Arrival
Ted Chiang
A true story is never quite so true as an invented one.
― W. Somerset Maugham
Somerset Maugham never read Ted Chiang's stories in Arrival. They are invented stories, but they are deliberately untrue. In my opinion, Chiang does not use fiction to make his stories more true -- he makes them more false. In most of the stories the falsity is obvious, for instance, future generations are not stored in sperm as literal homunculi ("Seventy-two letters"). But I was most bothered by "Story of your Life", which was inspired by "variational principles of physics", as Chiang writes in the story notes. It is however a deliberately distorted version of those principles. Chiang chose this distortion to improve the "metaphoric possibilities". This bothered me because it was less obvious and therefore more deceptive than the distortions in his other stories.
When I use the word "heartless", I am doing something that Chiang himself likes to do: playing with language. Usually we take "heartless" to mean "cruel", but Chiang's stories are only occasionally cruel, and never so without justification. I call them "heartless" because they lack heart. Chiang is surreally good at making his characters uninteresting, even when interesting things are happening to them.
I guess a lot of the problem for me was that Chiang used these stories as vehicles to explore certain intellectual ideas in physics, mathematics, linguistics, and biology. I found his explorations naïve and simplistic.