Review: Exhalation – Stories

Ted Chiang is up for two Hugo awards this year, one novelette (“Omphalos”) and one novella (Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom). I was able to get ahold of the book they’re collected in, so I’m taking an easy week and just reading those two stories.

Ha! Just kidding, it’s a short-story collection, of course I read the whole thing. Click the jump for a review of Ted Chiang’s 2019 collection Exhalation: Stories.

Chiang wrote the story that was adapted into the movie “Arrival”, a film about aliens who teach humans a language that alters their perception of time. So it feels appropriate that this collection’s first story, “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” is about time-travel. Written in the style of 1001 Arabian Nights, it features a now penniless merchant telling an Emperor about meeting an alchemist who has invented a way to travel twenty years into the future. It’s whimsical and entertainingly convoluted, with all the wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey elements you get from someone who really knows how to play with cause and effect. It’s also very touching; the accepted idea is that it’s impossible for a time traveler to change anything, but whether that’s true or not depends on your definition of the word “change”.

Many of these stories…actually most of them (okay, all of them) feel like the author is exploring a topic as he’s writing it, creating a world or a science or an alien race in order to look deeper into some very basic elements of being human. One of those recurring topics is how we react when we know what’s going to happen, and can’t make it stop. “Exhalation” is a poetry-like first-person narrative about a race of mechanical creatures who live via air that’s pumped into their bodies from the core of the planet. The narrator takes most of the story to describe the steps taken to dissect their own brains in order to find out why something with the air is…going wrong. The last few paragraphs touch on what everyone is going to do about it, knowing that there’s nothing they can do to change it. It sounds grim, but it’s a surprisingly uplifting ending, almost like a love letter to the universe.

By contrast, “What’s Expected Of Us” , the shortest story in the book, is not uplifting. It’s actually rather terrifying. Free will is an illusion. Now what?

“The Lifecycle of Software Objects”.  Good God this one is epic. At over 200 pages it takes up most of of the book, and the actual “plot” feels secondary to the concept of creating Artificial Intelligence and what that will mean both for humans and the AI’s we create. Chiang has no illusions about how most innovations get started; if AI’s are ever created they’re going to be part of a viral craze, carefully designed to appeal to a consumer base and marketed in the best way to maximize the company’s bottom line. The AI’s here are virtual-reality anthropomorphic creatures called digients, programmed to be prelingual and then learn how to speak and develop their own personality. The story goes into great big detail about the process of forming the digients, how they change over time, the ways that people find to abuse or neglect them (shades of every person who had a kid because they’re “supposed to”, or abandoned a dog because “it’s not as much fun as a puppy”) and basically looking at every angle of what is is we owe to the beings we’ve created and/or have power over.

There are shades of Steampunk in “Darcy’s Patent Automatic Nanny”, but like many of these stories it’s less about the fantastical element (a scientist who gives up on human nannies and invents a mechanical one instead) and more about everything that brings a human to the point where they think making a robot to look after your child is a good idea. And the fallout afterward.

I’m not completely sure how to feel about the “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling”. It’s one of the few times I’ve run across a story where a brain augment which records everything you experience and lets you play it back at will is anything other than a terrible idea. It’s nice to think that something like that would make people face up to all the character flaws they can no longer ignore, but I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of folks would still justify their crappy behavior by insisting they deserved to act that way. The parallel story of a pre-literacy civilization being introduced to words on paper that never change, well, I’m looking at this with the prejudice of someone who didn’t depend on an oral tradition for important memories. There’s an argument here that the memories which everyone agrees on are more important than blindly believing what’s on paper; I think I would have had an easier time accepting that if the person making that argument didn’t have a vested interest in believing that the “truth” was something different from what had been written down.

“The Great Silence” is possibly the saddest story in the collection. It’s wistful, but oddly forgiving. Humanity has been looking so hard for intelligent life in the galaxy, and meanwhile at least one is slipping away as we speak.

Now we get to the Hugo-nominated stories. The title of “Omphalos” is taken from a 19th century essay which argues that science only seems to disprove Creationism, because God himself created everything to make it look like the Earth is billions of years old. There’s literally no middle ground between science and faith here; if science is true then God doesn’t exist. If God deliberately faked the age of the Earth, then science is nothing but a lie. Anything that conflicts with the Bible can be dismissed by saying it was created that way. It’s the Young Earth version of a conspiracy theorist responding to every argument with “That’s just what they want you to think.”

This story takes place on an Earth that’s really eight thousand, nine hundred, and twelve years old. And there’s scientific proof to back that up. Literally every fossil and petrified tree and stratum of the earth has layers that go back 8912 years, and then stop with a solid unbroken core. Irrefutable evidence of the moment when God created them out of nothing.

Our narrator is a scientist and also a devout believer; her scientific studies are inseparable from her faith. And then she stumbles across new study shows that shows that while yes, God does exist, the why to everything she believes, that she’s been backing up with science, is completely wrong. Nothing in the universe has actually changed, but everything she’s based her beliefs on is gone, and she has to decide if she’s going to lose both her science and her faith. The story is a dissection of religion, but I don’t think it’s a really dismissive one.

The last story in the collection is also my favorite, “Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom”. The fantastical element in this story is the Prism, a machine that uses quantum physics to create an alternate timeline, and an alternate you who you can then talk to through the Prism. The two timelines only diverge at the moment you activate the machine, so you’re not going to get an alternate universe where Hitler was never born or the dinosaurs didn’t go extinct. The Prism is simply the ultimate “what if” machine. What if I never took that job? What if I accepted that proposal? What exactly did I do differently that made my life so much worse than the “me” on the other side of the screen?

It’s an amazing hook to hang a story on. Chiang looks at every way someone can use the Prism, or misuse it. Some people obsessively activate Prisms again and again, second-guessing every decision. Others carefully preserve their Prism for years after activation, letting the alternate world diverge more and more, giving them access to a treasure trove of music and art and literature that doesn’t exist in our reality.

And of course there’s always going to be someone who’s looking for the next con.

If you’ve ever read Larry Niven’s story “All the Myriad Ways”, you’ll know that the Infinite Worlds theory can have the side effect of making someone ask “What’s the point?” If every time you make a decision, another version of you takes the other path, so what does it matter if you make the “right” decision or not? And there’s a little of that here. So it’s odd that this becomes such an empowering story. All the infinite universe, narrowed down to the most important question of all: what are you, in this universe, going to decide right now?