Stories of Your Life

by Ted Chiang

352pp, Tor, £10.99

The short story is, apparently, in crisis: so deep, in fact, that there is an Arts Council-supported campaign to rescue it (saveourshortstory.org.uk), one of the aims of which is to give the form "more prestige and a higher profile". Yet short stories have always been indispensable in SF, fantasy and horror: there, at least, reports of the death of, etc. Even in genre, though, there's still the rule that says you can't get a short-story collection out until you've published a novel or two. Two young Americans have emerged as pre-eminent exceptions to this dictum, and very important new voices in the field. One is Kelly Link, whose magnificent book Stranger Things Happen is not yet published in this country. The other is Ted Chiang.

Link's success makes immediate, intuitive sense: she writes bravura experimental prose with a subverted fabular logic that sits well with today's genre-bending sentiment. Chiang, by contrast, is a much more traditional science-fiction writer. His language is precise rather than impressive; even, sometimes, a little flat. Occasionally the high concepts of his pieces necessitate those undigested lumps of explanation known as info-dumps. His record, however, is remarkable. The eight stories collected here (his entire output over more than a decade) have deservedly notched up three Nebulas and a Hugo - the most prestigious awards in SF.

In Chiang's hands, SF really is the "literature of ideas" it is often held to be, and the genre's traditional "sense of wonder" is paramount. But though one reads Stories of Your Life with a kind of thematic nostalgia for classic philosophical SF such as that of Asimov and Theodore Sturgeon, the collection never feels dated. Partly this is because the "wonder" of these stories is a modern, melancholy transcendence, not the naive 50s dreams of the genre's golden age. More important, the collection is united by a humane intelligence that speaks very directly to the reader, and makes us experience each story with immediacy and Chiang's calm passion.

Complex issues of language, maths and physics provide the contexts and narrative hooks - precisely the sort of science-fictional concerns that bring a blench to the face of the literary snob. But the stories are constructed on a bedrock of profound humanism, so the most abstruse philosophical conjectures are experienced as resonant and emotional. In "Division by Zero", for example, we feel painful empathy and pity for the main character only because and insofar as we have understood the crisis in her life occasioned by a mathematical paradox.

This is scientific problem not as puzzle to be solved, but as ontological catastrophe, and human catastrophe too. Similarly, in his notes, Chiang describes how "Story of Your Life" "grew out of [an] interest in the variational principles of physics": perhaps surprisingly, the tenderness of this story, and its astonishingly moving culmination, are not achieved despite the scientific speculation, but are direct functions of it.

In Chiang's universe, humanism is inextricable from rationalism. Far from being counterposed as "cold" to emotion's "warmth", it is the rationalism of the characters - and the writer - that makes them emotional and human. This conception unites all the stories, even those set in universes with different, "magical" laws. In "Seventy-Two Letters", the basis of Victorian industry is kabbalism as a systematised, rational and political science - if one very different from our own. In "Tower of Babylon", Chiang brings his austere contemplation to bear on a universe for which the Tower of Babel is not a moral fable of scattered peoples but a philosophical investigation in architectural form.

Science fiction and fantasy are at best nebulously divided categories. The most fantastic of Chiang's work is rational in ways traditionally associated with SF. What is perhaps the collection's showcase piece, "Hell Is the Absence of God" (which took both the Nebula and the Hugo), is predicated entirely on the supernatural, but does not sacrifice rational, investigative consciousness. For this story, the bleak doctrines of some Christian fundamentalists are scientific predicates known to be true. Hell and Heaven exist - characters can see them, sometimes - and angels visit the earth with bursts of Holy Presence and catastrophic side-effects. There is, though, no moralistic Sturm und Drang; while he emphatically problematises the theology that underpins its world, Chiang does not descend to the finger-wagging one might expect from a liberal intellectual.

Instead, the story revolves around real people attempting to get on with real lives in this universe - one in which virtue is not necessarily rewarded, in which a serial rapist and murderer can be glimpsed ascending to heaven because he has seen God's light, while a good man who does not love God will be cast out. The outrage of the adolescent crisis of faith is here redignified and reinvigorated as the genuine and profound moral questioning it is. Theology of the most punitive kind is treated as science to be investigated. From this counterintuitive, even ornery starting point, Chiang has the story, and all his stories, unfold with a logic that is ineluctable and compassionate.

· China Miéville's most recent novel is The Scar (Macmillan)