Exhalations: Stories

Highly lauded science fiction author Ted Chiang has put together a provocative collection of short stories and novellas in this book.  Chiang most famously Stories of Your Life and Others, which was the basis for the movie Arrival. Covering everything from time travel to species extinction to augmented memory technology, we are prodded to reconsider ideas and values we currently cling to and challenged to consider new ones to fit a changing world. My book group read this for our December selection. I personally found some stories more engaging than others. We decided to focus our discussion primarily on the story "The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling," which generated thoughtful and often deeply felt discussion. These did not feel like a most science fiction I have read in book length, where there is a plot line that you follow to conclusion. The entries seemed to raise more questions than they answered.

His stories have won all the big name prizes--Hugos, Nebulas, etc.-- and critical reviews are almost unanimously glowing.

The Guardian: "The emotional and the cerebral are expertly balanced in these meditations on the mysteries of existence." Read this review to get a brief overview of each of the stories and the reviewer's assessment of their strengths and weaknesses.

The New Yorker: Chiang explores "conventional tropes of science fiction in highly unconventional ways." This reviewer had different ideas about which stories were most noteworthy, so also worth a read.

NPR: Chiang writes often (almost always) with an understanding that nothing we do, nothing he does, nothing any of his characters do, can change that. Consequence comes of every choice, of every breath (the entire point of Exhalation), ..."Nothing erases the past," says the narrator. "There is repentance, there is atonement, and there is forgiveness. That is all, but that is enough."

Kirkus:  "Visionary speculative stories that will change the way readers see themselves and the world around them..."

Washington Post: "Chiang’s stories are uniformly notable for a fusion of pure intellect and molten emotion. At the core of each is some deep conceptual notion rich with arcane metaphysical or scientific allure. But surrounding each novum is a narrative of refined human sensitivity and soulfulness that symbolically reifies the ideas. While this combination represents the ideal definition and practice of all science fiction, it’s seldom achieved."