Everyone says Ted Chiang is really good.

Everyone is right.

This collection of his earliest work, including his Nebula winning first story "Babylon", a sci-fi retelling of the tower of Babylon, as well as the titular "Stores of Your Life"-basis for the film Arrival, demonstrate fluency with big ideas in the grandest traditions of science-fiction. Chiang is an exacting, almost clinical writer (one of these stories was published in Nature, a meditation on the role of humans in science when super-intelligent posthumans are racing towards the singularity). These stories are cold and brilliant, like arctic ice.

The only story less than exceptional is "Liking What You See", a multifaceted tale about a neural 'enhancement' that removes the glamour of beauty, and a political campaign to make its use mandatory in order to foster healthy body images and objective habits against the convert money of the cosmetic and advertising industries. It's an interesting premise that is dragged out for at least twice as long as it deserves.

That aside, Chiang is a master of the short form, and this is the best of the 1990s return to the new hard scifi.