“Exhalation” by Ted Chiang

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Rating: 5/5 Stars

A wonderful collection of stories by an author who does not produce many stories. But the ones he does write are finely crafted and raise questions about people and their reactions to situations that, but for the way the universe was created, could really exist outside the author’s imagination.

• “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate”: a tale of a merchant who encounters an alchemist who works magic with a gate that can bring one to the past or the present. Via a series of stories in the story, the nature of the gate is shown and the effect it has on the people who use it to travel to the past or the future and reveals the nature of time travel where the past and future are fixed by the choices already or yet to be made.
• “Exhalation”: an exhilarating story about an unusual world where air itself drives the workings of a form of life. When unusual events occur, the protagonist is driven to examine his inner self and learns a universal truth; that entropy will be the cause of the death. Yet even then, he holds a faint hope that others will learn from his experiences.
• “What’s Expected of Us”: a short short story about a little ‘toy’ that reveals the truth about free will.
• “The Lifecycle of Software Objects”: a thoughtful story about the nature of relationships, responsibility and growing up for a group of software objects that, for all practical purposes, are intelligent. Being ‘born’ by being expressed as instances of an initial software genetic model, they grow up under the watchful eye of people bought in to train them and get them ready to be sold as relationship objects by their company. But times change: companies goes bankrupt, and even the virtual world the software objects inhabit becomes obsolete. But some owners still keep them running, training, educating and keeping them company. Then comes an offer that may be the lifeline to keep them running for longer, but it comes with a price that all children that become adults have to do: making their own decisions.
• “Dacey’s Patent Automatic Nanny”: a tale set in Victorian times about a man who decides that mechanization is the key to raising a healthy child and proceeds to make a mechanized nanny for his son. The idea does not take off, but then the son, now an adult, attempts it again on another child. But he abandons the idea when the child does not apparently prosper, and gives him away to a home. But it is only when the home attempts to communicate with the child and raise him that is it revealed that the automatic nanny has succeeded, just not in the way its inventor expected.
• “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling”: a story about a new invention that will allow people who keep a video log to search through it quickly to find the required segment. The story is told from the viewpoint of a journalist concerned that such quick recall would lead to conflicts when people’s memory and actual footage of events differ, which happens when the journalist searches for a recording of a previous argument with his daughter and is shocked to learn what actually happened. The story also interleaves another story of a young nomad who learns to read and write from a missionary, and also learns a lesson about the difference between the truth as told by writing and the truth as told by the elders of his clan.
• “The Great Silence”: a look at the paradox of why there appears to be no other intelligent life in the universe, from the viewpoint of a species that shares the Earth with us, and it generally thought to be quite intelligent, if only we could realize it.
• “Omphalos”: a fascinating story about an alternative Earth where a moment of creation of all living creatures has been found and accepted by scientists. Tracing the sale of stolen artefacts of the moment of creation from a museum leads one scientist on a journey that will end with the discovery that while god did create man, man may not be special to god. And now the scientist and the world will have to deal with the outcome.
• “Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom”: a different take on the idea of ‘multiple worlds’ via quantum physics. Here, devices called Prisms cause a quantum ‘split’ in the universe when each Prism is first turned on, with both sides communicating with each other via the Prisms. As time passes, deviations built up between the universes (different weather, different people, different actions by people, different outcomes of accidents, etc.) and some people try to take advantage of it, like selling Prisms to people who loved ones have died but still survive in the alternate universe. But the Prisms also change people, making some feel inadequate when their other self appears to do much better. All of that is considered in a story with a cast that revolves around a person who starts off being selfish and, via interactions with people and their Prisms, resolves to be a much better person.

Book read from 2019/11/05 to 2019/11/13