Exhalation

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.