Exhalation

Ted Chiang's collection of short stories, Exhalation, falls in the science fiction category, but some of them seem oddly prescient, especially those about artificial intelligence and social media. Some of them are like nonfiction science writing from some future technology magazine, but a few have surprising heart.

Exhalation begins with "The Merchant And The Alchemist's Gate," which is about time travel. Set in the Arabian Nights world, a man visits a merchant to see a portal that can allow him to go either twenty years in the future or twenty years back. It has the usual time travel mind-benders--a man goes forward in time to visit his future self, who gives him advice on what to do so he ends up rich like his future self.

There is a story told from the point of view of a parrot ("The Great Silence") and another about creationist archaeologists ("Omphalos"), who believe that the Earth is only about 4,000 years old, citing mummies that they find that have no navels.

While a few stories are very short, one is novella length--"The Lifecycle of Software Objects," which is about virtual pets. It gets very technical, but at the heart of the story is how software designer become attached to digital pets. While we have already experienced that with the Tamagatchi, this is on another level, and brings up many interesting ethical questions--can digital creations obtain rights?

Ethics is at the core of my two favorite stories in the collection. "The Truth of Fact, The Truth Of Feeling" sees a future where we can record our entire lives, and call up any moment from the past. The narrator discovers that his memory of things isn't quite what he thought it was, and do we want to be able to access any point in our personal history? He adds a parallel story of South Pacific islanders who are taught how to read and write--after all, writing things down is a form of recording that to a primitive society also brings up ethical questions, such as disputing the oral tradition or storytelling.

My other favorite is "Anxiety Is The Dizziness Of Freedom," which posits a device, called a Prism, that allows the user to speak to themselves from a different timeline. This uses the theory that there are a multitude of timelines, in which different things happen depending on the slightest of changes (the most famous example of this is Ray Bradbury's "Sound Of Thunder," where the killing of a butterfly in the time of the dinosaurs changes the future). As Chiang writes, "For a hypothetical time traveler who wanted to prevent Hitler’s rise to power, the minimal intervention wasn’t smothering the baby Adolf in his crib; all that was needed was to travel back to a month before his conception and disturb an oxygen molecule. Not only would this replace Adolf with a sibling, it would replace everyone his age or younger. By 1920 that would have composed half of the world’s population."

But if you had access to yourself in a different timeline, what would that mean? What if your other self was happier than you--would that make you depressed? What if they did something that you had only thought about, such as committing an act of violence. Does destiny win out, no matter what happens?

Chiang, who wrote the short story upon which the film Arrival was based, is a writer of clarity and thoughtfulness. These stories may get under your skin, or more accurately, get into your brain.·