Book Review of the Month: Exhalation Stories

Michael Maag reviews the best and worst science fiction novels so you know what you should - or shouldn’t - read next.

“Exhalation Stories”

by Ted Chiang

What is the book about?

This diverse collection of nine short stories explores time travel, artificial digital entities, love, faith, memory, truth, free will and the heat death of the universe.

The first story, “The Merchant at the Alchemist’s Gate,” is a re-telling of Arabian Nights with a clever time travel twist. This allows for four fantastic adventures in the meta framework of the merchant and alchemist’s story. The tales are about desire for worldly goods and love, sacrifice, passion and the acceptance of fate. This story alone is worth the price of the book, it left me weeping. 

It gets better, in “Exhalation,” the 2019 Hugo Award Winner for Best Short Story, we are transported to an enclosed universe filled with Argon gas. Each mechanical entity or person uses two lungfuls of air each day, and if they run out, they cease to function. While they can be revived with fresh lungs, all of their memories are gone. To learn why memories disappear and time seems to be moving  faster, our narrator performs an experiment to dissect his own brain and realizes that time isn’t moving faster, but thoughts are moving slower. The universe is enclosed, with each breath the air pressure increases. Eventually the pressure will equalize, and all life will terminate. We are left with the narrator leaving a message for possible explorers from another universe: “contemplate the marvel that is existence and rejoice that you are able to  do so.” 

Other stories contemplate free will with a device that always knows when you are about to push a button. Or a parrot near Arecibo that wonders why humans are searching to communicate with  extraterrestrial intelligences when parrots are right here. “The Life Cycle of Software Objects” is a thought provoking tale ripped right from today’s ChatGPT and artificial intelligence headlines. “Truth of Fact, Truth of  Feeling” tells two tales about technology affecting cognition.  

On a scale from one to five, how much did you like this book?

I rate this book five out of five stars, for the first two stories alone. The other stories are equally thought provoking and well written, but didn’t hit me quite as hard as those two.

What is the best or worst quote, chapter or item in the book?

The following quote from the first story sets the tone and theme of the collection. 

“All the while I thought on the truth of Bashaarat’s words: past and future are the same, and we  cannot change either, only know them more fully. My journey to the past had changed nothing,  but what I had learned had changed everything, and I understood that it could not have been  otherwise. If our lives are tales that Allah tells, then we are the audience as well as the players, and it is by living these tales that we receive their lessons.”