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Review: Exhalation: Stories by Ted Chiang (2019)
I finished the stories in Ted Chiang's second collection, "Exhalation: Stories."
Stories
Some of the stories in this collection covered topics that Chiang had already written stories about previously. However, no two of his stories were ever exactly the same, so I definitely found value in reading stories about things he'd already wrote about.
In this collection, I also found that I enjoyed Chiang's story notes even more, because they introduced even more discussion topics that hadn't occurred to me before.
The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate
This was another story that took place in an unconventional location, in an ancient time. In summary, this was a story about time travel and how some events were inevitable, but it showed this in a rather optimistic and peaceful way.
In all of the stories that were told, the people who walked through the time travelling door did not end up changing their timelines. In the first story, Hassan went to the future, and his older self advised him on simple day-to-day choices that would lead him to eventual prosperity. This was a relatively benign use of the door, except for the fact that he did technically steal the box of riches.
The second story related to Ajib, who was less cautious than Hassan. Ajib saw that his older self was rich but living very modestly, so he stole old Ajib's money. Young Ajib spent lavishly. His wife was kidnapped because others were under the impression that he was a rich many. Ajib used the rest of his money to pay the ransom, and lived the rest of his life modestly because he needed to save money for the young Ajib who would eventually come and steal his money. I thought this was a very interesting take on the use of time travel. While Hassan's journey was a constant cycle of prosperity, Ajib's journey was a constant cycle of atonement, as Ajib would spend the rest of his life atoning for his poor decisions as a youngster.
Raniya's story was a really creative use of the door, which I enjoyed. First, she went to the past and saw her future Hassan trying to sell a necklace that she ended up having. In most cases, people would not to engage for fear of disrupting history. However, Raniya thought the opposite, and felt that she was given an opportunity to do something and therefore should do it. This reminded me of Chiang's story note, in which he mentioned that the Islamic faith involved an acceptance of one's fate. While most people's acceptance of their own fate would probably lead to inaction, Raniya viewed fate as taking every opportunity offered.
Raniya recruited her older self in order to create a mini-crowd at the jeweler. I thought it was a very creative use of the door, but at the same time, must be used with caution.
Later on, Raniya got to know the young Hassan and taught him to be a good lover. Again, this was a case of Raniya taking every opportunity presented to her. Of course, she wanted to spend more time with the young Hassan for her own selfish reasons, but she also saw an opportunity to teach Hassan about love so that her younger self would meet a Hassan who was a considerate lover.
The last story was the narrator's own. Fuwaad was the first person in the story who wanted to use the door to change fate. Specifically, he wanted to save his wife from dying. He ultimately ended up arriving in the destination right after his wife died, but was informed that she had only pleasant thoughts of him as she died. Then he was subsequently captured and brought before the authorities, to whom he was presently speaking. I felt that Fuwaad's journey towards realization was also a creative one. He left the situation understanding that maybe there was no need to change his fate, because while his wife did die, she died in circumstances that were less painful than one might expect. I didn't think that Fuwaad gained any particular insight into how his actions might alter timelines, but instead, his story was a more personal one, about why his own timeline was not so bad if left unaltered.
Like Story of Your Life, this short story also tackled time and free will (as do several other stories in this collection). It provided the reader with another interpretation of time. The way I interpreted this story was as follows: the timelines that we are all walking are at a sort of "equilibrium." Let me attempt to explain. All the timelines had played out in a way that was consistent with the characters' personalities, even taking into account their knowledge of the door of years. So all timelines had understood people's personalities and had already accounted for the fact that young Ajib would've stolen money, that Raniya would've gotten involved in helping her future husband, etc. Perhaps the only constant in life is our own personalities and characters, and we can trust that time will play out in a way that is just and fair according to our personal morals and attitudes.
Exhalation
This was the title story. It took place in a world inhabited by machines who breathed argon. There was much curiosity about memory and how it was created and stored. The narrator decided to open up their own brain and discovered that memories and thoughts were the result of air moving through their valves, rather than physical things. What seemed to be malfunctions was actually changing air pressure, causing these machines to operate more slowly.
I thought that this story had environmental undertones. After the narrator communicated to their peers that the changing air pressure was causing them to move more slowly, there were large movements to promote actions that lower air pressure above ground. I thought this was a pretty direct parallel to rising temperatures in the earth that we live in. Unfortunately, it hasn't been so easy here on earth to convince others that this is a real issue.
The earlier discussion about the concept of memory was very interesting to me. In the world of Exhalation, the popular theory was that memory was written on gold foil, because when machines died, gold dust remained. It's always been a small curiosity for me. While the physical contents of my brain are the same as most other people's why is it that my memories are different? What gives our brains this sense of individuality and consciousness? This wasn't one of the main topics of discussion in this story, but I still thought the theories for these automatons were interesting.
