Hugos 2020: Exhalation: Stories by Ted Chiang

Collection first published: 2019
Contents originally published: 2005-19
Acquired: May 2020
Read: August 2020

Exhalation by Ted Chiang

I picked this up for my Hugo reading, since two of its stories ended up on the Hugo ballot; once Hugo voting was closed, I circled back and read all the other stories. Other than Arrival and "Story of Your Life," this was my first exposure to his work. At his best, Chiang hits that doubling effect of science fiction I love so much: he build other worlds based on scientific ideas, and his ideas serve as metaphors about our world. Chiang tends toward the hard sf end of the spectrum, which is to say that his ideas are put forth in great detail. I don't know if the science is real but it feels real, and Chiang keeps explaining it interesting, usually by paralleling it with the human impact of the technology.

Stories that really worked in this way including "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling," about how writing reshaped our cognition, and about how memory retrieval is likely to do so again; I really liked his point that memory technologies will do for individual people what writing did on a societal scale. (As I was reading the story, I thought, "someone knows his Walter Ong," and then I got to "story notes"... and yes he does!) I also really liked "Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom," about branching timelines. It's clearly a grounded, realistic take on the idea, and in being so, does some really interesting stuff that I've never seen before in sf.

The more middling stories don't quite thread this needle. I thought "The Merchant and the Alchemists' Gate" (a take on how a time machine would "actually" work) was intellectually interesting, but it didn't have the emotional impact of Chiang at his best; similar thoughts were spurred by "Omphalos."

Chiang seems to be at his weakest when in short-short mode; all the stories I liked least were ones that explored an idea but didn't really support it with character or thematic work. Thus you lose the doubling effect of the best sf: I liked the weird other worlds, but I want to see the connection to our world. I felt the title story fell into this trap, as did "What's Expected of Us" (I didn't even remember what this one was about until I flipped back through it to write this review) and "Dacey's Patent Automatic Nanny" (about a Victorian who makes a mechanical child-rearer, it's told in the form of a museum guidebook, which keeps you rather distant from the actual events, and as a Victorianist, I didn't think the period details rang true; it felt like someone's stereotypes of the era). I think Chiang actually did pull off the form in "The Great Silence," a cute story about the parrots who live near the Arecibo Observatory.

My favorite story in the book was "The Lifecycle of Software Objects," about a group of people "raising" AIs in a computer environment. I really appreciated its accurate depiction of AI; ever since I read Gödel, Escher, Bach, it's seemed unlikely to me that AI would spring into the world fully sapient. Any truly emergent system would have to be taught just like human have to be taught. It's a really neat look at how that process might go, and how difficult it might be, and how external factors might influence it-- and it's also a really moving depiction of the difficulties of parenting and figuring out when to let someone be autonomous. An incredible piece of sf writing that does what only sf can do at its best.