Exhalation by Ted Chiang
Title: Exhalation: Stories
Author: Ted Chiang
Published: 2019
Type: Fiction
Pages: 350
My message to you is this: Pretend that you have free will. It’s essential that you behave as if your decisions matter, even though you know they don’t. The reality isn’t important; what’s important is your belief, and believing the lie is the only way to avoid a waking coma. Civilization now depends on self-deception. Perhaps it always has.
In Brief:
Somewhat a hit-or-miss short story collection for me, rhough the overall standard is very high – Chiang has a meticulous and almost academic approach to science fiction, making stories feel especially relevant and thought-provoking.
Rating: 4.2
Synopsis:
From Goodreads (one day I’ll catch up and write these myself again):
“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.”
My one note: there are four additional stories to the ones mentioned above; I don’t know why this summary doesn’t acknowledge them. You get the drift, though.
Where I’m At:
We read this book in my work’s book club, and it fit in very well. Many of my coworkers have highly technical or philosophical backgrounds and areas of focus; some tend to be rationalists or part of the Effective Altruism community. I realize this might not mean much to some people. But there seemed to be an overlap between the way some of us think and work, and Chiang’s approach to science fiction. He roots it in real science, laws of physics, current theories, and so on. This makes his work feel rather literal, an exploration of what it might actually look like as we continue to advance artificial intelligence, or if there was a multiverse, or time travel, or a recently-created universe, etcetera. Very Black Mirror-esque.
That said, I mostly read it while on a road trip with one of my close friends, driving through the American West. I think that made me like it a bit less – I was enjoying my escape from the tech bubble of San Francisco. I was being dazzled by giant blue skies, deep forests, looming mountains. I was reveling in the comfortable silence of two friends, the precious ease of our relationship. In other words, my heart was somewhere more poetic, so Chiang’s drier, technical approach felt discordant.
Getting Into it:
Chiang does a marvelous job developing the worlds and ideas for his short stories (which, as I’ve said with every short story collection I’ve read, is hard to do). However, instead of quickly establishing the circumstances and stakes in the fashion of Millhauser, he sort of slowly rolls out the rules for the world, making the reader shift their idea of what’s happening. This could be done in a poor or confusing way, but Chiang masters it, makes it more enthralling, gives the reader an aha moment as the next layer is revealed. As part of this, he makes the technical aspects of the story very casual and believable, weaving them into the background so they’re just part of the world, not the focus on their own. For instance, in Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom (one of my favorites), it’s established that there are devices where you can communicate with alternate realities. He does spend some time succinctly and satisfyingly explaining the science behind it, but then he moves on, and keeps the focus more on the ideas, the repercussions of such technology.
To that point, Chiang is perhaps a bit heavy-handed about his ideas. Instead of hinting at it or leaving it up to the reader, he says the point directly, then spends time exploring the nuances of it. I didn’t find that too annoying – his ideas are deep and interesting, so I enjoyed the care he took to draw them out. Even more interestingly, he would sort of approach the same idea from different angles throughout different stories – consistent themes were those of determinism, free will, memory, time, parenthood, robots, etcetera. Despite these weighty topics, Chiang also manages not to take himself too seriously: he has a light touch.
Like I mentioned above, the quality of the stories varied widely for me. There were maybe four that I liked, but I felt a bit meh about the rest. It didn’t help that the longest, a 100+ page novella was one of the latter. Another issue is that the book was heavy on developing ideas, but spent very little time on its characters, and I tend to be more drawn to character-driven stories. Only the first story, The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate, really hit that spot for me.
One that I did enjoy and want to highlight is The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling. It’s a story that deals with the subjectivity of memory, the way that one person’s “truth” can vary from another’s, and both from the “real” event. But if the event happened in the past, what is “real” now? Chiang’s approach to this is fascinating, alternating between one narrator who is grappling with a technology that allows everything you do to be recorded (think The Entire History of You), and another narrator who is taught to read and write from a missionary, and struggles to reconcile it with his own oral culture. I think it’s just a delightfully interesting topic, and reminds me of this podcast from Malcolm Gladwell (which I strongly recommend).
Overall, I did like the collection – the stories that I liked were good enough to make up for the others, which weren’t ever bad, just not for me. And Chiang’s writing is simple but elegant, thoughtful, and well-structured, making his stories a joy to read. I recommend it to fans of science fiction, especially if you prefer your stories slow, technical, and contemplative.
