ISBN: 9781529014488
Date read: 19/12/2021
How strongly I recommend it: 10/10
Support your local bookshop by going to Bookshop.org to buy your copy (instead of THAT online shopping website…)
Exhalation is one of the best short story collections I have read in recent years, and also some of the best science fiction I have ever come across. Like the best sci-fi literature, Chiang’s stories invoke the oldest themes in the genre, but deal with them in a truly new and original way. His real mastery as a storyteller is his ability to communicate big, scientific concepts in not just layman, but what I would call lyrical terms; by fusing them with virtuosic clarity, wit and humanity.
‘The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,’ the story that opens the collection, takes place in medieval Baghdad and follows Fuwaad ibn Abbas, a fabric merchant who stumbles upon a new shop in the local market. The shop sells various items, but most interesting of all is the archway in the back, made of black stone, which the shop owner has made himself through alchemy. The arch allows anyone, simply by stepping through it, to go 20 years into the future. The shop owner regales Fuwaad with three cautionary tales of others who have travelled through his archway to find, and in some cases meet and even have conversations with, their future selves. The shopkeeper explains that the time travel is limited to the lifespan of the archway, meaning that the furthest someone can travel back to is the moment at which the archway was constructed. Fuwaad is initially disheartened by this, as he was hoping to travel back and correct a mistake he made 20 years in the past, which he has no way of reaching through this archway. But Fuwaad soon embarks on a perilous journey of his own when he learns that the shopkeeper has another gate in Cairo and he built it 20 years ago. ‘Nothing erases the past. There is repentance, there is atonement, and there is forgiveness. That is all, but that is enough.’[1]
The title story, ‘Exhalation,’ is chiefly concerned with the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and deals with it through the epistolary lens of a scientist’s journal account of his investigation into a phenomenon on his homeworld; for some inexplicable reason, all clocks appear to be running fast, but not actually malfunctioning. Understanding that he is a member of a race of ageless, and relatively death-free, mechanical beings who breathe argon to power their air-driven bodies, the scientist decides to take the ultimate risk in order to discover the nature of the phenomenon; to attempt to dissect his own brain while remaining conscious. In doing so, he not only gets his answers but discovers the sad reality that will someday befall both his and our own universe: entropy. ‘With every movement of my body, I contribute to the equalization of pressure in our universe. With every thought that I have, I hasten the arrival of that fatal equilibrium.’[2]
‘What’s Expected of Us’ is the shortest story in the collection and one of the best. It deals with the invention of a novelty item called a Predictor, which is a device that resembles a remote control with only one button and a green display. When you press the button, the screen lights up. What makes things interesting is that the Predictor contains a bit of technology that connects to the future, so the game is to see if you can press the button before the light flashes. And it always flashes a second before you click the button. Always flashes. If you stop to think about what this means regarding free will, then a question that has occupied scientists and philosophers since the dawn of time is immediately answered and, as millions of Predictors are sold, the implications of this revelation become apparent to the wider world, with disastrous results for humankind. ‘There has always been arguments showing that free will is an illusion, some based on hard physics, others based on pure logic…The experience of having free will is too powerful for an argument to overrule. What it takes is a demonstration, and that’s what a Predictor provides.’[3]
‘The Lifecycle of Software Objects’ follows former zoo trainer turned software developer Ana who, over a twenty-year period, raises an artificial intelligence, Jax, from a basic digital pet (think Tamagotchi or Nintendogs if you are of a certain generation like me), into something that starts to ask questions, express itself and, most alarmingly of all, become all too human. The duty of care, and ultimately love, that Ana feels towards Jax and the other ‘digients’ is tested when the company that is responsible for their creation, continued existence and maintenance goes bankrupt, and the developers have to turn to external sources of funding, one of which is a sex toy company that wants modify the digients to make them sexual companions for humans. Instantly against the idea, Ana is forced to recognise that, by championing the consciousness and self-determination of digients, her role has changed from that of an owner to that of a parent, and that the consent may not be hers to give. ‘Experience isn’t merely the best teacher; it’s the only teacher. If she’s learned anything from raising Jax, It’s that there are no shortcuts; if you want to create common sense that comes from twenty years of being in the world, you need to devote twenty years to the task.’[4]
‘Dacey’s Patent Automatic Nanny’ is presented as an exhibition catalogue from the turn of the 20th century, describing a mechanical invention designed to aid in child-rearing. People soon begin to question the safety of using a machine to raise a child, especially when the result is a child who is only capable of interacting with machines and not humans. The story allows Chiang to explore the emotional relationships that we have developed with machines, but from an analogue perspective as opposed to digital, by setting the story about 100 years before anything as complex as computers were around. ‘The majority of the Nanny’s torso was occupied by a spring-driven clockwork mechanism that controlled the feeding and rocking schedule. Most of the time, the arms formed a cradle for rocking the baby. At specified intervals, the machine would raise the baby into feeding position and expose an India-rubber nipple connected to a reservoir of infant formula.’[5]
“The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling” takes place in a near future, where a journalist begins chronicling how the world around him is changing because of a technology that most people possess called “Remem”, a recording device that allows user to record everything they see and experience and contains a search function, effectively granting its users eidetic memory of everything that has ever happened to them, and the ability to share those memories with anyone. He uses his own life experiences with his daughter as a way of showing how memory has always been unreliable, and what it could mean if suddenly it wasn’t anymore, and everyone’s experiences became perfectly objective, unquestionable and, most relevant to our current social media-obsessed culture, shareable. In a parallel story interspersed throughout the narrative, the reader also follows a Tiv man, Jijingi, whose village is visited by a white European missionary and becomes one of the first of his people to be taught how to read and write, and discovers that this may not be compatible with the Tiv people’s oral tradition. When taken together, the two stories mirror each other, showing how sudden technological advancement, with writing itself being a form of technology, has always resulted in a diminishing of our subjective selves and the reality surrounding us, and that Remem might not be the dystopian threat its first appears to be, but rather the next in a long line of developments that humans have been making for centuries:
“How can paper tell a story?”
