I bought Ted Chiang‘s Exhalation on the recommendation of a friend without knowing much about it. I was expecting a novel, but instead this is a collection of nine short stories, published in 2019, and covering stories published from 2007 to 2015.
I’m glad to have read it–I fell off the short story wagon a few decades ago, and it was a nice reminder of how enjoyable of a ride they can provide.
Chiang’s stories are wide-ranging, but generally fall in the category of “idea-based science fiction.” I wrote about this briefly in my musings on Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time trilogy, but it essentially means that the intellectual ideas behind the stories are dominant over other considerations. Chiang’s ideas will stay with you far longer than individual characters or scenes will (that is not to imply those things are bad, just that the creative force of his ideas are better).
This collection centers in many ways around the question of what it means to be considered alive or human in different contexts with the longest story, The Lifecycle of Software Objects, explicitly wrestling with the question of when programmed consciousness can be considered equivalent to “real” personhood. My favorite story was Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom, which very cleverly intertwines quantum superposition with some of the traditional concerns of time-travel narratives, and is one of the few entries in the collection that presents characters that remain memorable after its conclusion.
Exhalation is a solid, thought-provoking, quick read. Recommended.