Ted Chiang, the mind behind Arrival, returns with another awe-inducing sci-fi collection
Image: Graphic: Karl Gustafson Aux Features Book Review
A handful of living science fiction writers have attained godlike status—N.K. Jemisin, Cixin Liu, and Ann Leckie, to name a few. But Ted Chiang is the only one who’s done it without writing a novel. In fact, he’s published far less than his neighbors on the genre’s current Mount Rushmore, usually just one short story every two years. But oh, his stories. They’re a religious experience.
If Robin Williams was a comedian’s comedian, Ted Chiang is a science fiction writer’s science fiction writer. He’s best known for his 1998 story “Story Of Your Life,” which the 2016 film Arrival was based on, but in between those iterations, Chiang won four Hugo, three Locus, and two Nebula awards—the sci-fi equivalents of Oscars, Golden Globes, and Emmys, respectively. His first eight short stories were collected in 2002’s Stories Of Your Life And Others, and the nine he’s written since appear in Exhalation, a moving book about fate and free will that is destined to become a literary landmark of the 2010s.
Like the fantasy writer Jeffrey Ford, Ted Chiang specializes in puzzle-box stories that click into place on the last page. Reading one of his stories feels like tracing a Gordian knot you don’t realize is perfectly symmetrical until the final turn. In Exhalation, which could be subtitled “Black Mirror For Optimists,” every story seems crafted with one objective in mind—pure awe.
It begins with “The Merchant And The Alchemist’s Gate,” an Arabian Nights riff about an Iraqi fabric merchant who stumbles upon a time-travel device in Baghdad. If he steps through the Gate of Years from the right side, he can visit “the Baghdad of twenty years hence.” If he steps through the left side, he can travel to the same spot twenty years in the past. It’s the book’s first of many quandaries over destiny and self-determination, since the alchemist warns the merchant, “using the Gate is like taking a secret passageway in a palace, one that lets you enter a room more quickly… [but] the room remains the same, no matter which door you use to enter.” The same theme continues in the book’s darkest story, “What’s Expected Of Us,” where a fidget spinner-esque device called a Predictor blinks green exactly one second before you push its button. For some, it’s a harmless toy, but for others it destroys the illusion of free will. “A third of those who play with a Predictor must be hospitalized because they won’t feed themselves,” the narrator warns.
On a lighter note, “Omphalos” concerns a religious archaeologist in an alternate universe where young-earth creationism was confirmed by secular science. The growth rings in trees, for instance, only stretch back some 9,000 years. But when new evidence suggests Earth might not be the center of the universe after all, she experiences a crisis of faith all too familiar in our own reality: the terror of free will in the sudden absence of fate. “Why did the primordial humans set about building civilization, if not out of a desire to fulfill divine purpose?”
The three longer stories in Exhalation are Chiang’s finest work to date. In “The Lifecycle Of Software Objects,” a Second Life-style game developer hires a zookeeper to raise newborn artificial intelligences clothed in animal avatars. Meanwhile, “The Truth Of Fact, The Truth Of Feeling” is a composite of two stories. In the near future, a new technology allows people to record, access, and share every moment of their lives. And in the past, a European missionary teaches a West African boy how to read and write, which makes a similarly dramatic effect on the way he sees and shares the world. “Writing let[s] you look at your thoughts in a way you couldn’t if you were just talking, and having seen them, you could improve them, make them stronger and more elaborate.”
But if anything in this book has a shot at becoming the next Arrival, it’s the 70-page novella that closes the collection, “Anxiety Is The Dizziness Of Freedom.” In the future, “prisms” allow people to communicate with alternate versions of themselves in parallel universes. Instead of wondering what your life could have been like had you made a different decision, prisms let you text, email, or Skype that version of yourself to find out. As with any technology, there are hidden costs. “[T]he quantum measurement that takes place when the prism is activated can still exert an effect on the outside world,” Chiang writes, “determining whether two oxygen molecules collide or whether they drift past each other.” Thus, courtesy of the butterfly effect, prisms aren’t just connecting realities—they’re changing them.
Chiang’s fiction isn’t for everyone—some stories, like the title track are essentially thought experiments that sound less like fiction and more like an essay. But every story works. Even “The Great Silence,” a five-page fable originally written to accompany a video art installation that juxtaposed the Arecibo radio telescope with its surrounding wildlife, is surprising and heartbreaking. Even “Exhalation” ends with an awe-inspiring crescendo.
Savor all nine of these stories. Read them one sitting at a time, somewhere still and quiet, and let them sink in. If we get a third Ted Chiang collection, it probably won’t be for another 15 years.
