the story notes alone are worth it

the title story runs on fermat's principle of least time and the maths isn't ornamental, the heptapod language falls out of it. people call the linguistics implausible / the linguistics is the least implausible thing here and it doesn't matter, the argument is coherent from its own axioms.

tower of babylon is the one i keep going back to. an entire cosmology built from a bronze age assumption taken literally and then followed all the way down without a single wink at the reader.

hell is the absence of god is the cruellest thing in the collection and i've only managed it twice. understand is the weakest, a fun action story with one good idea sitting inside it. division by zero i liked more than most people seem to.

the story notes at the back are the model for how notes should be done. two paragraphs each, where the idea came from and what problem he was solving, no anecdotes, no long thanks list, no padding. every collection should be made to do this.

10 because there isn't a dead story in it and because i've gone back to this one more than anything else on the shelf.