Exhalation (2019)by Ted Chiang

 Book Review

Exhalation (2019)

by Ted Chiang

  What is crazy about author/intellectual Ted Chiang is that he has 125 reference in the New York Times data set and none of them are a full-length book review of Exhalation, his 2019 short-story collection.  Only five years later he's been hailed as a genius-level thinker about the potential impacts of AI on our society.   I believe Chiang's real break-through outside the science-fiction community was the success of Arrival, based on a short story from his first collection.  Arrival hit theaters in 2016, so that makes it doubly surprising that Exhalation didn't rate a full New York Times book review.

  You'd have to chalk it up to the double prejudice against genre fiction and short stories.  It's interesting to me that Chiang is known as an AI expert, because I think his most interesting stories are the ones that deal with religion.  In this collection Omphalos- which won a Locus Award in 2020- is a good example.  Omphalos takes place in a world where "young earth creationism" was proved true and accepted as scientific fact in a world that is otherwise similar to ours.  Basing science fiction stories on religious concepts or themes is a particularly interesting approach to science fiction- and you could almost call it a different genre, one I think that Chiang may have invented?  I certainly can't think of another example- maybe Chabon's alt-history The Secret Yiddish Police-Man's Union.  But the AI stuff is good too- in this collection The Lifecycle of Software Objects was a particularly interesting take on the after life of digitally created "pets."  That story caused me to think more about AI then I have in months.