Exhalation

There was a surprising amount of duplicate stories from the version of stories of your life I read. However, this was on the whole so much better than stories of your life. I remember overall really liking stories of your life but skipping a 2 stories at least. With this one, however, I don't think I skipped any. And not only did I not skip any but I think I basically also loved all. Like really loved.

Off the top of my head my favorites (in order) were:

- The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling
- Omphalos
- Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom

I've been trying to read through some of the novel and novella nominees for the Nebula awards this year, and that's when this collection of stories came onto my radar. I was also quite disappointed in myself that I had never heard of such an accomplished Asian SFF author and immediately decided to read the whole collection, not just the nominated story. And wow was this a revelation. The stories here are written beautifully and they cover such a wide range of topics and I was also impressed by how scientific and technical the author could be in his writing while also raising some immensely philosophical questions which would make us think for a long while. And I was even more fascinated by the reasoning behind why the author chose to tell each story and what was his inspiration behind them. I'm totally gonna checkout his other works and I would recommend you do the same.

The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate

A very beautifully written philosophical tale about past and future, the importance of forgiveness, repentance and atonement and the joy in following God's teachings. The story within a story within a story format was very intriguing, and while I was confused slightly sometimes, the stories were like parables with interesting lessons and I enjoyed them a lot.

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️.5

Exhalation

This was very sciency and full of technical jargon, but the idea of an augmented human performing brain dissection on themselves to understand its working mechanism was fascinating to read about. There is a lot more going on here but ultimately, it's about marveling at the life we have and the universe we live, gain knowledge and take joy in all our experiences without worrying about the end which is inevitable.

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

What's Expected Of Us

This was a fascinating tale about what would happen if humans realize there is no such thing as free will and everything is predetermined, and what kind of consequences can occur due to this shattering of the illusion. And even though I didn't understand it completely, that last line was a master stroke.

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️.5

The Lifecycle of Software Objects

Firstly, this was too long compared to the usual lengths of short stories and I won't deny that I got bored quite a bit. It raises a lot of philosophical and ethical questions about creating digital animals in the virtual world and then raising them almost like children, what types of expectations can we have from them, can we apply human growth and cognition standards to them, how much consent can they give, what's the difference between an AI that develops through experience vs an AI that is developed algorithmically etc etc. These are all interesting questions to ponder and kept me engaged for a while, but when the discussion turned towards the morality of humans having sex with actual animals, I kinda lost it. And the ending is also very open and I felt like such a long story deserved a more concrete conclusion.

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Dacey's Patent Automatic Nanny

Another intriguing story about how a child's cognitive and physical development depends on the kind of care they receive in their infancy and early years. The implications of the use of a mechanical nanny as described in the story are so fascinating and it definitely makes me think how the use of devices by children since very young is affecting them in our present day and age.

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling

Told through two stories - one historical and one in a technologically advanced setting, this has many philosophical questions but ultimately it's about the nature of truth and memory - how there is written word or digital memory which can be relied upon to be objective truth, but there's also oral history or the memories that we remember which are a part of who we are and in their case, their objectivity doesn't matter because they are the truth that we believe. The story goes quite deep into these discussions and I found it very fascinating.

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

The Great Silence

A heartbreaking story narrated by a parrot, this is about the creation of the universe and the huge aspirations of humans to contact extra terrestrial life but how we continue to ignore and neglect the species that coexist with us.

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Omphalos

Written as a series of diary entries by a scientist addressing God, this is about her complete faith in God and her belief that her scientific and archeological endeavors are all in tune with her faith, finding out more about how God created humanity. But when some contradictory scientific claims are made, she has to grapple with uncertainty in her faith and what it means to have a purpose that is not in service of God. Another fascinating story with lots to think about, and definitely one I found very relatable.

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom

A story about quantum divergence and how our actions or any small change in weather or anything not even related to us occurred, it would be spawn multiple timelines of ourselves . I found the idea of communicating with our alternate selves using devices utterly intriguing but it was the myriad of questions it raises about free will, actions and consequences, how much different or similar we can be across the different timelines, the morality of being able to communicate or selling such devices etc was what that made it so compelling. I know I'm probably not explaining it well but this was a great story and I definitely understand why it's a Nebula nominee.

