Exhalation
This was another book that I’ve read before that I am listening to instead. One of the main reasons is that I’m trying to introduce more varied literature to my daughter and thought Exhalation was a good place to start for a short story collection.
Ted Chiang’s work has always fascinated me. He’s not an author first, having a professional job, and he only ever writes short stories, which is his preferred medium, and yet his stories are always so profound for the length, and in a few dozen pages, can craft both a world or a situation that is both steeped in science fiction and also grounded in humanity. The best example is the first story in this collection, which spins out a tale that could have come out from the Arabian Nights (tale in a tale format), but which has both science and a keen understanding of humanity.
The title story is one about self discovery and takes a bit of concentrating to get through in audio book format, but is still worth while even if you have to relisten to it. The descriptions of what conscious robots can do for self discovery, such as self-lobotomizing, is worth the listen/read.
Then there is the story about religion and what if religion and science are both simultaneously true and that creationism is actually real. And you find out that maybe humanity is not the center of the universe (it never was, but if the assumption that it was is the foundation of the religion, what will it do to the religion?)
At the end of the novel, I think my daughter liked only 2 out of 3 stories (she particularly did not like the Lifecycle of Software Objects, which I agree, went on for probably a few chapters too long), but I think it was a worthwhlie journey for her to go through reading this. In particular I wanted her to know that an Asian American author does NOT have to write about Asian Americans at all. Contrasted with Ken Liu, it was a breath of fresh air.