“It is an art that we Europeans know. When a man speaks, we make marks on the paper. When another man looks at the paper later, he sees the marks and knows what sounds the first man made. In that way the second man can hear what the first man said.”
Jijingi remembered something his father had told him about old Gbegba, who was the most skilled in bushcraft…Gbegba was able to look at the ground and know what had happened even though he had not been present. This art of the Europeans must be similar: those who were skilled in interpreting the marks could hear a story even if they hadn’t been there when it was told.[6]
“The Great Silence” is told from the perspective of a parrot addressing the humans managing the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico that, in 1974, sent a message out into space with the hopes of contacting intelligent extraterrestrial life. The parrot suggests that the ‘Great Silence’ of the title might not actually refer to the void of the universe around us, but rather the absence of the living creatures, the brothers and sisters of our parrot narrator, that humans are driving to extinction on a daily basis by destroying their habitats to build our technologies to search for alien life. He highlights how misguided this is by explaining that the very object of humanity’s search for fellow intelligent life lives on the doorstep of the observatory itself. The irony of this is not lost on our narrator, who proclaims, ‘We’re a nonhuman species capable of communicating with them. Aren’t we exactly what humans are looking for?’ [7]
“Omphalos” is one of my favourite stories in the collection. Told through prayers addressed to god, it presents the reader with a world in which Young Earth creationism is proven, scientific fact; God definitely exists, humans all come from a precursor race (whose mummified remains, serving as proof, did not have navels) and the universe was definitely created via intelligent design. But our narrator, devout archaeologist Dorothea Morrell, is exposed to a deeply unsettling fact about her universe through a recent discovery in astronomy, a field she has previously been highly dismissive of. ‘All five thousand eight hundred and seventy-two stars were catalogued in 1745, and not another has been found since then. Whenever astronomers peer at one closely, they confirm that it’s identical in size and composition to every other, and to what end?… Choosing to study them has always felt a bit like choosing to taste the plate that food is served on.’[8] To say here what the discovery is would be to ruin the story, but it is one that suggests both her and humanity’s constant prayers and adulations to their scientifically proven creator might be falling on, if not exactly deaf, then certainly uninterested ears.
“Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom” takes place in a future where, through advancements in quantum mechanics and computer technology, we have discovered that parallel realities exist. Through the simple act of observing them using a personal machine known as a prism, divergent timelines are created and the prism allows communication between them. Want to know what would have happened if you had gone left instead of right? Well, now you can switch on your prism and ask your parallel self what happened. The ability to communicate across alternate timelines has had several negative effects on society, causing widespread existential crises and necessitating support groups for people who obsess over the choices they could have made and how their lives could have been better. And two people, who run a shop that allows people to pawn their old prisms, decide to do what seems natural for some of us. They use it to con people out of their money, one of which is a dying elderly woman:
“If there’s one person you can talk to without pretense, it’s your own self.”
Morrow lifted the prism from the overbed table and repacked it into the carton. “Mrs. Oehlsen, if you don’t mind, I’d like to suggest something.”
“Go ahead.”
“You’ve said you don’t know anyone who really deserves your money. If you really feel that way, maybe you ought to give the money to your paraself.”
“You can do that?”
Confidence was the key to selling any lie.[9]
Chiang’s stories are not just the best kind of thought-provoking sci-fi, but stories about people as individuals and their roles within humankind as we know it. Stories that explore those timeless existential questions, as well as the implications of what might happen if, through the ever-accelerating development of technology, we get the answers we are looking for. Chiang dedicates the same skill, care and attention to all aspects of these pieces, whether he is describing the intricacies and inner workings of imagined technologies or of the people who use them, giving us a series of stories that will stay with you long after you’ve finished them.
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Arrival (2016)- Directed by Denis Villeneuve and adapted from Chiang’s 1998 short story “Story of Your Life,” Arrival is not just visually brilliant without losing any of Chiang’s story, but also an example of how more of Chiang’s work could come to the big screen. It is a truly original take on the ‘first contact’ sci-fi story tradition and you should definitely check it out.
[1] Ted Chiang, Exhalation: Stories, (New York; Alfred A. Knopf, 2019) P.34
[2] P.46
[3] P.52
[4] P.148
[5] P.159
[6] PP. 170-171
[7] P. 209
[8] P.228
[9] P.262