Exhalation
Ratings440
Average rating4.3
.jpg&width=40&height=40&type=webp){kind=small}
Thought provoking, some interesting ideas, but a tough act to follow.
I had read “Story of your life and others” and I fell in love with the book. Chiang is an amazing creative writer with ideas that are so beautiful I found myself constantly telling others about the stories.
Exhalation is very much the same ilk: beautiful ideas and mostly well executed. My star rating is based in context of “Stories of your life and others” which I know is unfair in some ways, but it's what it is. It's more 3.5 stars rather than 3.
I found I was really craving some more lengthy stories from Exhalation and (I think) there were about four of the total short stories that gave me that. Although each story was inventive, amazing and beautiful, I kept feeling like the endings were falling short, or ending too soon...or maybe just giving up.
“The Lifecycle of Software Objects” I thought approached some really interesting ideas and asked me, as a reader, to expand my mind and preconceptions of what could be, but the way it ended, I felt as if I'd missed something. It felt true to life in that it just ends without any big bang, but as a story, I wanted to come away satisfied, or shocked, or with some emotion, but it just ... kinda ended.
I think “The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate” was my favourite story and I loved the setting and the idea that the past can be revisited in the way described in the story.
Exhalation is definitely a good book, but for me, it just didn't shine as brightly as Chiang's first collection (which was 5 stars). That said, I'll still rush out to buy anything else Chiang publishes - his stories always make me feel like my mind is being expanded!
Ted Chiang's collection of tales is filled with unique, clever, and above all, reasonable situations and environments, ranging from a clockwork universe to one where the lines between AI and organic life are dotted (at best) to one with a set of time portals, to one where one can connect with multiple parallel worlds and engage with your counterpart in each, and more. Each story is wonderfully crafted and the characters therein help you dive deep into unexpected areas of thought, all while being thoroughly entertained. Superb.
Not all of the stories worked for me but overall a well-written thought-provoking collection
Amazing collection of short stories. I'd read The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate before, but the others were new to me. For those unaware, Ted Chiang is the author of the short story that was the inspiration for the film, Arrial.
The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling reads like a Black Mirror episode.
So too with Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom.
I think my favorites are The Lifecycle of Software Objects and Omphalos.
The story The Lifecycle of Software Objects on raising AI pets was fantastic. I found the other stories less gripping.
If Goodreads allowed it, I'd rate this as like a 3.8/5 stars.
The ideas were really fascinating and quite deeply thought out, and will be stuck in my mind for a long time, like the best episodes of Black Mirror. Chiang is really good at imagining how people would interact with speculative technologies in an networked society. However, a few of the stories were much longer than necessary, and not well paced. Characters generally felt pretty flat, as if they were present just to support the story's central conceit.
It's quite rare these days to encounter science fiction that feels this fresh and exciting. With the popularity of shows like Black Mirror many science fiction tropes have been overdone and cliched. This is science fiction at its best. Incredibly creative stories that are based on solid (although speculative) science. This is a must-read for anyone with an interest in sci-fi.
How do you talk about a short story collection? Some work, others don't but what's clear throughout is the thoughtful effort Chiang puts to these stories. He explores notions of time travel, free will, entropy, alternate realities and wrestling with notions of being and memory.
He's careful with his logic but what I appreciate is the his exploration of the human impact. A miniature device with a negative time delay that can send a signal back a second in time creates a catastrophic existential toll on some individuals. Meanwhile a time portal allowing travel back and forth across 20 years doesn't change the past but can change our understanding of it.
You never get the sense he's overly impressed with himself and his sci-fi conceits. He doesn't fall in the trap of trying to dazzle with outlandish futuristic worlds and clever scenarios (which abound nonetheless) but instead uses these ideas as a jumping off point to wrestle with something more human.
Apart from a couple of short stories I personally found a bit stale — “The Lifecycle of Software Objects” and “Dacey's Patent Automatic Nanny” —, this is a stellar collection. The three first short stories are simply gorgeous and mesmerising, proud children of Ted Chiang's flow and tone. The last two stories are in turn surprising tales about science gone... awkward: “Omphalos”, my favorite, is a wonderful alternative-history epistolary adventure that left me wanting for way more... and “Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom” — which could be its own movie only if directed by Alexander Payne — struck me as a sordid and yet uplifting drama.
In a nutshell, Chiang continues to address powerful questions about technology and science. It changes our lives, it gives us new tools and it's up to us, and us alone, to make a good use of them.
Most of these are solid and a few are really exceptional. They're all thought-provoking in the way sci-fi should be.
I've known Chiang's work for years now (ever since listening to “Exhalation” on the EscapePod Podcast years ago) and have been a fan ever since. The movie Arrival, based on one of his short stories is a great example of how well he mixes thought-provoking science fiction with emotional themes that would ring true to most of us.
He has again delivered with this book of short-stories, with themes that would remind the reader of both Netflix's Black Mirror and Saramago. In particular, “The truth of fact, the truth of feeling” has now become my favourite short story of his:
“Digital memory will not stop us from telling stories about ourselves. As I said earlier, we are made of stories, and nothing can change that. What digital memory will do is change those stories from fabulations that emphasize our best acts and elide our worst, into ones that — I hope — acknowledge our fallibility and make us less judgmental about the fallibility of others”