While the narrator was discussing how society was working towards lowering air pressure to maintain their species, the narrator commented on what a miracle it was for them to even have lived at all. I thought this was a surprisingly optimistic ending for such a case, but I guess that isn't too far out of left field, considering that society was already working towards improving the species' chances of survivel.
In Chiang's notes, he discussed how existence of humans and similar sentient beings innately cause disorder (such as changing air pressure levels, or in our case, rising temperatures). This made sense. Then Chiang said that we were only able to exist because the world was in a highly ordered state to begin with. This was a little more difficult to me to wrap my head around. How were disordered beings able to arise from a highly ordered environment? Perhaps a way of rephrasing it would be that only when we have consistency, can we then proceed to have inconsistency. Only when we had consistent physics, could then disordered forms such as ourselves have a framework in which to live. It's an extremely abstract theory, one that I think would require more sitting and thinking about.
While Exhalation was probably supposed to be the "big story," the one drawing all of the focus because it was the name of the book, I didn't find this story as compelling. It was interesting, but it wasn't my favourite. Rather, I enjoyed the stories that dealt more with discussions on human personalities and character.
What's Expected of Us
This was a very short story, but slightly haunting. There was a device called a predictor, which was basically a beeper with a negative time delay. This meant that rather than beeping after you pressed a button, it would beep before you pressed a button, effectively time travelling.
At first, the predictor was a fun gadget, but people were driven to a catatonic state called akinetic mutism. Since the predictor was predicting everything they would do anyway, it didn't seem like there was any reason to make an effort. The short story ends with the narrator telling us to feign free will, presumably for our own sanity. This was rather haunting to me, due to the helplessness of the narrator's voice.
In light of the other short stories of Chiang's that I'd read though, I refuse to feel so pessimistically about the predictor. As powerful as the predictor may seem, it is just a button. How does it know when someone will press the button? My theory is that it is still based on the button-pusher's character. A button would predict that you would push a button because the button would figure that based on the circumstances and based on the type of person you were, you would press that button at that time. So similarly to The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate, if we stay true to ourselves, then I think it would be easier to understand that free will isn't the be all and end all, but we also have some say in determining our futures.
The Lifecycle of Software Objects
Man, this was a deep read. It was about people and their relationship with their AIs whom they effectively trained from birth to the age of 20. Due to financial struggles, two characters were forced into difficult situations. Ana considered taking a job at a company that might be able to port their AIs to a more popular server, at the cost of wearing a patch at work that would affect her mental and emotional state (to make her more focused on her job). The group of AI carers had also received a proposal from Binary Desire, a company interested in developing AIs into sexual companions.
In the end, Derek decided to sign a contract with the latter company so that Ana wouldn't have to wear the patch. Derek actually had romantic feelings for Ana. He knew that by doing this, he would lose Ana's friendship, because Ana would rather sacrifice herself than turn her AIs over to Binary Desire which she likely deemed inappropriate. In a scene where Ana's AI Jax was playing with another AI and copied some inappropriate acts that they'd seen on TV, she immediately stopped what was happening. I think Ana truly saw Jax as a child, and couldn't accept that a child would become a sexual being. On the other hand, Derek would rather sacrifice his AIs Marco and Polo rather than seeing Ana's personal relationships affected. Specifically, Ana was in a relationship and while it hurt Derek, it hurt him to think that Ana would have problems with her boyfriend because of the patch. In addition, the AIs were actually interested in the proposal from Binary Desire because it offered them more independence (e.g. the possibility of becoming a corporation that could carry out its own actions in the real world). So I think the juxtaposition here was that Ana was unwilling to see her child grow up, whereas Derek was willing to accept that the more these AIs developed, the more they'd crave free will. I think this was also supposed to hint to us that Derek prioritized his feelings for Ana over his feelings for Marco and Polo, whereas Ana prioritized her feelings for Jax over her feelings for her boyfriend.
The AIs were feeling lonely as their home, Data Earth, became deserted. It was something that didn't occur to me, but made sense in the context of the AIs. To them, Data Earth was their first true home. Ana tried getting Jax to go on Real Space (the more popular virtual world) to go on a computer, but he didn't like it. This was very reminiscent of issues with old social media platforms, or old games that we humans like to go on.
In Chiang's notes, he went into detail about the idea of putting effort into relationships. As we could see, Ana, Derek, and their Digient community were willing to put lots of work into their relationships with their AI. For many people, since they don't see AIs as real people, maybe they're less willing to put in that much effort into taking care of an AI. Such is the case with, say, abandoned Neopoets accounts, etc. To many of us, AI is simply a form of entertainment and that is why we don't spend much time on them. I don't have any arguments against this, especially because AI in our current day and age is still very primitive, and I would not say that it is conscious at all.
