Skip to main content

Exhalation by Ted Chiang

From the recommendation of my friend Ashfaq, I finished listening to the short story collection Exhalation by Ted Chiang yesterday. Ted Chiang has won four Nebula awards, four Hugo awards, the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and four Locus awards. His short story, Story of Your Life, was the basis of the film Arrival (2016). In the 9 short stories and novelette of Exhalation, Ted Chiang brings out a fusion of science, technology, religion, philosophy, ethics, morality, relationship, fantasy with great mastery. He takes an idea and gives it a very human touch instead of just focusing on the core technical idea, exactly the type I like. After Cixin Liu's Three-Body Problem trilogy that I finished 3 years back, Exhalation is the book that is going to instill FOMO (fear of missing out) in me for the new breed of sci-fi books (I still can't come out of Asimov).




The stories in this collection are listed below. The first two are particularly better than the rest of the stories. The first one, The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate, I would rate as one of the best short stories (in all categories, not just sci-fi) I have read in recent times.
  1. The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate - What would you do if you are given a choice to meet your own self 20 years in the future or 20 years in the past? I chose 20 years in the future (when my friend asked me) as Alhamdulillah I am content with my past. Ted touched on what destiny means in the style of Arabian Nights i.e. story-within-story in an Islamic context. Apart from the time travel part, he didn't try to use science in it, and hence this may better be classified under fantasy or philosophy rather than sci-fi. The way Ted wrote, I felt he has talked to his Muslim friends or scholars to properly understand Qadr (Predestination), fate, and the relevant arguments and counter-arguments within Islam about destiny. Just this story alone is worth buying the whole book for. It won the 2008 Hugo Award for Best Novelette and the 2008 Nebula Award for Best Novelette.
  2. Exhalation - You may read the story online here. This is a story based on the second law of thermodynamics (total entropy, thermodynamic equilibrium) in a civilization led by air-driven mechanical human-like robots. The story is epistolary in nature, taking the form of a scientist's journal entry who first identifies the upcoming eventual demise of the universe they live in. Exhalation won the 2009 Hugo Award for Best Short Story.
  3. What's Expected of Us - You may read this very short story online here.
  4. The Lifecycle of Software Objects - I was surprised to read how familiar the author sounded in this novella about software startups and the ecosystem. So later I found he is by profession a technical writer in the software industry. It won the 2011 Locus Award for Best Novella and the Hugo Award for Best Novella.
  5. Dacey's Patent Automatic Nanny
  6. The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling
  7. The Great Silence - You may read this short story online here.
  8. Omphalos
  9. Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Moved To New House & Tuhin Bhai's Quick Visit

We moved to a new rental house near BART end of last month. We have stayed in LakeView Apartments for three and half years before moving here. I was too busy with my office works the last month and hence Shusmita did most of the packings. We got the new house key 1 week earlier than our move in date of first November. So we actually moved 24th October Saturday and took rest of the one week to slowly finish the moves. We rented DesiMovers who moved all out packed cartoon (30+) and many unpacked staffs. They disassembled the bed and assembled back again. Although a bit costly, they were quick and did a good job of transferring all the staffs and assembling those back again. All our friends in Fremont liked the house as we did. I wish I would not be a tenant but the owner of the house! However, buying house is very expensive in California and I can't simply afford it maintaining my current lifestyle, I let myself forget about it. Tuhin Bhai (Ripa's hubby) gave a surprise visit...
195 comments
Read more

Bought New Car: Honda Accord 2009 LX-P Maroon Color

After a month of my Civic being completely destroyed in a car accident, I bought my new car yesterday. It's Honda Accord 2009 LX-P Maroon Color that I bought from Autowest Honda of Fremont . I have shopped around for car in Toyota and Honda. While Toyota Camry 2010 is also a very good car, somehow we ended up liking Accord. Whlile in Accord you feel the road and the power behind the car more, for Camry it's the smoothness of driving experience. Shusmita didn't want to even go for a test drive of Hyundai Sonata although that is also a comparable car at a cheaper price. I guess we are so used to our Honda Civic that only another Honda car would have been able to psychologically match our unknown requirements. I gave a four thousand dollars down payment and the rest my dealer financed me from American Honda Finance. While buying the car, I also bought the 6 years service, mechanical breakdown warranty, low jack safety and some service contracts. I came to know at that time t...
22 comments
Read more

BDR Mutinee And Crisis in Bangladesh

Just when I was thinking we (Bangladeshis) are moving forward with the newly elected Govt bringing hopes for a better democracy, I was shocked with this week's BDR Mutinee and massacre killings of Bangladesh Army's high officials in Pilkhana right in the enter of the capital city Dhaka. This is so sad that it can't be described in written words. We 6 families in Fremont were watching a movie Delhi 6 and at the end of the movie, Shahriar one of my friends told me that he just heard during the intermission of the movie that there is a mutinee happended in Dhaka little earlier against the Army officers. And it's widely suspected that DG of BDR Major General Shakil are of the many high officials who got killed as part of it. We rushed to home to call back to Bangladesh to make sure our family and relatives there are safe. Yes, by almighty, they were. But this is not the same case for many of the others. It's just hopelesss, sad, shocking and distrous in lack of words s...
4 comments
Read more