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Chiang writes with such intention and purpose that I inhale each sentence as fact, even when just a story before I constructed another world entirely. But I also believe his intention is to let us know these aren't fully different worlds, but evolutions of our world as we know it today. Different prisms maybe, alternating outcomes once one small molecule shifts out of place. Just one minuscule change can make the difference in our collective human experience even as purpose of the stories he writes remains consistent. A overlying purpose I understand to be - there is an end to everything. A lifecycle that begins with ingenuity, grows through gaining knowledge and disseminating what is learned, experiences it's height, then slowly dims as we head towards an inevitable conclusion. But that inevitable is always always meant to have a purpose (or is it? Either way it's better to believe it does). Something that we as a collective, feeling species can use to spurn new growth in the future.

All I know is I want more, and I'll hold my breath until I can exhale.

Thought provoking, some interesting ideas, but a tough act to follow.

I had read “Story of your life and others” and I fell in love with the book. Chiang is an amazing creative writer with ideas that are so beautiful I found myself constantly telling others about the stories.

Exhalation is very much the same ilk: beautiful ideas and mostly well executed. My star rating is based in context of “Stories of your life and others” which I know is unfair in some ways, but it's what it is. It's more 3.5 stars rather than 3.

I found I was really craving some more lengthy stories from Exhalation and (I think) there were about four of the total short stories that gave me that. Although each story was inventive, amazing and beautiful, I kept feeling like the endings were falling short, or ending too soon...or maybe just giving up.

“The Lifecycle of Software Objects” I thought approached some really interesting ideas and asked me, as a reader, to expand my mind and preconceptions of what could be, but the way it ended, I felt as if I'd missed something. It felt true to life in that it just ends without any big bang, but as a story, I wanted to come away satisfied, or shocked, or with some emotion, but it just ... kinda ended.

I think “The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate” was my favourite story and I loved the setting and the idea that the past can be revisited in the way described in the story.

Exhalation is definitely a good book, but for me, it just didn't shine as brightly as Chiang's first collection (which was 5 stars). That said, I'll still rush out to buy anything else Chiang publishes - his stories always make me feel like my mind is being expanded!

If Goodreads allowed it, I'd rate this as like a 3.8/5 stars.

The ideas were really fascinating and quite deeply thought out, and will be stuck in my mind for a long time, like the best episodes of Black Mirror. Chiang is really good at imagining how people would interact with speculative technologies in an networked society. However, a few of the stories were much longer than necessary, and not well paced. Characters generally felt pretty flat, as if they were present just to support the story's central conceit.

I picked this book up after listening to the New York Times Top 10 Books of 2019 and hearing it was by the author who wrote the story that the film Arrival was based off of.

I absolutely loved the first story, which is kind of a fable set in medieval Baghdad that uses time travel to explore fate. There's another great story later on that deals with memory, language, and writing by contrasting new technology and old customs.

However, about a third of the entire book is taken up by my least favorite story here, The Lifecycle of Software Objects, which was just a dull story about the morality of our treatment of AI that never really went anywhere interesting.

Overall though, this is a great little set of philosophical sci fi stories that I'm glad I read. The author even had a short little blurb at the end of each story to explain what motivated him to write each of them, which I found very insightful.

Amazing collection of short stories. I'd read The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate before, but the others were new to me. For those unaware, Ted Chiang is the author of the short story that was the inspiration for the film, Arrial.

The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling reads like a Black Mirror episode.

So too with Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom.

I think my favorites are The Lifecycle of Software Objects and Omphalos.

??I don't usually read short stories but this one was recommended to me. Maybe I had too high expectations? Anyway, I enjoyed the first stories “The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate”, “Exhalation” and the “The Lifecycle of Software Objects” and “Dacey's Patent Automatic Nanny”. But I had a hard time engaging with all the other stories. I didn't find the ideas that interesting and for the most part, I didn't care at all about the characters/narrator of the story. Most of the stories were disturbingly weird to me. I was a little bit disappointed overall.??

This book just jumped to the top of my list of favorite short story collections. Chiang is so brilliant and imaginative. I cannot believe the diversity and creativity of this collection. I cannot wait to dive into more of his work.

Highly recommended to all looking for something unique and inventive, whether or not you've read much sci-fi before.

I've known Chiang's work for years now (ever since listening to “Exhalation” on the EscapePod Podcast years ago) and have been a fan ever since. The movie Arrival, based on one of his short stories is a great example of how well he mixes thought-provoking science fiction with emotional themes that would ring true to most of us.


He has again delivered with this book of short-stories, with themes that would remind the reader of both Netflix's Black Mirror and Saramago. In particular, “The truth of fact, the truth of feeling” has now become my favourite short story of his:


“Digital memory will not stop us from telling stories about ourselves. As I said earlier, we are made of stories, and nothing can change that. What digital memory will do is change those stories from fabulations that emphasize our best acts and elide our worst, into ones that — I hope — acknowledge our fallibility and make us less judgmental about the fallibility of others”

Having never read a series of short stores like this before, I enjoyed most of them, and liked the topics/concepts that were explored. Being a fan of science fiction and fantasy, it was nice to be able to read shorter stories where I didn't need to understand lots of information. Chiang also does a good job of providing just enough information despite starting a story in the ‘middle' of the action. As much as I liked some of the stories, a few of them were a bit boring or sometimes difficult to get through.

Really really fantastic book would recommend. Every single story Ted will turn an incredible and complex idea into the most digestible, engaging story. What's more impressive is how much he is able to explore and explain these topics within such short stories. Even the stories that look at popular concepts like the multiverse, proof of god, and ai take a very unique and interesting twist. The stories that I did not enjoy as much as the others still made me want to continue through Teds amazing writing and storytelling. I'm so glad this was recommended to me, I can't wait to read more of him.

I listened to the audiobook version of this and found fascinating story ideas delivered in an almost textbook like fashion - devoid of emotion, tension, scares, or anything else that could have drawn me in. Perhaps it was the narration of the audiobook, which had a strange, almost robotic delivery to it. I found myself bored for the majority of it, setting it aside for weeks at a time before I forced myself back because “maybe the next one is better”. I finally made it 25% of the way through the final story and then bailed. I know Ted Chiang is a revered author, but for me this just didn't connect.

3.5 stars rounded up. This was like a collection of black mirror episodes that dove deeper into the science or technology that it would take to get to these points and then explored the limits of these scenarios morally and ethically. I enjoyed it even though sometimes I struggle with the science part of sci-fi and I can easily recommend it for sci-fi fans who enjoyed Black Mirror.

Many of the stories are glaringly built around a fixed idea so that the notes at the end are redundant—or are more interesting than the stories themselves. The surrounding texts are more filler than breathing worlds. “The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate”, “The Lifecycle of Software Objects”, and “Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom” are the most organic.

Ted Chiang's style has the same steady, metronomic pace as that of an exam scenario writer, avoiding any flair and unnecessary imagery. But instead of asking us to calculate how many leftover fish we have, we're given depictions of the moral choices that might be common in our cybernetic future and asked to contemplate them as if they were here in the world today. The lack of any commonplace SciFi tropes or attempts at impressive visuals means every line is dedicated to the story's ideas. This is a good thing, because Ted's ideas are phenomenal in their own right. The Lifecycle of Software Object kept my mind in a constant runaway state as I thought about AI rights and our obligations to them, each page turned in a dazed state. That same actuarial style - and Ted's light use of realistic jargon - makes it easy to imagine these moral choices as being tangibly relevant to us.

The only downside, of course, is that unless the dilemmas are of any interest to you in the first place, the underlying story will be as dry and boring as a biscuit. I haven't read anything else by Ted at this time; all I can say is this: this approach could have easily failed if he had chosen a slightly less interesting topic.