However, Chiang points out that some people maintain the same attitudes when it comes to their human relationships. I'm sure many of us know people who refuse to put effort into their relationships with family, friends, lovers, etc. I myself am sometimes guilty of this as well. When it comes to parenting an AI, I think the results of a loving relationship would be more apparent, since they would manifest into something more visible. For example, as Chiang mentioned, some people put minimal effort into parenting their child. As long as that child is fed, that child will still be alive and would grow and age like all humans. That being said, that child might be emotionally distant. On the contrary, if no time was spent with an AI, it would remain at the same level of intelligence as it was before. When Digients had rolled out, some users got frustrated with trying to teach their Digients new tricks. I would imagine it would be easy for them to get bored of a Digient who couldn't do what they asked them to, and that Digient would be suspended soon enough.
The concept of AIs being legal corporation was not explored in too much depth, but it was brought up as a kind of endgame for the AIs. Marco and Polo wanted to become corporations to experience more freedom. Polo had brought up the possibility of editing their reward maps, and Derek had to remind them that editing their reward maps was not a good idea because it could lead to dire consequences. Marco showed pretty advanced reasoning, because he basically implied that he was willing to accept the consequences of his own mistakes. He just wanted the opportunity to make those mistakes more than he didn't want the consequences.
Back to the concept of legal corporations though. Chiang said he felt legal corporations were the shiny, glitzy part of AI, and the dirty work was the actual raising and parenting of the AIs. I think this is related to the idea of AIs being created with all of their knowledge already vs. AIs needing to be taught and trained. I think most of us expect the former, and I admit that is one of the things that scares me about AIs becoming extremely advanced. Unlike the AIs that need to be trained, AIs that are ready made don't really have life experience that will keep them alive. Through their lessons with Ana and Derek and other humans, I think the Digients would have amassed a lot more practical human-related knowledge that made it easier for them to get along with humans, as opposed to AIs that were created to do one thing, without considering whether they'd get along with humans.
This was a very in-depth story, and I think that was because this story spanned 20 years. We saw how Ana and Derek's relationships with their AIs developed and also changed throughout the years. I do admit I was pretty skeptical of the AIs throughout the story. I could understand that Ana and Derek would be attached to the AIs as their creators and trainers, but at the moment, I think I myself would not be able to build that kind of relationship with an AI, let alone put that much effort into raising it like a child.
Dacey's Patent Automatic Nanny
This was another story about technology in parenting. It was written in the format of old articles, which was interesting. Reginald Dacey devoted much effort into developing a nanny. He was convinced that a mechanical nanny would be rational and consistent and therefore better than any human nanny or mother ever could be. His son continued the endeavour and ended up raising his own illegitimate son Edmund with a mechanical nanny. However, the result was that Edmund was uanble to cohabit with humans.
In the final few paragraphs of the story, Lionel reflected on his studies. He understood that Edmund's inability to cohabit with humans was a failure on his part, and a disproving of his father's work. Reginald had devoted most of his time to his work and spent little time on Lionel, and Lionel in return spent his life trying to prove his father's work, as a way to earn his father's approval even after his death. In doing so, he failed to see that his father's focus on technology deprived Lionel of the one thing he wished for, which was his father's love.
In Chiang's notes, he brought up a few studies that I looked up myself and was slightly horrified by. Several of these studies on parenting likely would not have been approved of at all today due to the ethical reasons. The idea of putting a study before a child's well-being is horrifying to us in the 21st century, but I wonder if these studies were considered acceptable in the past.
The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling
This short story covered two story lines. The first story line was about a piece of technology called Remem, that would record actual events from a person's point of view. This exact piece of technology was brought up in the first season of Black Mirror, so the discussion around this type of technology was familiar, but I much appreciated the more hopeful turn that Chiang took with this story. The second story line was in a historical setting, about a Tiv man who is the only person in his village who knows how to write. These two story lines at first seem to contradict each other with their final messages. However, I think that these stories show us that perfect memory, like many other things in life, has its upsides and downsides.
The story line about Remem is written from the point of view of a journalist. He wrote a bit about the development of the Remem technology. His personal journey was related to reconciling with his daughter Nicole. He'd had a fight with his daughter and had misremembered that Nicole was the one saying hateful things. Years later, when he was trying to gather accounts of himself in other people's members, he realized that he was in fact that one who said them. He had twisted memory to make himself out to be the victim. He hadn't realized that Nicole had harboured negative feelings towards him and it was a big surprise when he also found out that Nicole had gone to therapy to learn to let go. The biggest takeaway from this story line was that the journalist realized the biggest strength of this technology was not to settle petty he-said-she-said disputes, but for people to see their faults for what they really were as a starting point to atone for them.
