Chiang clearly has had to upgrade software libraries and feels the pain of cross-compatibility issues and open source. The Lifecycle of Software ObjectsĪ tender and complex story about AI that isn’t about it taking over the world, but instead it taking the form of pet-like creatures who are less conscious and capable than humans, and asking what responsibilities we’d have toward them. Clearly at least somewhat inspired by parts of Gödel, Escher, and Bach, one of my favorite books. Has themes about the scientific method, global warming, and self-reflection.
Great premise, almost made it to Excellent but for the lack of characters and emotion, and a weaker ending. While both have ingenious devices as their intuition-pump premises, this is much more fleshed out and human. Anxiety is the Dizziness of FreedomĪ better inquiry about fate, free will, and responsibiliy than What’s Expected of Us. The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feelingįor anyone who loved Black Mirror’s The Entire History of You: an exploration of memory technology held up side-by-side with the effects of writing as a technology. It’s the first story in the collection and when I finished it, I flipped back to page 1 and re-read it instead of continuing on, and waited a bit to start the next story so I could savor this one. Excellent The Merchant and the Alchemist’s GateĪ seemingly well-worn concept (time travel) that Chiang somehow manages to make fresh, mashed up with the Arabian Nights-style nested story structure. However, when he does find the specific human experiences in the ideas he’s exploring, he’s unbeatable. In general, Chiang is masterful when he develops the story elements fully, and is weaker the closer his stories are to essays he has a tendency to tell rather than show, and The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling almost got bumped down to Good But Not Great for that reason. Here are my reviews for each of the short stories in Ted Chiang’s short story collection, Exhalation (2019), organized into categories: Forgettable, Good but Not Great, and Excellent.
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