Fifty Books Project 2023

Exhalation by Ted Chiang

It cheers me to imagine that the air that once powered me could power others, to believe that the breath that enables me to engrave these words could one day flow through someone else’s body.  I do not delude myself into thinking that this would be a way for me to live again, because I am not that air, I am the pattern that it assumed, temporarily.  The pattern that is me, the patterns that are the entire world in which I live, could be gone.

Ted Chiang is a highly successful science fiction writer, winner of 4 Hugo and 4 Nebula awards.  To date, he has focused exclusively on short stories – Exhalation is his second collection.  Science fiction is not usually a genre I read, but this was a gift from my son and I decided to expand my tastes a bit.  My chief response is that most of these stories are extremely well-written and while their plots focus on details that don’t excite me, Chiang is most interested in theme and idea.  His plots are carefully thought through, but what kept me turning the pages was his interest in identity and its relationship to memory and event.

In the title story, quoted above, a scientist begins an exploration into the nature of memory.  What only slowly becomes clear to the reader is that this is not a human scientist.  The narrator is some form of robot or cyborg, living in a human-like society and on an earth-like planet, but whose body is a mechanical and electrical construct.  As a result, the narrator’s exploration involves finding the physical location and structure of memory – something he accomplishes by performing brain surgery on himself.  Chiang creates a really beautiful description of the mechanical brain uncovered in the surgery – a series of very thin gold leaf sheets, physically imprinted with memory lines that interact with each other as air circulates among them.  This circulation is uncontrolled and extremely delicate, so that what memories become important and how they feed the identity of the self becomes a subtle and unpredictable phenomenon.

There is an entertaining time travel story, “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” in which characters are able to travel forward and backward in time in twenty year intervals – so that multiple versions of the same person interact with each other, carefully figuring out how to optimize their lives by showing up at key moments every two decades.  The story is written as if it is a kind of Arabian tale, mixing the science fiction with a variation on the mysticism of the 1001 knights.  

In “The Lifecycle of Software Objects,” people live with a kind of very advanced Tamagotchis – electric pets that evolve to be like children because of their human qualities (language, ethics, learning).  The relationship between owner and “digient” grows to be very similar to a parent-child relationship.  Chiang makes this observation more powerful by incorporating elements of the corporate history of electronics into a long narrative (this is really a novella, rather than a story).  Start-ups that create digients go out of business or are sold to larger conglomerates, early digient platforms are abandoned by their developers in the same way that computer programs and operating systems have become obsolete.  As a result, some digients have vastly more constrained lives and opportunities than others.  Thus, the parent-child relationship metaphor is given a socio-economic component.

In “Anxiety of the Dizziness of Freedom” society has found a way to track parallel universes.  Every time someone makes a major decision, it affects the quantum field (the relationship between time and space?) and multiple versions of the decider are created, each of whom follows one of the possible decision paths.  An inventor has developed a machine called a prism that allows people to communicate with their “paraselves” and see what the result of the other decision would have been.  This causes much heartbreak for those people who see their paraselves leading much happier and more successful lives than their own.  One lonely character discovers his paraself is happily married.  He responds by finding the version of his paraself’s wife in his branch and proposing to her out of the blue.  There are also people who use the prism for criminal activity and we follow a pair of con artists attempting to fool people into paying for information from another branch of their lives.  The plot is entertaining and Chiang has a good eye for character development, but his major interest is always identity and its relationship to phenomena:  which self is the real one?  If you behave the same way in every branch, does that prove something about your character? Do you have a greater obligation to the branch you live in or to your paraself even in another branch of the quantum universe?

In most of these stories, minimal time is spent exploring the details of the alternative universe posited for the story.  The worlds here are usually very much like earth, with obvious, key differences.  While even the explanation of the key differences was sometimes too much for me, I appreciated Chiang’s ability to create settings and plots that opened up avenues for speculation and wonder about the world we live in.