Reddit reviews Stories of Your Life and Others

You could read novels, but I personally think you're going to get a better intro to SF and more enjoyment, and a better chance of finding "your thing" if you read short stories. You can then read the novels you know you'll enjoy. I love SF anthologies, not only because you get a collection of pre-selected awesome pieces, but also you get to sample a ton of different authors with different styles in the same number of pages as reading a novel would get you just a single story and a single author. Also, many consider the short story the ultimate and best form for science fiction.

I suggest anthologies that collect stories over multiple years instead of just "best of the year" collection. For obvious reasons, you get better stories. Here are the best I know of:

• The Locus Awards: Thirty Years of the Best in Science Fiction and Fantasy
  
• The Hard SF Renaissance (One or two stories from this will answer the question of whether you like Hard SF.)
  
• The Science Fiction Century
  
• Twenty-First Century Science Fiction (sort of a sequel to the previous one)
  
• Science Fiction Hall of Fame Volume 1, 2a, and 2b (This is kind of a survey of historical SF, ranging from the '20s to the '60s.)
  
  So you could go historically starting with old stories and working your way more contemporary, in which case you'd start with SF Hall of Fame. But it might be a better idea to start with the most contemporary stuff and go backwards. In that case, you'd start with Locus Awards and start in the back of the book.
  
  In terms of specific authors, I would be amiss not to encourage you to read Ted Chiang. He has written only 13 short stories between 1992 and now, but he's won more awards for them than most SF authors do in their lifetime including the prestigious Nebula, Locus and Hugo awards, among others! READ. HIS. STORIES. He has an awesome anthology Stories of Your Life and Others plus you can buy his more recent stories on amazon.
  
  You should also read Greg Egan. And Enders Game if you somehow missed it. There's also the classic Arthur C. Clarke, either his short stories, or a novel like City and the Stars.
  

I've bought a fair amount of ebooks on Amazon recently and I think most of them are books that a lot of people here would enjoy (heck I heard about most of them through here!).

The Preorders:

Underlord - The sixth book in the Cradle series which is described as a Western Xianxia series. A lot of people here don't really like the Xianxia genre and I agree with their criticisms of how many main characters are very villainous, under-developed enemies and female characters, the economies of cultivation aren't logical, poor scaling in conflict as you go from one city to interstellar in scope, and awkward prose. But I bring up all of these flaws to say that the Cradle series completely avoids all of the typical flaws in Xianxia and has a very smart character who sets out to cultivate smartly instead of bullheadedly.

And the sixth book is coming out in March! (Get the box set. It has the first three books and is cheaper!)

Exhalation - Who here hasn't heard of Ted Chiang, the master of short stories that perfectly appeal to the r/rational crowd? The same guy that we literally use as an introduction to rational fiction. Well, if you enjoyed his first collection, Stories of Your Life and Others, you'll love hearing that the second collection is coming out in....May! (Ugh....really May? I don't think I can wait that long!)

The books you can read right now!:

The Beginner's Guide to Magical Licensing - Has a similar start to Unsong where a magical college-graduate, minimum-wage, sweat-shop worker stumbles on a powerful spell and sets out to start his own business competing with the powerful. The parts of the story that follows afterward makes a whole lot more logical sense than Unsong however. (Used to be online for free, but now you'll have to pay the price for your ignorance if you want to read it! (Nah, I lied.))

Six Sacred Swords - If you liked the Arcane Ascension series, but wished there was more dungeonnering and less of school shenanigans, then look no further! In some ways it's a lot like reading a very good DnD session played by really savvy players who never follow the 'standard' way to solve problems.

The author of Six Sacred Swords made a recommendation for The Ruin of Kings. He said that it reads like a Locke Lamora-esque rogue protagonist, telling the story in a style similar to Kvothe, in a setting similar to Game of Thrones. I haven't bought the book yet, but the review was interesting enough that I wanted to include it in my list of recommendations.

Senlin Ascends - I haven't read this yet either, but skimming through it, I see some fair bit of social manipulation/combat that I think people here would like. Plus the Tower of Babel setting is something that appeals very strongly to me.

Polyglot: NPC REVOLUTION - A lot of people here seem to really like LitRPG and Artificial Intelligence, but almost no one seem to ever question the implications of the NPCs in LitRPG stories having human-level intelligence.

Small Medium: Big Trouble - It's by the same author who wrote Threadbare that people here really liked. Similar to Polygot where the NPC is the main character who needs to deal with players, but smaller scale in scope. There's a lot of fast-talking to convince selfish sociopaths to do what you say.

