Exhalation by Ted Chiang

Thursday June 13, 2019

Ted Chiang wrote Story of Your Life, which I liked a lot and became the movie Arrival. Exhalation has two more single-timeline deterministic time-travel stories at the beginning, but then it opens up a bit. Chiang's first collection might be better, but read this one too.

Spoilers as I briefly describe Exhalation's stories:

• The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate
  • Single-timeline time-travel with portals that can take you whenever they existed.
• Exhalation
  • Entropy kills (but also some neat stuff on trying to understand brains).
• What's Expected of Us
  • Oh man there's no free will.
• The Lifecycle of Software Objects
  • Humanlike AI requires humanlike entities. I tend to agree with his take here.
• Dacey's Patent Automatic Nanny
  • Some kid develops an attachment to machines rather than people.
• The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling
  • Let's understand Trump as pre-literate / maybe perfect (video) memory is cool?
• The Great Silence
  • Maybe parrots are really smart?
• Omphalos
  • A world with physical proof of creationism finds out it was God's practice planet.
• Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom
  • Devices for communicating between two parallel universes (one pair per device).

I never wrote about Stories of Your Life and Others, so I'll describe those too:

• Tower of Babylon
  • It gets so high that it breaks through the firmament.
• Understand
  • A guy gets crazy smart and fights with another smart guy.
• Division by Zero
  • Whoa what if arithmetic is inconsistent.
• Story of Your Life
  • Cross-time awareness (single timeline) with aliens and writing.
• Seventy-Two Letters
  • What if people really did grow from homunculi (also other weird stuff).
• The Evolution of Human Science
  • People make more advanced humans and we can't understand them any more. (Possible connection to AI explainability?)
• Hell is the Absence of God
  • A world where angels are real and messy, heaven and hell are real, etc.
• Liking What You See: A Documentary
  • Turning off visual perception of human beauty.

Thanks Lenny for letting me know that Exhalation was available!