Reviewing Ted Chiang's Exhalation (December 2023)

 

Ted Chiang is an American science fiction and fantasy author whose stories have won four Nebula awards, four Hugo awards and six Locus awards. Exhalation, published in 2019, contains nine stories, two previously unpublished and the others published as individual stories in various periodicals between 2007-2015. In the final section of the book, Chiang includes brief notes for each of the stories, often sharing what inspired the story.

 

Chiang's science fiction can be best characterized as soft science fiction, i.e., storytelling that is primarily interested in showing human interactions and development in the context of new technology for the purpose of social commentary. Isaac Asimov's Foundation and Robot series and Liu Cixin Remembrance of Earth's Past series would be examples of hard science fiction, though there, too, the authors engage in social analysis and criticism. The line between soft and hard science fiction is not bright, and it is more common for both to be blended, though the emphasis of one or the other may preponderate. Former president, Barack Obama, described Exhalation as "a collection of short stories that will make you think, grapple with big questions, and feel more human." If correct, and I tend to agree, then Chiang's stories fit the bill as soft science fiction in line with that of Ursula Le Guin (The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed) and Octavia Butler (Earthseed series and Kindred).

Although Chiang seems principally concerned with the human condition, addressing politicophilosophical issues like free will, anthropocentrism, and species or racial superiority, he, nevertheless incorporates hard science themes such as time travel, quantum theory, and artificial intelligence into his stories. Even so, these are essentially there as props for Chiang's analysis of human interactions.

 

This review will offer a glimpse of each story, hopefully sufficient to pique the reader's interest without spoiling their enjoyment.

 

The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate

Set against the backdrop of a timeless Middle East, this is a story within a story (actually a story within a story within a story). Early on, the reference to Baghdad and the embedded narrative suggest the influence of Scheherazade, and the reader discovers that the stories are being related for much the same reason she told hers. The story is not about time travel—so magical time travel works well enough—but about the paradoxical concept of change despite the immutability of past and future.

 

In his notes, Chiang writes,

 

While we can all understand the desire to change things in our past, I wanted to try writing a time-travel story where the inability to do so wasn’t necessarily a cause for sadness. I thought that a Muslim setting might work, because acceptance of fate is one of the basic articles of faith in Islam. Then it occurred to me that the recursive nature of time-travel stories might mesh well with the “Arabian Nights” convention of tales within tales, and that sounded like an interesting experiment.

 

Exhalation

For the inspiration for his eponymous story, 'Exhalation,' Chiang's notes cite a short story by Philip Dick ('The Electric Ant') and an article on entropy (the tendency of a closed system, e.g., the universe, to degrade from orderliness to randomness) by Roger Penrose (2020 Nobel Laureate in Physics). The 'exhalation' to be followed in the distant future by a corresponding 'inhalation' analogizes the Big Bang and Big Crunch hypotheses of the universe's cycles of expansion and contraction.

In addition, the imagery of the narrator's dissection and reassembly of their (sing.) own brain is reminiscent of Descartes' introspective search for the proof of his existence to counter the doubt of radical skepticism, although the narrator's search is in the physical world, while Descartes' was in the world of logic. The narrator's find goes one step further than the discovery of 'self' and suggests a version of epiphenomenalism where physical processes determine mental processes but not vice-versa—a possible implication being that consciousness and sentience are organic and not metaphysical.

 

What Is Expected of Us

In this short short story, Chiang's narrator attempts to ascertain whether free will exists, and based on observational tests conducted using a recently-invented device, concludes that it does not. Nevertheless, the narrator maintains that 'what is expected of us' is to pretend that it does, otherwise the futility of a purposeless and predetermined existence would condemn us to catatonia

 

In the story, the narrator reflects that,

 

People used to speculate about a thought that destroys the thinker, some unspeakable Lovecraftian horror, or a Gödel sentence that crashes the human logical system. It turns out that the disabling thought is one that we’ve all encountered: the idea that free will doesn’t exist. It just wasn’t harmful until you believed it.

 

The Lifecycle of Software Objects

The story's title is taken from the term 'Software Development Lifecyle,' which refers to the standardized process requirements for manufacturing commercial software. This story is by far the longest of the nine stories. Digients (digital organisms that inhabitant a pre-programmed virtual reality) are introduced to explore the interactions and relationships between humans and these virtual entities created by humans. Throughout the story there is a comparison between pet ownership and raising digients, with the complication of an even greater asymmetrical relationship due to the difference between organic and synthetic life. Towards the end of the story, the human-humanoid relationship appears to simulate a human parent-child relationship for some, though for others there is the unbridgeable void between the organic and inorganic.

 

In his notes on this story, Chiang writes

 

Raising a child, she [Molly Gloss, an American science fiction author] said, “puts you in touch, deeply, inescapably, daily, with some pretty heady issues: What is love and how do we get ours? Why does the world contain evil and pain and loss? How can we discover dignity and tolerance? Who is in power and why? What’s the best way to resolve conflict?” If we want to give an AI any major responsibilities, then it will need good answers to these questions. That’s not going to happen by loading the works of Kant into a computer’s memory; it’s going to require the equivalent of good parenting.

