Ted Chiang is the best. ( )

7/10
Let me start by saying I am generally not a fan of short stories. They are too much like reading a random chapter from the middle of a book or watching a random episode from a long-running TV series. If they are well-done, I usually am left wanting more. If they are not, I am left confused and disappointed.

Having said that, [a:Ted Chiang|130698|Ted Chiang|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1399023404p2/130698.jpg] has specialized in short form speculative fiction and the stories in this collection vary greatly in subject, style, and, IMO, effectiveness, but they are all thought-provoking. My favorites were “The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling”, “Omphalos”, and “Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom”. Least favorites were ‘What’s Expected of Us” and “Dacey’s Patent Automatic Nanny”. ( )

The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate: In a story-within-a-story, a merchant meets an alchemist who invented a gate through which a traveler can access the future or past. The alchemist tells him an additional layer of stories, and the merchant decides to go to the past and change things.
This story is fine, but not spectacular. It contains some time travel tropes that I enjoy, while also feeling very Arabian Nights. Perhaps a little derivative of it.
Exhalation {short story}: The narrator describes their life a bit, and then their discovery that the environment is deteriorating and their species will go extinct in a few hundred years.
A nice little story with a good twist - the people are robots. It felt kind of halfway between Ray Bradbury and H.G. Wells. It's a little bit of a metaphor about climate change, except it falls apart when there's nothing society can do about it. (Solar power would fix their problem but they live inside a titanium dome.) I enjoyed it a lot.
What's Expected of Us: A very short letter from the future explains the invention of a button that lights up one second before you press it, and the effect it had on society.
This story is only 4 pages but it packs a lot. A good lesson - it doesn't matter if we have free will or not, but we have to act like we do.
The Lifecycle of Software Objects: Ana and Derek both work for a company that creates Digients, cute digital pets with a genetics-mimicking algorithm that allows them to grow and change based on how they're raised in their digital world. They love their work, bond with the Digients they've created and raised, and create a community with other Digient owners. The market for these pets is vibrant, with several companies in gentle competition over who has the best algorithm or the cutest interface. Over the next few years, however, the market declines and eventually the company closes. Ana and Derek get jobs elsewhere, but continue to find joy in raising their Digients in their free time. As the tech world continues to move on to shiny new things, the digital world the Digients live in is no longer supported and is in danger of shutting down. The Digients could be ported into a more modern space, but it would cost far more than the dwindling Digient-raising community could ever afford on their own. They are approached by a company with a proposal: sell copies of their hand-raised Digients to be used as sexual companions, and guarantee their survival.
This truly remarkable story has been sitting with me since I first read it 5 years ago. I think about it constantly. It's hard to explain in a plot synopsis but Ana's bond with her Digient feels so true, and the way she feels about losing them is the way I imagine I would feel if, say, LibraryThing shut down tomorrow. The story is about what it's like to form a bond with an internet community, but it's also about what it means to be a sentient being. An adult. To consent. The Digients are in favor of selling copies as sexual companions because for them, like humans who have turned to sex work since time immemorial, it's about an existential threat. To the owners it is unconscionable, because they don't think the pets they've been raising for the last 18 years are capable of consent. Really thought-provoking stuff.
The only bad part of this novella is the relationship between Ana and Derek. The story is told equally from their points of view, but Derek's sections are full of romantic thoughts about Ana. At first he is married but wants to be with Ana, then he gets divorced but Ana is in a relationship and Derek thinks all the time about whether/how he can drive a wedge between them. Ana, on the other hand, never thinks about him romantically in any direction and is apparently unaware of his obsession. It's a gross dynamic that treats an otherwise well-written woman like an object. The point of it in the end is that Derek "sacrifices" his "chance" of a relationship with Ana by selling a copy of one of his Digients so that she doesn't have to take a possibly abusive job to pay for the port. It's not that she's terribly disgusted with him for doing so (after he explains that he let the Digient choose), but that her boyfriend did not want her to take the abusive job and so by preventing that Derek pushed them together. It left a bad taste in my mouth to end a story about consent on that note.
Despite that fairly big flaw, I do highly recommend this story. I think the good parts will stick with you.
Dacey's Patent Automatic Nanny: An eccentric inventor in 1901 creates a mechanical nanny that will help raise children, after being unhappy with how he saw real nannies treat his son. It doesn't catch on, but later the inventor's son revives the mechanical nanny, and has it raise his own son.
A nice little story with a steampunk vibe. I liked that both of the inventors are well-meaning (the original inventor thinks that nannies should be nicer), and that nothing really bad happens to the young child, he's just emotionally bonded to robots, which is totally fine after he gets a few accommodations. I especially liked that the whole story is presented as the description of an item in a museum catalog.
The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling: Two alternating narratives - a first-person story from a future in which everyone's life is awkwardly recorded on video and the introduction of a new algorithm which analyzes and organizes the videos to anticipate which ones the user might want to revisit, and an historical account from the introduction of written language to a fictional pre-literate African society.
I didn't love this one. I think it goes on too long, especially compared to other stories in this collection which are so concise. The point is that new technology, whether it's written language or a video-analyzing algorithm, will radically change society but society will adapt and move on and everything will be fine. But it takes too long to get there.
The Great Silence: A parrot laments in the first-person that humans spend all their time and energy trying to communicate with aliens beyond earth, when they could be communicating with parrots right here on earth.
I don't think this one really clicked for me, but it's short and sweet.
Omphalos: A world that is mostly the same as ours, except there is substantial tangible proof that all of life was created at once several thousand years ago. The narrator, an archaeologist who specializes in uncovering artifacts proving the creation of life, investigates a black market which leads to an astronomer who has discovered life on another planet which seems to be more favored by God than Earth. A crisis of faith ensues.
This story was fine. The faith vs. proof aspect didn't speak to me but I really liked thinking about how this world differs from ours. I liked the methodology for realizing that life was created (by examining ancient preserved wood they can see the point at which tree trunk rings begin, same with ancient shellfish shells) and how their Earth never discovered how genetics works because there is no evolution.
Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom: A device is invented which causes a single change at the quantum level, branching the timeline into two, and also allows communication between the timelines. The technology is originally used for research, but as it gets less expensive regular people start using the device (called a "prism") to talk to their alternate timeline selves. Some find it comforting, but others become addicted and spend all their time thinking about how their life could be if it was slightly different. Nat works in a shop where people can rent prisms, and on the side she and her coworker hustle prism users out of money whenever they can. Dana is a therapist who sees patients and also runs a support group for prism addicts, which Nat starts attending as part of a scam.
I really loved this story. It's the only story in this collection in which any character has actual bad intentions, and it also provides lots to think about. It's about free will and determinism. If for every action you take there is an alternate timeline in which you make a different choice, does any choice matter? Or, if you consistently act a particular way does that become an inherent part of you that is rarely changeable? I really loved the story's ending.