79 Comments
So yeah looks like I have to buy this…
“Stories of Your Life and Others” may have been the first book I ever bought based on a movie, and I did not regret it one little bit.
I’ve loved the story ever since I read it years ago and I was amazed that it was even made into a film.
Even better, the story and the film are pretty different, but equally excellent. Sort of like two different houses built by the same contractor. You can tell they started with the same ideas, but changed to fit the space they were building for.
I thought all the changes made for the movie were bad. Although I guess it made certain things more explicit, whereas my skepticism of Sapir-Whorf meant when I read the story I thought the scifi angle was just that the linguistic theory was true and caused the narrator to phrase things oddly rather than something more fantastical.
I had read the book years earlier. I was in my anthology phase, and only found it because of Amazon’s ‘you might also like’ algorithm.While ‘Story of your Life’ was solid, and made a decent film, I would love love LOVE to see a filmed version of ‘Tower of Babylon’.
If I had to chose an adaptation of that book, it had to be a tossup between Tower of Babylon and 72 letters.Ted Chiang’s amazing.
72 Letters would be difficult. Go to far and viewers can get lost in the details, don’t go far enough and you lose what makes it Chiang.I think Tower of Babylon is perfect for film adaptation. They way he writes, I feel like I know every inch of that tower. 🙂
Yes! I loved that story so much I even tried reading it to my 7-year old daughter. Probably not the greatest idea but it was wort a shot.
I hope one day in this age of streaming and endess content we could have something as challenging and most controversial as ‘Tower of Babylon’, and I’m surprised after Arrival that this hasn’t happened. My personal favorite is ‘Hell is the Absence of God’
I did the same. Both are incredible, and I get why they made the changes for the film. That was a good year for movies, and Arrival stands out – I’m still surprised that Amy Adams didn’t get a nomination for best actress.
I bought and read all twelve volumes of “Dude, Where’s My Car?” after seeing the movie.
Awesome, thank you for the write-up!
Chiang is one of the few SF writers whose books I will purchase, sight unseen, simply because they have his name on them.
And have you ever been disappointed?
Not yet. But then he hasn’t published much, and he only writes short fiction. A lot of it can be found online.I recommend this one highly.
https://web.archive.org/web/20140527121332/http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/under.htm
I just read that one this evening and really was fun and so different.
Is this story included in the new book?
I can’t find a definitive list of what’s in the new book, but I’m guessing it doesn’t include this one.
That was my favorite story in Chiang’s first collection.
Absolutely. I even skimmed this article except for the part about the one I’ve already read (what’s expected of us) so I can go into it clear. Stories of Your Life and Others is my favorite book, I’ve bought so many copies because I keep giving them to people
“If Robin Williams was a comedian’s comedian”I have to say, I don’t think anyone has considered him a comedian’s comedian. Pretty much the exact opposite.
You write 4 words a day they better be good ones…..
Right?! The thing is
Sort of like James Cameron who only makes 1 movie per decade.
I really love his short stories. Tower of Babylon and the one about angels are my favorite.
Hell is the Absence of God. Read it so many times and it punches me in the gut every single time. Spectacular.
I love it!
“A handful of living science fiction writers have attained godlike status—N.K. Jemisin, Cixin Liu, and Ann Leckie, to name a few.” Yeah, if you wanted to include wmen for the sake of diversity or quota….but the best are obviously Neal Stephenson, Dan Simmons, charles Stross etc…
N.K. Jemisin has been really good so far (I haven’t read all of her stuff, but so far I’m very impressed). Ann Leckie, however, I feel like peaked with Ancillary Justice and then went sharply downhill. I didn’t really like the second half of Three Body Problem, so I can’t talk to much about Cixin.That said, yeah, Neal Stephenson is the primary face of the medium for me and holy shit we’re less than a month from his next book…
Jemisin has been great so far, and Cixin Liu has filled his books with some of the coolest stuff I’ve read in sci-fi (even if his writing ends up being more pessimistic and somber than I like). With Leckie, I read the Ancillary series and was not a fan.But I also feel the same way about Stephenson. It always feels like he’s trying to write two books in one, and that sometimes they might have been better if written separately. His next book sounds interesting though.
I am not a great reader of contemporary science fiction, which is probably why I had never heard of the above writers except for Stephenson. Recently I read an illuminating preface/rant in “Memories and Visions: women’s fantasy and science fiction” which pointed out that women have always written sf but have been so infrequently included in “Best of” anthologies that the casual reader isn’t aware of them.
Or maybe stuff like this is always subjective, and the writer genuinely think the best is what they have listed?
