Exhalation

by Ted Chiang

I don’t read that many short stories, but I thoroughly enjoyed every one of these. I felt the same about the other collection of his stories that I listened to a while back. The stories in this book dealt a lot with free will.

• The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate — An Arabian inventor makes a portal that can take you 20 years into the past or into the future. The story tells several tales of people who tried the gate and what happened.
• Exhalation — Journal entries from a scientist whose body is powered by the flow of air. He builds a contraption to let him disect his own brain and learn how it operates. He learns that as the air pressure in his world reaches equilibrium, he and all creatures will slow down and eventually die. He leaves a message of hope for future explorers who may come from other air pockets in the universe.
• What’s Expected of Us — A very short story about free will. A device called a Predictor is invented that always blinks green before you press it. It can’t be tricked. The conclusion is that you have no free will, since your actions can be reliably predicted. The story is a message from the future explaining that this device will drive a lot of people to despair, and the advice from the future is to pretend you have free will.
• The Lifecycle of Software Objects — A novella about a zookeeper (Ana) who joins a software company that makes sentient software animals for people to take care of, train, and play with. She and some others treat them very much like living things, even like children, and keep them running long after the company that created them goes under. Engrossing but not really my favorite.
• Dacey’s Patent Automatic Nanny
• The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling — In the future, people fully record their lives with LifeLog, but it’s cumbersome to look back through the video until a new product called Remem arrives, which makes it fast to search your past memories and see the actual video of them. This is interspersed with the story of a European missionary bringing reading and writing to an oral culture. The most interesting part of this story to me was when the missionary tried to teach a man to write, the man wrote his letters spaced evenly. “No,” said the missionary, “put spaces between the words.” “What is a word?” the man said. And the missionary had trouble describing the concept. In a purely oral society, it might not be so clear which sounds constitute their own words. (Objects have names, of course, but more abstract things might be hard to pin down.)
• The Great Silence — Something about parrots? I don’t remember much about this one.
• Omphalos — This takes place in a world where the creation of the universe can be tracked back to an actual year because the trees don’t have rings prior to that, ancient mummies don’t have belly buttons, etc.
• Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom — People can use quantum Prisms to communicate with parallel universes. Really enjoyed this one.