Wednesday, May 29, 2019

Exhalation: Stories, by Ted Chiang


Title: Exhalation: Stories
Author: Ted Chiang
Publisher: Knopf

This is the second collection of short stories and novellas by American author Ted Chiang, probably best known for his short story "Story of Your Life", which the movie "Arrival" was based on. 

"Story of Your Life" was breathtakingly good, one of those rare stories that just powers straight through your eyeballs and blows apart your brain even as it puts your heart back together again. A linguist learns an alien language, and forcing herself to think like them enables her to perceive time the way they do--which leads/will lead/has always led to her realizing the trajectory of her life, and of her daughter's.

That's a pretty good taste of what Chiang is like. In the first collection, “Stories of Your Life and Others”, Chiang's stories often featured people's ideals or beliefs—especially religious beliefs—getting challenged or thrown out of whack by scientific discoveries or new technologies. For example, in “Acts of God” a recently-bereaved widower struggles with the meaning of devotion and faith in a world where the existence of God is an observable fact. In another story, the builders of the Tower of Babel discover their cosmology is all wrong—but not in the way you’d expect.

The collision of humanity and science continues to be a strong theme in this new collection, "Exhalation: Stories". The title story, for example, is about a race of automatons dealing with the knowledge of the inevitable destruction of their world. How do you go on living when you know nothing will last? In another, on an alternate Earth where humanity has found objective scientific proof that the universe was created by a god (nothing older than 8,000 years old exists) they then have to confront the fact that their planet is moving with respect to background radiation—meaning their planet is not the center of creation.

Generally, the collection is up there with his previous work, if not quite as good, but remaining both touching and thought-provoking. There aren’t any space battles or marauding aliens or killer viruses, it’s all low-key, very internal stuff, featuring people struggling to come to terms with what it means to be human (or automaton) in a complex, technologically-mediated world.

At the same time, Chiang remains an author much better at concepts and ideas than characterization and dialog, but maybe with the popularity of books like “Three Body Problem” or “Ancillary Justice” stories long on ideas and short on, er, story, are what’s in at the moment.

In particular the longest story in the collection, "The Lifecycle of Software Objects," is also the dullest and most meandering and could probably have delivered the same punch in a quarter of the length.

I must confess my main gripe with this collection is economic rather than stylistic, though. I'd already read many of the stories as they're available online from various sites, including both "Exhalation" and "The Lifecycle of Software Objects" and a couple of other stories, so the $20+ price tag for the Kindle edition felt a bit steep. I think only two out of the nine stories in the collection are actually original, with the others all published sometime between 2005 and 2015. They're good stories, but maybe wait for this one to go on sale?

In the meantime, here’s where you can read some of the stories in this collection: