Exhalation

How do you talk about a short story collection? Some work, others don't but what's clear throughout is the thoughtful effort Chiang puts to these stories. He explores notions of time travel, free will, entropy, alternate realities and wrestling with notions of being and memory.

He's careful with his logic but what I appreciate is the his exploration of the human impact. A miniature device with a negative time delay that can send a signal back a second in time creates a catastrophic existential toll on some individuals. Meanwhile a time portal allowing travel back and forth across 20 years doesn't change the past but can change our understanding of it.

You never get the sense he's overly impressed with himself and his sci-fi conceits. He doesn't fall in the trap of trying to dazzle with outlandish futuristic worlds and clever scenarios (which abound nonetheless) but instead uses these ideas as a jumping off point to wrestle with something more human.