你一生的故事

My favorite part of this collection is the end notes where the author explains where he got the idea for each story, which is not to put down the stories themselves, but more than most sci-fi, his stories are about ideas. Sci-fi generally is not short of ideas, but typically you can read a story, even a rollicking good one, and think "I could have written that" (ignoring the fact that you didn't), but at the end of each story here, I thought there's no way I would have thought of that.

So the strength is not so much in the characters, it's hard to find any of them really relatable, but some of the stories are moving nonetheless, particularly in the flagship Stories of Your Life, which I now appreciate the movie adaption, Arrival (not the other alien movie The Arrival with Charlie Sheen which actually not bad), did a very good adaptation of, somehow replacing it while retaining the tone. And there's one story that looks like Cixin Liu cribbed the idea in his trilogy without crediting it (maybe not, but I was only a Cixin Liu fan during that brief time between reading his books and reading his interview where he endorsed rounding up Uyghurs).