It’s always a bit scary to read something by someone that has earned multiple awards for their writing, because what if you don’t like it?? That was my experience with Exhalation, a collection of science-fiction short stories by Ted Chiang.

I’m not super familiar with science-fiction short stories, so I don’t know if it’s a trope of the genre, but I found that almost all the stories had a Very Obvious Point and as someone who dislikes clear authorial messages in fiction (I don’t mind reading your treatise but just make it a nonfiction book), it rubbed me the wrong way. This was really obvious in the shorter stories, like The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate and What’s Expected Of Us (both seem to have the message that you can’t change fate). It is a pity because The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate has a clever structure wherein the all the smaller stories lead to one big story by the end.

I think one added demerit is that many of the stories have a clear narrator that’s telling us what happened (often in what feels like a form of a letter or report – see Exhalation, Dacey’s Patent Automatic Nanny) and quite often, adding in this thoughts about the whole thing. It just makes the message/point behind the story that much clearer and decreased my enjoyment. I suppose if I was still a literature student, I would be happy for this but I’m passed that stage.

So I was feeling pretty meh about the book until I read the longest story, The Lifecycle of Software Objects, and was blown away. Yeah, I can tell it’s looking at what makes something alive and emotional attachments to things (it’s like the Velveteen Rabbit but sci-fi) but because the story had more room to unfold, I managed to get really attached to the characters and the point behind the story got properly obscured.

In fact, I noticed that I liked this longest story the best, the second longest (Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom) next after this, and the third longest (The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling) next after that. In other words, there’s a correlation between the length of the story and how much I liked it, with the longer stories faring better.

Perhaps I’m just not a science-fiction reader, but I wasn’t terribly impressed with this collection. I liked one of the short stories very much, but the shorter works left me feeling like I read some philosophy essay disguised as a story. That said, if Ted Chiang ever writes a novel, I would be pretty interested in reading it because I really liked The Lifecycle of Software Objects.