No love for Alastair Reynolds? Revelation Space series, or House of Suns, or Revenger? Or John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War series, or even the Lock In books?
It’s not exactly the thrust of the article but I was surprised by that list too. I like the aforementioned authors and they’ve written some of the best work in the genre of the last decade, but if I were to list living science fiction authors with “godlike” status I’d like ones to have proven to have more lasting impact.Me I’d go with Louis Bujold, Larry Niven and Margaret Atwood. Maybe Thomas Pynchon if you want to stretch the genre further — he did get nominated for a Nebula with Gravity’s Rainbow, only to lose to Clarke’s Rendezvous With Rama because sci-fi was and is conservative in a lot of ways. I’d expect Gibson, Stephenson, Robinson and Mieville before any of the newest generation too.
I am not sure how all his stuff holds up, but Greg Egan’s Axiomatic collection is one of the best sci-fi short story collections I have ever read. The only other Egan I read was Diaspora and it was disappointing.
Agreed, I would bump William Gibson to the front of the list. He is not one of the greatest living sci-fi writers. He is one of the greatest living writers.
The only Leckie book I read was Ancillary Justice, which was wildly overrated. I have no interest in reading any further. The Three Body Problem was one of the worst books I’ve ever read. I would jam a fork in my eye before I read another one of his books.
“Yeah, if you wanted to include wmen for the sake of diversity or quota….”In other words, “I’m not sexist, but…”
I love most of Chiang’s stories, so let me cite one of the few that I hate and yet love thinking about: “Understand.” Some spoilers.
I hate the egocentrism of its main character, that the story focuses on who was (to me) an unsympathetic character, the pseudo-cyberpunk themes of people so intelligent that they build simulations of sensory input in their own mind. There was nothing about it that clicked with me, or maybe it didn’t age well between 1991 and 2016. (For example, The Matrix may color my perception of the final confrontation; in “Understand” I found myself reading the second half of the story as awkward and pretentious in comparison, which isn’t fair.)
That said, I do like the idea at the center of the end of the story (the “cascade”), I like that Chiang had the boldness to focus on someone made unsympathetic and paranoid by his own condition, and the idea of how a super-egocentric entity would respond upon learning of his equal or better was interesting. If nothing else, the degree of denial brought on by the confidence in his own abilities brought about a fitting end. “Know what you don’t know,” or in one word, “Understand.”
I was an employee at borders when they were going belly-up, and every day before we closed up shop permanently we were reducing the prices of books dramatically. One of the last days before we were done I was perusing my isles hoping to find like five interesting books in a mostly picked through store for a dollar (for all five. It was drastic). The ONLY one I distinctly remember was Ted Chiang’s Your Life and Other Stories. So happy I found it and will never hesitate to lend it out.l
This sounds great, my favorite story of Chiang’s isn’t actually “Story of Your Life” (the basis of Arrival), though I do like it, it’s “Tower of Babylon” and “The Merchant And The Alchemist’s Gate” is definitely giving me a lot of the same vibes.
Does Cixin Liu have God-like status? I read mixed reviews of The Three-Body Problem.
I’m struggling with TBP to be honest. I’m past the first third but so far I’m not getting all the hype about it. I rarely quit books, I usually just slow down to a crawl until it’s over. And I hate to sound culturally insensitive, but many of his characters are literally named things like Ching, Chang, Chiang, Ding, Dong, and so on, and it’s nearly impossible for me too keep them all straight, Are there seriously no other options for even generic Chinese names out there?
There is a character glossary at the beginning of the book, and barely more than 10 main characters. Not to say that it isn’t occasionally confusing, but given that this was my first work of chinese science fiction I thought it added to the experience
I would say no, based on limited experience (just the Dark Forest trilogy). His ideas are great, but characters – not so much.
I said in another comment that it’s one of the worst books I’ve ever read.
There are only three gods in Sci-fi: Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein. ;)Everyone else… demi-gods at best… maybe bodhisatvas. :DCheers
Eh. I loved Asimov when I was young. He doesn’t hold up so well. I prefer Gibson, Stephenson, and Stross at this point.
Clarke still holds up fairly well. As for modern greats: I’ll take Egan, Banks, and Bear. And The Quantum Thief trilogy by Hannu Rajaniemi was incredible, start to finish. If you loved Stross’s Accelerando, definitely check it out.
Clarke definitely hold up best. And Heinlein is fine too. Reading Asimov as an adult, a lot of his famous stuff (Foundation trilogy and robot novels) have pretty poor character work. Heinlein’s characters in his older stuff are often juvenile and silly, but they are better drawn. Clarke is the most intelligent and literary of the bunch.
