Exhalation –Ted Chiang (2019)
Note: Ted Chiang has won four Hugo, four Nebula, and four Locus awards. The movie Arrival was based on a story from his 2002 collection Stories of Your Life and Others.
The nine science fiction short stories in Ted Chiang’s Exhalation philosophically explore the consequences arising from alternative physical laws or technological inventions. It reminds me of the I, Robot stories by Isaac Asimov in which Asimov played out thought experiments based on his Three Laws for Robots with a variety of situations and characters. (First Law: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. Second Law: A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.)
As with Asimov, each Chiang story gently pushes characters along as they learn to cope and adjust to the logical outcome of the story’s laws, and most of the stories conclude with a bit of a twist of wry appreciation for the primary character’s self-discovery. It felt like old-fashioned science fiction for a 21st century sensibility. Many of the nine stories were published over the past ten years in collections such as Fantasy and Science Fiction and The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities.
Unlike Asimov, Chiang creates unique physics laws or technology for each story, and then takes us all down a path of discovery of the consequences. In “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom,” a technological tool is created in which a person can obtain a video connection with a parallel alternative world that exists under the random chances of quantum physics. This allows people of our world who procure the tool to communicate with their alternate self, and to see the variety of consequences that occur to their other self as chance and choice evolve over time. As an easy early example in the story, a fickle woman in our world decides not to accept a marriage proposal. She worries over her decision, and is able to second-guess herself by communicating with her alternate self in another world who accepted the proposal. These alternate selves are as real as we are, but exist in parallel existences. There is a catch – each tool that a person procures to communicate with the other world eventually wears out, so that the person forever loses contact with that world. If they procure a new tool, it will open into a different parallel universe with a different alternate self.
As interesting as it is to see the logical impact over time of a life-changing new technology, the stories do not create an emotional pull that drives the action and the reader. It is more about the philosophical consequences arising from the situations than about the personalities. However, Chiang is gentle and kind, and one always senses his empathetic ear for all the characters in all the stories.
Chiang does our logical work for us by letting us see the characters gradually come to grips with the consequences of a piece of fantastical technology or alternative physics. In many cases the technology is developed for profit by entrepreneurs and initially appears apt to undermine our human nature. In “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling” a technology allows perfect and accurate recall of all past personal experiences. One of Chiang’s most personal characters, a single dad, cringes at all his past mistakes as a husband and father that the tool exposes. The dad comes to realize that as everyone sees all the vulnerabilities of each other, the survival instinct seems to result in people becoming more forgiving of each other.
Many of the stories involve a play on the logic of time, putting characters in a variety of situations in which they can participate in time travel to the past. But, in all cases Chiang creates a world in which the participant cannot go to the past to change the future.
The opening story, “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” is told in a style akin to the stories of the Arabian Nights. A soft-spoken merchant, Fuwadd ibn Abbas, of Bagdad, is presented the opportunity to step through a portal to travel to his life exactly 20 years in the past and then is able to return to the exact moment he stepped through. The past cannot be changed, but Abbas obtains new revelations and appreciation for how his life arrived at its present condition. This story is beautifully told in a lilting voice that captures the polite and gracious voice of Arab culture.
My personal favorite is “Omphalos.” This is another world, much like our earth, in which secular science repeatedly and consistently finds evidence of creationism. The first person narrator is an archaeologist who finds evidence in growth rings on ancient trees that demonstrate the trees were created in whole at a particular moment exactly 8,912 years ago. This date is consistent with every archaeological artifact that science evaluates. Mummies are discovered who have no navel – evidence that these primordial human beings were created rather than birthed. Virtually all scientists are united and exhilarated to continuously confirm the presence of God who created their world as the center of the universe for mankind alone. Chiang displays such kindness, such empathy, for the narrator as she comes to grip with a new discovery that may suggest the universe actually revolves around a different planet.
Bob Fall 