comfortingly Manichean and vibrant. I was not precocious, and my taste was conventional. One thing I can clearly remember from my childhood and preteen years is how much I read. ![]()
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