Q is for Quantum - I was going through my older ebook orders when I found this one. It's the single best introduction for quantum mechanics that I have ever read (not that I've read too many of those). It focuses on building an intuition for the subject and once you've read through the book, you will understand on a gut level what superposition means. Note that it's meant as an introduction for the subject, so don't expect it to cover everything, just what's need to get started learning about quantum mechanics. But I'd still recommend it to experts if only for a better way to explain their subject to their peers and laypeople.

Short story by Ted Chiang - story of your life.

You can find it here. The whole collection is worth a read. It's the best short stories collection I've read, maybe ever.

Ted Chiang and his book of shorts - Stories of your Life, and others was simply fantastic. The story is much better than the movie, Arrival.

I recommend buying Ted Chiang's anthology
or the movie tie-in edition

Fantastic book!

[Stories of Your Life and Others
by Ted Chiang]
(https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0048EKOP0/ref=kinw_myk_ro_title)

Tower of Babylon is a good one. It was featured in Omni magazine back in the early 90's.

Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang. Short fiction collection.

Ilium by Dan Simmons.

Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand by Samuel Delany.

The Islanders by Christopher Priest.

Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson.

On My Way to Paradise by David Farland.

Oh cool, second collection! Didn't know that was coming out.

No though, that collection is just named for one of the stories in it, "Exhalation." Legit copy here: http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/exhalation/

His first collection was "Stories of Your Life And Others":
https://www.amazon.com/Stories-Your-Life-Others-Chiang-ebook/dp/B0048EKOP0

Stories of Your Life and Others

Specifically, inside this compilation of short stories, you will find the (almost) eponymous title, Story of Your Life. That short story is the basis for the movie Arrival

I recommend both reading the story and watching the movie. They are similar, but they are both phenomenally done.

This one isn't very well known but it's fun:

Fredrik Pohl - The Voices of Heaven

And Ted Chiang's short story collection Stories of Your Life and Others has a really cool story about angel visitations. Actually all the stories are excellent, and two others deal with ideas from religious mythologies.

In addition to his Stranger in a Strange Land already mentioned, Heinlein's Job: A Comedy of Justice is neat.

Stories of Your Life and Others https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0048EKOP0/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_Oug4CbR6ZBMYY

Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life and Others comes to mind for some reason.

My favorite short story collection ever!

https://www.amazon.com/Stories-Your-Life-Others-Chiang-ebook/dp/B0048EKOP0

"Liking What You See" is the particular story.

play books, overdrive, kobo books, amazon...

Are you in Canada? I see it on Amazon.com at [this link.] (https://www.amazon.com/Stories-Your-Life-Others-Chiang-ebook/dp/B0048EKOP0/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1502076009&sr=8-1&keywords=the+story+of+your+life+and+others)

It's from the short story colletionThe Story of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang. I highly recommend it. You can listen to some of his stories online here too.

I recommend, if I may, Ted Chiang's novella Seventy-Two Letters. It deals with the old hypothesis of the homunculus, which argued that inside each spermatozoa there exists a tiny human being, fully formed and only needing the ovum to develop. And that inside the testicles of that homunculus, there were spermatozoa containing an even smaller fully formed human being, and so on all the way... where? Where does it stops? That's one of the plot points. In the style of Ted Chiang, he fully develops the idea and creates a scientific framework (that's one of the things he does in some of his stories, he takes a ridiculous idea, a superstition, a myth, a debunked pre-scientific notion, and posits how things would be if they where real). It's a very fascinating novella, also dealing in jewish mysticism and the concept of the Golem, and framed as a mystery story.

You can find it in his collection "Stories of your Life and Others", which also contains the novella on which Arrial was based, and the breathtaking Tower of Babylon (which in my opinion has stronger cinematic bones). Or you can read it here.

Ted Chiang is mind blowingly amazing.

http://www.freesfonline.de/authors/Ted_Chiang.html

http://www.amazon.com/Stories-Your-Life-Others-Chiang-ebook/dp/B0048EKOP0/ref=asap_B001HCZ6OA_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1417029984&sr=1-1

https://www.amazon.com/Stories-Your-Life-Others-Chiang-ebook/dp/B0048EKOP0

I loved Arrival and I've been meaning to read the short story it's based on (as well as the others in the collection, obviously)

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0048EKOP0/ref=wl_it_dp_v_nS_img?_encoding=UTF8&colid=2N41JHWV5GDQ1&coliid=I39WE33O5CM301

Ninja edit: thanks for the contest :)