 

Dacey's Patent Automatic Nanny

This is another story dealing with the interactions between humans and humanoids, but it specifically addresses the possibility and complications of attachments being formed by humans to their humanoids. For instance, Dr. Thackery of the Brighton Institute of Mental Subnormality in his analysis of a patient with psychosocial dwarfism attributed to having been raised by a robot

 

wondered if the consequences of the child’s bond with a machine might be more far ranging than anyone suspected. He speculated that Edmund [the child raised by a robot nanny] had been misdiagnosed as feebleminded simply because he paid no attention to human instructors and that he might respond better to a mechanical instructor.

 

The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling

Human memory and 'truth' are the themes of this story. Chiang employs two examples: first, a father-daughter relationship augmented by the commercially-available memory prosthesis (Remem) which can execute instantaneous searches of the megadata in digital lifelogs; and second, the cross-cultural relationship between a European missionary and the Tiv people, where the latter are introduced to writing (itself a prosthesis in the narrator's eyes).

 

In an attempt to get at the truthfulness of human memory, the narrator distinguishes between two types of memory:

 

Psychologists make a distinction between semantic memory—knowledge of general facts—and episodic memory, or recollection of personal experiences. We’ve been using technological supplements for semantic memory ever since the invention of writing: first books, then search engines. By contrast, we’ve historically resisted such aids when it comes to episodic memory; few people have ever kept as many diaries or photo albums as they did ordinary books.

 

But in both the father-daughter and missionary-Tiv relationships, there are inconsistencies and inaccuracies in both types of memory, i.e., it isn't only personal memories that can sometimes get it wrong.

 

The Great Silence

This is a clever short short story that juxtaposes the human species search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) while ignoring the terrestrial intelligence 'hidden in plain view.' Humanity's superiority complex makes us blind to what the parrot means when it says: "You be good. I love you."

 

The Fermi Paradox is fundamental to this story. It maintains that the 'great silence' in the universe may be attributable to the desire of advanced species to have their existence and whereabouts unknown lest they be attacked and destroyed by other more aggressive worlds. Incidentally, this is a central organizing theme in Liu Cixin's Dark Forest, the second book in the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy.

 

Ironically, the parrot is already known to humans but wants to be acknowledged as an intelligent life form, though the history of its coexistence with humans has led to the near extinction of its species.

 

Omphalos

In this story, the narrator, a devout believer, experiences a negative epiphany on encountering doubt about the centrality of humanity to God and the universe. But, the believer is not 'disabled' by this absence of certitude. Instead, they (sing.) declares:

 

I’ve devoted my life to studying the wondrous mechanism that is the universe, and doing so has given me a sense of fulfillment. I’ve always assumed that this meant that I was acting in accordance with your will, Lord, and your reason for making me. But if it’s in fact true that you have no purpose in mind for me, then that sense of fulfillment has arisen solely from within myself. What that demonstrates to me is that we as humans are capable of creating meaning for our own lives.

 

And in a supreme assertion of independence, free will and perhaps even defiance, the believer concludes thusly:

Even if humanity is not the reason for which the universe was made, I still wish to understand the way it operates. We human beings may not be the answer to the question why, but I will keep looking for the answer to how.

This search is my purpose; not because you chose it for me, Lord, but because I chose it for myself.

 

Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom

This story about free will in a quantum world will indeed induce dizziness if not anxiety.

 

Dana, one of the characters who acts as facilitator for a group of PRISM addicts addresses the uncertainty of an eternally forking path where every decision seems to be of no consequence inasmuch as in a parallel pathway, a different (and good) choice could said to have been made, which would absolve one of responsibility for making a bad choice in the primary path. In her words,

 

Every decision you make contributes to your character and shapes the kind of person you are. If you want to be someone who always gives the extra money back to the cashier, the actions you take now affect whether you’ll become that person.

The branch where you’re having a bad day and keep the extra change is one that split off in the past; your actions can’t affect it anymore. But if you act compassionately in this branch, that’s still meaningful, because it has an effect on the branches that will split off in the future. The more often you make compassionate choices, the less likely it is that you’ll make selfish choices in the future, even in the branches where you’re having a bad day.

 

And so, even in a universe governed by the uncertainty principle—the very existence of which ensures some certainty—it is possible to work out a probabilistic path of one's choosing, thereby affirming free will.

 

This is the experience of Nat, a recovering drug addict, who poses as a PRISM addict to complete a scam against another member of the self-help group.

 

But recently I had this…this opportunity to do something actually nice for another person. It wasn’t anyone I had wronged, just someone who was hurting. It would have been easy for me to behave the way I always have. But I imagined what a better person might do, and I did that instead.

I feel good about what I did, but it’s not like I deserve a medal or anything. Because there are other people for whom being generous comes easily, without a struggle. And it’s easy for them because in the past they made a lot of little decisions to be generous. It was hard for me because I’ve made a lot of little decisions to be selfish in the past. So I’m the reason it’s hard for me to be generous. That’s something I need to fix. Or that I want to fix.

 

For readers of this review, an hour-long interview with Chiang in the March 30, 2021 edition of The New York Times Ezra Klein Show elaborates on some of the themes in his writings, most prominent among those discussed being free will, superheroes, AI and technology/capitalism. The interview and transcript are available at the following URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/30/podcasts/ezra-klein-podcast-ted-chiang-transcript.html.