Overall this is an excellent collection. The stories are varied but still themed - free will, the introduction of new technology, seeing the future. There was a bit more first-person narration than I like, but I really enjoyed that all of the stories are gentle and everyone is well-meaning. Highly recommended, and I’m definitely going to check out the author’s other collection. ( )

Wow. This is my favorite kind of SF. Explorations. What If, and Sense of Wonder, and Science. Like the best of the old pulps, but bright & shiny, relevant to what we know better now. Not plagued with 'isms. Thoughtful character development. Tight, crisp craftsmanship. I highly recommend this collection to everyone who reads any sort of SF.
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Reread for buddy read in SFFBC, May 2024. Still love it. Love the notes on the stories at the end, too. Besides the notes in the group discussion, I want to add some here for the final story, [b:Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom|56482305|Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom|Ted Chiang|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1681951064l/56482305._SY75_.jpg|88126963]:

"We like the idea that there's always someone responsible for any given event, because that helps us make sense of the world. We like that so much that sometimes we blame ourselves, just so there's someone to blame. But not everything is under our control, or even anyone's control."

"We've all made mistakes.... But there's a difference between accepting responsibility for our actions and taking the blame for random misfortunes."

"If Vinessa hadn't gotten her act together by now, it was her own fault, not Dana's."

"... 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."

"If the same thing happened in branches where you acted differently, then you aren't the cause."

Basically it's pretty much the same theme hammered home... but we all either are, or know, people who need to understand that! :) ( )

Chiang's stories walk a thin line between fiction and thought experiment. As prompters for speculation about free will, consciousness, the multiverse etc. they're excellent. I especially liked the title story, set in a pneumatically-powered universe where the equalization of air pressure is a metaphor for entropy in ours, and featuring an extended scene of self-conducted brain dissection. What this story has in common with Chiang's best is that it sticks the emotional landing: The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate, a time-traveling Arabian Nights-style frame story does this too, and is impossibly clever to boot.

I was less taken with the Hugo-winning novella The Lifecycle of Software Objects, which relates the ups and downs of a group of (mostly) VR-dwelling self-learning AI's, designed and marketed as virtual pets, and their human owners in loco parentis. Unfortunately the "digients" never get past toddler-speak, so the dialogue is somewhat infuriating, although it has its moments, like when they get upset because their owners won't legally incorporate them:

"People say being corporation great," says Marco. "Can do whatever want."

A number of human adolescents have complained that Voyl has more rights than they do; obviously the digients have seen their comments. "Well, you're not incorporated, and you definitely cannot do anything you want."

"We sorry," says Marco, suddenly appreciating the trouble he's in. "Just want be corporations."

A wry moment in a too-long tale. But I can't really fault Chiang for writing brain-twizzling conceptual science fiction tales; God knows the general direction of the genre seems to favour the waving of hands and the baring of souls. Three or four of these — shout-out to closer Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom — reach the empyrean heights of Story of Your Life, and you can't ask for more than that. ( )