I will definitely check out the Quantum Thief trilogy. I may have even bought the first book some time ago. I have a couple (hundred) unread books on my shelf.
Le Guin, Ellison and Bradbury are missing from that list.
A good challenge. For me personally, no, but in my understanding of the international SF community, yes.
yes god like!
He is way overrated.
First book incredible, second book has a different translator, not nearly as compelling. Third book is back to same translator I think, and more compelling. It can be hard going – felt very Russian novel like, with your grandfather’s story and challenges and actions determining much of your heirs later lives.
Interesting. I found the Dark Forest to by my favorite of the trilogy. The final book, was a little dry but the ideas were huge so I still highly recommend it.
Slightly overrated but Story of Your Life is really good and this collection isn’t bad at all.
That would be Chiang, correct? I have seen Arrival and I thought it was great. I intend to read that story collection.
Yep!
Now to look up when this comes out, since the article’s author doesn’t seem to want to tell me.
It’s released tomorrow (5/7/19)
The single worst thing about Arrival is the cowardly, lazy-ass decision to go with the dull-ass final title rather than sticking with the far superior original one.
I love Ted Chiang’s work! The whole idea of prisms greatly appeals to me, though I know I’d spend every minute I’m awake talking to better versions of me.
Relieved, and extra excited now!!!
Robin Williams was a comedian’s comedian
Apropos of nothing, Robin Williams was no one’s idea of a comedian’s comedian. He was a populist who could frequently rely upon hacky stereotypes and (as he would freely admit) often stole jokes from other comedians. Next time, try a reference like a Mitch Hedberg.
I was hoping that it would be a bunch of new stories, so I was a little disappointed to learn that I had already read them all. But I might just get it anyway, Chiang is a great writer.
My family couldn’t understand Arrival. The message was clearly there.
Who decided Anne Leckie was “godlike”???
I haven’t read Chiang’s work so my critique of “Arrival” isn’t mean to deride his obvious talent. His body of awards is impressive for even the most accomplished writer. That being said, “Arrival” was nigh unwatchable. During the entire film you get the impression that it was way too high on its own feeling of importance. “Arrival” would be the cinematic equivalent of someone who liked the smell of their own farts. Denis Villeneuve is a great director and the movie’s cinematography was beautiful, but the whole mood and tone of the movie was like camping in a beautiful location on a miserable, rainy day in a tent with a leak in the roof and you’re sitting in an inch of water eating a saltine cracker.
I bought an anthology by a local talent BEF, who did a masterful translation along with other writer, and this little (Story Of Your Life) was in it.Next thing I know they are making a movie. Wonderful things both of them, left me astonished as back then with the Golden Age authors era.China also affects me as Ted does, you sure know you are in for a ride with both them always taking you through different, twisted, seldom used roads.———I have been posting this Ad Nauseam, but still, why the passing of the Great Grand Master Gene Wolfe (a Writer’s Writer as expressed by his contemporaries) did not even cause a blip in this site radar?.
Agreed – Gene Wolfe’s passing should have been marked.
I bet if Neil Gaiman dropped off the twig, there’d be plenty said here. Not that there shouldn’t be, mind.
We recently lost an author who truly had God-like status — that was Gene Wolfe, author of _The Book of the New Sun_. None of the authors mentioned here are quite at that level.
What are people’s general feeling on Alastair Reynolds?
How come nobody points out Arrival was Slaughterhouse-Five, only without the humor and pathos?Even the aliens looked like Tralfamadorians.
I read The Lifecycle of Software Objects some time ago – it took me an age to hunt it down but I’m glad I did. I haven’t seen Arrival…just didn’t fancy it for some reason, but if Chiang is involved I shall reassess that decision immediately. Thank you!
Love Chiang’s work. Not sure to sure about Liu, though. Three-Body Problem was a slog, as was The Wandering Earth. In regards to time travel novels, here’s a couple that I’ve quite enjoyed over the past year or so:Dark Matter by Blake Crouch
Split Second by Douglas E. Richards
The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman
The Emissary by Terrance Mulloy
Einstein’s Secret by Irving Belateche
Timebound by Rysa Walker
Linear Shift by Paul B. Kohler
Robin Williams was, and never will be, considered a “comedian’s comedian.” The truth is that he was a notorious joke thief.
I just finished the collection, and I think I may have just read the book of the year. It’s only June, of course, but wow. Chiang never fails to weave lofty (to me) concepts and captivating characters into compelling narratives that go right to the heart.