With Ted Chiang for the holidays

Ted Chiang's collection, Stories of Your Life and Others, is enjoyable. Always on the lookout for science fiction, I've heard about Ted Chiang's brilliance and gift from podcasts and friends. I'm more than halfway through the collection. Story of Your Life, from which the title of the collection, is as good as people say it is. I made the connection right away that this was the basis for the film adaptation, Arrival, which stars Amy Adams. What surprised me was The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate, where a merchant named Fuwaad ibn Abbas retells the story of how he discovered a passageway to the future in a humble shop of Bashaarat, located in the City of Peace. It's a series of smaller stories that prove to be interconnected in the end. I love the story's last lines, and I'm sharing it here.

Nothing erases the past. There is repentance, there is atonement, and there is forgiveness. That is all, but that is enough.

Here's LeVar Burton, reading the story.