“Four things do not come back: the spoken word, the sped arrow, the past life, and the neglected opportunity.”
Author: Ted Chiang
Genre: Science Fiction, Short Stories
Exhalation by Ted Chiang is the most brilliant book I have read this year, and here I mean “literally” brilliant. Every story in this book is smart, well crafted, and original. I haven’t read any of his previous work, though I had watched Arrival and loved it. So, I wasn’t wholly unaware of his writing. But, I was still taken aback with the brilliance of the stories. His style reminded me of one of my favorite science-fiction authors – Ray Bradbury. Exhalation felt a lot like The Illustrated Man; not that the stories were inspired here, it was more of the subject and the treatment of the themes which are similar.
Ted creates a fantastic balance between scientific and technological innovation and keeping it grounded. It’s wildly imaginative, yet he works under the scientific constraint. It makes the stories believable and makes the message and morals more effective. Each story has a very profound and well thought social or existential messages behind it. And what makes the book more impactful is how relevant these observations are.
The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate: Out of all the stories, this one is my favorite, and it’s a smart pick to begin the book with. It is an instant classic. The fascinating thing about this story is, it’s a time travel story told in the settings of The One Thousand and One Nights (The Arabian Nights). It’s a perfect choice to tell the recursive nature of the time travel tales, as Ted himself acknowledged. This story explores how the concept of fate and time-travel are interrelated. Ted achieves this by using a more stifled variation of time-travel, where one can travel either twenty years in the future or the past(it’s quite similar to the time-travel in Netflix original Dark). Using this simple restriction, Ted weaves a very astute and entertaining story and it could be a perfect addition to the Arabian Nights. And yet it’s still complicated and mind-bending. It is definitely in my all-time favorite time-travel stories.
Exhalation: It is a story constructed around the second law of thermodynamics. But at its core, it explores the idea survival of a race when faced with the ultimate doom and the zeal to understand it’s surroundings, including itself. One of my favorite lines is from this story:
“Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so. I feel I have the right to tell you this because, as I am inscribing these words, I am doing the same.”
If you pay attention, this story eventually is the story of our universe. The universe is doomed to end similarly.
What’s Expected Of Us: It follows the theme of the book so far. In the first story we saw, the past and future are predetermined, and in the second story, we saw the fate of the universe itself is fixed. There is nothing we can do to change any of this. In this story, Ted brought a similar theme on a more personal level: our actions and our choices are predetermined as well, or in other words, we have no free will. The story explores how this affects humans on an individual as well as the sociological level. It’s a short story and doesn’t go very deep, but it still makes you question your place in the universe.
Life Cycle of A Software Object: It’s the longest story in the book. It explores the humanization of digital objects. It’s a great concept to examine, especially now. We all are living two lives, one in the digital world and one in the real world. We interact with all kinds of digital objects, and the story explores the idea of what if these digital objects actually become a being. Ted tries to examine the notion of emotional attachment with such digital objects, and how the advancement in artificial intelligence and cognitive bots can introduce a new form of life in our society.
Dacey’s Patent Automating Nanny: Since the last story, Ted now has started focussing on human-machine interaction. It is a tale exploring how the interaction with machines can affect humans at psychological as well as social level. I felt it was a great social commentary on our current time when machines and social media surround us, and we are losing the human touch. In a way, these devices have become our caretaker, our nanny!
The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling: This, I feel, is the smartest story in the book. There are two stories here. The first one is about a new virtual assistant Remem. It can record everything from your POV (lifelog) and can be used to look back and search through your whole life. The goal is to create a perfect memory so that with a mere thought, you can find the actual memory associated with it. The narrator reasons why it’s important to forget and how recording everything can ruin the romanticization of our memories. He tries to draw the parallel from another story of a remote island, where people didn’t know how to write.
It’s a story of a young kid Tiv, who never knew the notion of writing, and is learning to write from a European missionary. We see him struggling with fundamental semantics like words, and sentences, and even with the spaces between words. I stopped for a minute to think about how we take writing for granted but how deeply it affects how we think, speak, and even behave. Tiv struggles to comprehend the distinction between oral and written knowledge. You can’t always trust what’s written, and you can’t always believe in what’s said.
“On one side are the truth of facts, on the other, the truth of the writer’s feeling & when those two coincide cannot be determined by an outside authority in advance.”
There are some subtle parallels between these two stories, and which along with a personal experience helps the narrator understand the importance of this new technology. It is one of the stories where I had to take a few minutes to understand the underlying themes. The importance of writing and our inherent reservations against new technologies seems to be the apparent theme. I felt there was also a subtle nod towards the era of misinformation/misunderstanding we are currently living in.
The Great Silence: “The great silence” is also a euphemism for Fermi’s paradox – our inability to find any evidence of intelligent life outside the solar system, while probabilistically, the chances are pretty high.
It’s a poignant story of a parrot, who might be the last of his species. He’s saddened by while humans are looking for intelligent life outside the solar system, the life around them is dying. While we are concerned about the silence from the universe, we have closed our ears to the cries of dying life. And, if we don’t start paying attention one day, we might find a great silence on our own earth.
Omphalos: Omphalos is another masterpiece. It’s a story set in a world where science and religion are entangled with each other. The existence of God is not a question; it’s a fact. And science is about understanding God’s purpose and bringing humans closer to him. Both of these ideologies complement each other. The beauty of the story lies in the realization that humans are not the center of God’s creation. He might not even care about us. When this discovery becomes public, we see the whole world falling into disarray. The conclusion of the story is quite profound. Our creation might not be the purpose of God’s creation, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have our own calling in life. All we have to do is find it.
Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom: The first thought I had after finishing this story was – “this is f***ing genius!”. I have never read such a unique interpretation of a parallel universe. The story is about a machine called Prism. It lets one communicate to himself from a parallel universe. But the caveat is you can only talk to the copy created from the point of divergence, and it has limited resources for communication. The impressive aspect is how many different use cases Ted creates for the machine. Ted explores the psychological effects such a device can have. All of us, at some point, have regretted a choice we made and wished we could have made a different choice. Now imagine that you did make a different choice, and you are happy now, but it’s a you in a parallel universe. Moreover, you can communicate with this person. The kind of psychological effects can be disastrous.
A person who can write such original, thought-provoking, visionary and complex stories need a lot of clarity in mind, and of course, he has to be a genius :). And I wasn’t surprised to see, that he actually looks like a genius 😛
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