Ted Chiang's Exhalation 📚
I heard about Ted Chiang from the Very Bad Wizards podcast. They read and discussed a few of his stories (episodes I didn’t listen to at first, because it sounded like something I may have one day read and that I didn’t want spoiling — good decision, as it turns out), and he also appeared as a guest in an episode about the computer game SOMA. Exhalation is a 2019 collection of stories, ranging from the very short to one or two novellas.
I read through the stories in the order presented, which I think is a good order. The first thing that hits you is Chiang has an incredible imagination. Some of the stories take place on Earth, with some new technology shaking things up, Black Mirror-style. Others take place in a world that is “Earth-like, but with a twist”. And who knows in what kind of world the title-story Exhalation takes place.
Though the stories are short, they’re rich with details. Some are technical and scientific, and Chiang clearly makes an effort with the science part of science fiction. But as with all great science fiction, the speculative elements serve to raise and explore questions of human and philosophical interest, and Chiang’s human characters are well realised.
The opening story, The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate is a 2007 novelette set in medieval Baghdad, about an alchemist with a portal that allows travel 20 years into the future, and how different customers of the alchemist have used the device. It’s a brilliant opening. Chiang’s technical skill is on full display, with the time-travelling aspects perfectly consistent, and the story of each customer feeling like a little parable in its own right.
I also loved Omphalos. So fun fact: I was raised a creationist. In Omphalos, the world really is created — and all the science in that world points in that direction. In some ways it is quite a silly story, but it’s a fun thought experiment, and it gave me the opportunity to chuckle at my younger self.
The highlight for me has to be The Truth Of Fact, The Truth Of Feeling, a pair of concurrently told stories about the impact of information technologies on the ways we think and feel about our own identities and our relationships with others. One story sees European missionaries introducing writing to a traditional tribe; the other, a near-future setting in which your entire life can be video-recorded and queried in real time, meaning you need never forget (or perhaps more importantly misremember) anything again. We explore what that technology would mean for our own self-image — our every screw-up available for us to recall in perfect detail — and what it would mean for things like forgiveness in our relationships if we could revisit every hurt the other person had caused.
A couple of the very short stories were a little less interesting to me, but the number of hits made this a thoroughly worthwhile read to me. I’d recommend this book wholeheartedly to anyone who likes science fiction, or “philosophical” fiction in general.