Onyx reviews: Exhalation by Ted Chiang

Reviewed by Bev Vincent, 05/15/2019

The nine stories in this collection—two previously unpublished—explore complex subjects in exquisite detail, analyzing practicality, morality and the possibilities created by various scenarios. In several of them, Chiang extrapolates contemporary technology into the near (or not-so-near) future to see where things might logically go.

The opening tale, "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate," would have been at home in One Thousand and One Arabian Nights. The first person narrator visits a shop filled with fascinating objects of the merchant's creation. He is shown a portal that allows people to go twenty years into the future (or the past, depending upon which side of the portal is used). Before he is allowed to embark on a time-traveling journey, the merchant relates several interlinked tales about what has befallen people who previously used the "Gate of Years." The stories all demonstrate the same basic concept: the future and the past cannot be altered or erased. "There is atonement, and there is forgiveness," the narrator realizes. "That is all, but it is enough."

The title story is the most fantastical of the collection, set on an alien planet populated by mechanical beings that breath argon. An apparent change in the perception of the passage of time leads to a voyage of self discovery by the protagonist, who wants to understand the true nature of their existence. The story explores the notion of entropy and what it means for a civilization in the long term.

"What's Expected of Us" is the shortest work in the collection, a clever but pessimistic look at predestination. A simple gadget that can manipulate time by one second proves the lack of free will. The implications of this machine causes widespread depression.

The novella "The Lifecycle of Software Objects" is a multiyear saga that tracks the rise and fall of a digital life form called a digient. The main character is a former zoo worker hired to assist in the creation of digital pets. The concept is similar to the tamagotchi craze of the 1990s, but on a much larger scale. The digients live in an artificial universe where their owners can interact with them by adopting avatars. The digients begin as blank slates, but are allowed to learn, develop personalities and speak. The question arises as to whether they might at some point be considered alive. As the years go by, interest in the digients wanes and the platform in which they exist becomes obsolete. The story explores the nature of artificial intelligence and how these long-lived entities should be treated. Is it okay to shut down a digient that seems sentient? What impact might a relationship with an artificial entity have on real-world relationships?

"Dacey's Patent Automatic Nanny" is another look at the potentially fraught relationship between man and machine. In Victorian times, a man creates an automaton to look after his infant child and in later years the child fails to thrive when it is reared by a human being.

"The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling" is a logical extension to the contemporary reliance on search engines and home assistants like Alexa and Siri. In the future, people record video of every second of their lives, and software becomes available that allows them to search for and replay any moment from the past. The protagonist explores a number of scenarios where this might change humanity. The notion of a "first memory" becomes obsolete, as does the nostalgic feeling people associate with certain early memories. He also wonders what will happen to relationships when arguments over who said what can be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. How can a person ease the memory of a traumatic event if the event itself can be called up at any moment? Chiang interleaves this story with another about a missionary who lives among a primitive tribe. They have no written language, so the missionary teaches one of the men to read and write English. In doing so, he learns that this tribe believes in two kinds of truth, one that is literal and another that "feels right" given the circumstances. A literal record cannot capture the nuances of the latter in the same way that a recording of an event loses all emotional context.

"The Great Silence" is a short contemplation on the Fermi Paradox from the perspective of gray parrots.

"Omphalos" posits a world in which Biblical evidence for the age of the world is scientifically provable, but then adds a wrinkle. A modern-day Copernicus submits a paper that shows that there is a point in space around which everything in the universe rotates, and it isn't the Earth. Since science in this reality supports religious tenets, this revelation causes a crisis of faith followed by a determination to create meaning for existence to fill the void.

In "Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom," quantum mechanical prisms allow people to create branches in the timeline. The prisms also enable people to communicate with their "para-selves" in the different timelines. This let's people find out what would have happened if they'd made different choices. As with all technology in Chiang's stories, the prisms come with risks. People become jealous of their paraselves' successes. The story explores the extent to which personal choices impact the future and also the fact that some outcomes cannot easily be ascribed to particular actions. If the same thing happens in branches where a person acted differently, that person wasn't the cause.

Chiang also looks at all the ways technology can be abused or used in ways in which it was never intended. In the final story, data brokers sell pirated copies of books, music and films artists create in different timelines. In the story about the digients, people hack and clone the artificial life forms and the sex industry tries to come up with ways to exploit them to satisfy particular sexual quirks.

These are high-concept ideas, and the characters in the stories act in service to these ideas, sometimes to the detriment of deep characterization. Readers do not learn much about these individuals beyond the way they grapple with the implications created by the inventions or situations. The stories, then, can feel a little clinical and distant. They are intellectual exercises that explore some fascinating and wildly inventive ideas.