EXHALATION

Latest Arrivals

RELEASED 11 July 350 | Hardback/ebook/audiobook

Author Ted Chiang Publisher Picador

If you don’t already know why this collection’s publication has SF fandom a-twitter, then you’ve just earned the undying envy of this reviewer, because it means you can read Ted Chiang for the first time.

In a career of almost 20 years, Chiang has won pretty much every genre award going. Yet he’s published no novels, just 15 short stories; the two new pieces in this collection (his second, after 2002’s Stories Of Your Life And Others, whose title story was adapted as Arrival), bring that total to a heady 17. Entire epic fantasy trilogies come and go in the time between Chiang’s tales. So why the fuss?

Simply put, he’s a master. He writes smart, sharp, self-contained experiments of thought and feeling whose impact goes beyond their page count; the more you think about them, the more possibilities they open up. “The Lifecycle Of Software Objects”, for example, is a portrait of software engineers who go on “parenting” their AI creations after their company folds; “The Truth Of Fact, The Truth Of Feeling” explores the social role of forgetting, as ubiquitous self-recording that autoplays apt memories means sleeping dogs can never lie; “Anxiety Is The Dizziness Of Freedom”, meanwhile, imagines tech whose users can quiz multiverse counterparts on their alternate lives.

Other pieces dwell on conceptual breakthroughs. In “Exhalation”, a robot society discovers entropy; “Omphalos” works through the physics and history of a universe that really is no older than the Bible says (trees dating back to creation have ringless cores; mummified remains of the oldest humans lack navels), but can still be rocked by a new scientific theory. Best of all, “The Merchant And The Alchemist’s Gate” does Einstein-compatible time travel, 1001 Nights style.

It’s not perfect – a couple of the stories are inessential – but few collections come closer. Nic Clarke

Their impact goes beyond their page count

The time travel in “The Merchant...” was inspired by Kip Thorne, who also advised Christopher Nolan on Interstellar.