Stories of Your Life and Others (2002)

The title story is only one example of Chiang turning an exact speculative premise into a question about how people live. Other pieces test different relationships between knowledge, belief, language and choice, so the collection's unity comes from a method of thinking rather than a shared universe. Take a pause between stories. The intellectual work is part of their emotional effect, and several are much closer to thought experiments than to action-driven science fiction.