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Loading... Exhalation (2019)by Ted Chiang
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. the epistolary short eponymous to the collection's title and, unfortunately, @mverant, although a creative metaphor for entropy, I couldn't suspend my disbelief: the whole brain tech was more fantastical than sci-fi and yet it was set in the sci-fi genre. I read the flash piece that was published in Nature Futures and it was clever and worth a chuckle. Epistolary is one of my least favorite styles and time-travel the hardest of sci-fi subgenres to swallow. Perhaps, those are a couple of counts against those stories. But I suppose it must be his distant POV and unadorned, matter-of-fact authorial voice.
Exhalation’s nine stories are … fine. A couple are excellent, most are good, a couple don’t really work. It feels like damning the book with faint praise to say so, but isn’t that exactly how short-story collections generally work? I can’t think of another modern genre writer like him, myself: his tales make me think of the same sort of impact a Bradbury or a Heinlein story had in the Golden Age, where readers would read something just because it is written by the author. In the hands of a truly fatalistic writer, the premises and conceits in Exhalation would frogmarch us down the tired path to dystopia. But Chiang takes the constraints on our freedom as a starting point from which we have to decide what it means to act as if our decisions still matter. Chiang is a writer of precision and grace. His stories extrapolate from first premises with the logic and rigor of a well-designed experiment but at the same time are deeply affecting, responsive to the complexities and variability of human life. [Chiang's] voice and style are so beautifully trim it makes you think that, like one of his characters, he has a magical looking-box hidden in his basement that shows him nothing except the final texts of stories he has already written — just so he'll know exactly how to write them well in the first place. ContainsAwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
This much-anticipated second collection of stories is signature Ted Chiang, full of revelatory ideas and deeply sympathetic characters. In "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate," a portal through time forces a fabric seller in ancient Baghdad to grapple with past mistakes and the temptation of second chances. In the epistolary "Exhalation," an alien scientist makes a shocking discovery with ramifications not just for his own people, but for all of reality. And in "The Lifecycle of Software Objects," a woman cares for an artificial intelligence over twenty years, elevating a faddish digital pet into what might be a true living being. Also included are two brand-new stories: "Omphalos" and "Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom." In this fantastical and elegant collection, Ted Chiang wrestles with the oldest questions on earth--What is the nature of the universe? What does it mean to be human?--and ones that no one else has even imagined. And, each in its own way, the stories prove that complex and thoughtful science fiction can rise to new heights of beauty, meaning, and compassion. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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My ratings:
"The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" 10/10
"Exhalation" 10/10
"What's expected of us" 7/10 (ultra-short story)
"The Lifecycle of Software Objects" 9/10 (short novel, really good but it just kind of ends, without a sense of resolution... maybe that was the point?)
"Dacey's Patent Automatic Nanny" 6/10 (ultra-short story, more a curiosity than a proper story)
"The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling" 9/10 (half-story, half-essay, but Chiang always has such interesting ideas to explore...)
"The Great Silence" 8/10 (ultra-short story)
"Omphalos" 9/10
"Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom" 10/10 ( )