Exhalation
by Ted Chiang
Rating: 5.0 / 5 · Read · Finished 2020-07-29
I was introduced to him by reading Story of Your Life and Others and was blown away by hit after hit. This collection is just as good. Every story is excellent. After reading both, I notice a couple themes the author seems to revisit:
- What would be the implications if debunked scientific theories were actually true? (Tower of Babylon, Seventy-Two Letters, Hell is the absence of God, Omphalos)
- How do you live with scary answers from science (e.g. the eventual heat death of the universe or determinism)
- Closed loops (Story of your life, The merchant and the alchemist’s gate)
- Expanding the range of things we call intelligent (The lifecycle of software objects, The great silence)
- What it’s like to change our own intelligence (The truth of fact, the truth of feeling, Understand, The Evolution of Human Science)
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On second reading, these are worth reading:
- The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate
- Exhalation
- What’s expected of us
- The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling
- The Great Silence
- Omphalos
- Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom
And these are not:
- The Lifecycle of Software Objects
- Dacey’s Patent Automatic Nanny