Written by contributor Marcin Zwierzchowski
10 / 10
Ted Chiang is quite a unique author as his fiction has been with us since almost 30 years, but doesn’t publish much, and yet he’s one of the most beloved science fiction authors of our time. Beginning with his debut story The Tower of Babylon, he has won praise from the critics, love from the fans of science fiction, and a lot of awards. With only a handful of short stories and novellas published, he has won four Hugo Awards, four Nebula Awards, four Locus Awards, John W. Campbell Award and BSFA Award. Perhaps now he’s most known as the author of Story of Your Life, which was the basis for the movie Arrival, directed by Denis Villeneuve.
Most importantly though, Ted Chiang is one of the last sci-fi authors that uses the genre not because it can be spectacular, with space battles and robots, but as a space for thoughts. Like the sci-fi masters of the Old, Chiang is still keen on the science part of the genre and stories combined in Exhalation are great examples of science fiction as an “idea literature”.
As Chiang himself explains in his authors notes for each story, it usually starts with a thought, a question, a seed which grows into a story. The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling shows us what it would be like to remember everything, and that’s the center around which the story grows (like in that Black Mirror episode – The Entire History of You). But that’s the surface. Chiang goes deeper, showing us on one hand how “truth” works, how there are different kinds of it, and how our own mind can play tricks on us, and on the other hand he also shows the significance of writing as technology and what it did to us, to how we think.
That’s the thing about Chiang’s stories – they make us think.
Also – they help us think. In the Golden Age, science fiction was known for “predicting the future” and even now many of sci-fi masters are praised because their writing has foreseen or inspired some future technology. Now it’s really hard, with science being so specialised and entire think tanks competing with each other to come up with the next iPhone. So what’s the new purpose of sci-fi? Maybe it’s not predicting the future, but making us ready for it? Or helping us understand the more and more complicated science?
In The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate, Chiang uses One Thousand and One Nights inspired stories to explain the paradox of time travel. In Omphalos, he’s built a universe in which the Creationists beliefs could work. And in Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom, we see how the knowledge of existence of many alternate universes could influence us and our decision making process. Both Omphalos and Anxiety… are new stories, original to this collection.
And because ideas or technology aren’t inherently good or bad (it’s what we do with it what makes them that) Chiang’s sci-fi also isn’t pessimistic or optimistic. Even when writing about the birth of AI in The Lifecycle of Software Objects, Chiang isn’t tempted to write either dystopias or utopias; it may sound strange when applied to science fiction, but those stories are just realistic. His uniqueness as a sci-fi author is that he chooses different paths than most of other writers – in The Lifecycle for example he focuses on the process, not the result, he takes his time and stays true to what he thinks is the most likely scenario, not to what would look “cool”.
And Ted Chiang’s greatness is that with all of that he manages to write compelling stories. He takes the more difficult paths, the longer ones, and still manages to hold our attention throughout the whole story. Yes, he focuses on science, but his fiction isn’t worse because of it. Forgetting for a moment about the time travelling paradox, in The Merchant you’ll find a touching love story. And The Truth of Fact is an immensely complex story of a relationship between a father and his daughter. Anxiety, one of the new stories here, has a great main character.
One shame is that Exhalation is only the second book in a nearly three decades long career of Ted Chiang and knowing how rarely he publishes, it’ll probably be a while before any new material will be available. Then again, one can read those stories several times and still find new things in there, be inspired in a new way.
Exhalation is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers.
Have you read Exhalation? Tell us in the comments below!
Synopsis | Goodreads
From an award-winning science fiction writer (whose short story “The Story of Your Life” was the basis for the Academy Award-nominated movie Arrival), the long-awaited new collection of stunningly original, humane, and already celebrated short stories
This much-anticipated second collection of stories is signature Ted Chiang, full of revelatory ideas and deeply sympathetic characters. In “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” a portal through time forces a fabric seller in ancient Baghdad to grapple with past mistakes and the temptation of second chances. In the epistolary “Exhalation,” an alien scientist makes a shocking discovery with ramifications not just for his own people, but for all of reality. And in “The Lifecycle of Software Objects,” a woman cares for an artificial intelligence over twenty years, elevating a faddish digital pet into what might be a true living being. Also included are two brand-new stories: “Omphalos” and “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom.”
In this fantastical and elegant collection, Ted Chiang wrestles with the oldest questions on earth—What is the nature of the universe? What does it mean to be human?—and ones that no one else has even imagined. And, each in its own way, the stories prove that complex and thoughtful science fiction can rise to new heights of beauty, meaning, and compassion.