In the Black Mirror episode the Entire History of You, a husband used this technology to determine that his wife was having an affair. Black Mirror showed us how this technology could save lives. However, if Ted Chiang were to continue this story, perhaps he would show how the wife would come to accept that she'd cheated on her husband because there was clear evidence of it, and she would have to learn how to atone for her betrayal of his trust.
The second story line was about a man called Jijingi who had learned how to write from a missionary called Moseby. His Tiv village relied on oral tradition and so even the concept of writing was very new to him. He soon learned how writing was a way for people to remember things, as well as a deeper understanding of speaking (i.e. how the story teller would structure his phrases differently).
The Tiv village was invovled in a dispute with other villages over who they should merge with for administrative reasons. In theory, the village should've merged with the village with whom they were closest in terms of family links. Jijingi went through old administrative records to see what past elders had said was their closest familial relation and presented it to his father as the one true answer. Jijingi's father scolded him because while it was factually correct ("vough"), it was not right ("mimi").
My interpretation of this was that while Jijingi had the right answer (assuming the elder from all those years back had not lied), merging with that village might not be in the best interest of Jijingi's village. In other words, whether something is right requires context.
In the end of his story line, Jijingi decided to burn his diaries. This, I didn't quite understand, but I think it was a manifestation of Jijingi realizing that he put too much weight in to what was vough and not what was mimi. In other words, I think it was representative of Jijingi's attitudes towards writing, as opposed to his actual thoughts.
I liked how these two stories worked together. The journalist's story told us how technology could be used for the better, and Jijingi's story told us how we need to use technology in the right way. I think this mindset is applicable to most new technologies. Most new technology probably serves a useful purpose. However, it is important to not be over-reliant on them to the point that we forget our morals, or what is important.
The Great Silence
This story was a little bit different from the others, but it was still interesting. In the author's notes, Chiang said it was a collaboration with a piece of artwork, but as we can see, this story still invokes lots of discussion on its own.
This story juxtaposes humans' search for extraterrestrial life with the fact that we have creatures with near-conscious levels of understanding here on earth. This theme is also discussed in the next short story, Omphalos. I was also reminded of a film I watched recently, Ad Astra. The parrot narrator in this short story wanted to point out the hypocrisy in human nature, the need for friends in the universe but ignoring the ones right next to them.
I think this was a softer piece, in that it was less about the hard science and the impacts on society, but more an appeal to the emotions. Throughout the story, the narrator parrot points out the hurtful things that humans have done, their condescension, or their "inadvertent" damaging of ecosystems, but the narrator parrot doesn't end their story hatefully. Instead, it ends with the very loving message of "You be good. I love you."
Omphalos
This was a really cool story, and reminded me a bit of the Tower of Babylon. In Chiang's notes, he said that much of science in the 1600s was meant to prove creationism, but instead disproved the idea that the world realtively young. He thought it would be interesting to explore the result of the science had aligned with creationism. The issue was that astronomy from before then already functioned under the principle that the Earth was not at the centre of the solar system and humans were not the centre of the universe.
Like Hell is the Absence of God, I thought it was cool that Chiang wrote a science fiction story with a discussion of the Christian faith. Dorothea was a devout Christian and she was a scientist because she wanted to show others the greatness of God. Through her narrations (in the forms of prayers to God, and later a letter to her cousin Rosemary), we find out that some of the evidence in line with creationism include tree rings that don't go on forever (i.e. have a finite start date), humans (primordial beings) who were created by God and therefore did not have navels (as those are connected by the umbilical cord to their mothers), and crustacean shells that are completely smooth. I thought these were very cool ideas.
Lawson's paper theorized that the aetherial winds on earth were following the movements of 58 Eridani, which probably orbits something else: another planet that might be the true centre of the universe. If that is the case, our earth is not actually the centre of the universe, but a castoff, an experiment, or just an accident. I did think that Lawson made quite a few big leaps to get from 58 Eridani's orbit to theories on our existence, but I guess it wouldn't have been a big jump in this alternate earth where humans had always believed that they were at the centre of the universe. It was also curious that humans had believed they were at the centre of the universe despite believing in a heliocentric solar system model rather than a geocentric one.
Dorothea's narrations were all prayers to God until she learned of Lawson's paper. Then she wrote a letter to her cousin Rosemary talking about her crisis of faith. In that letter, she described herself as a secular scientist, which I thought curious, because in our world, she likely would not be called such. I wonder if she had decided to change her ways to become a more secular scientist after learning of the paper.
I think Dorothea's eventual journey back to God is something that we might see in our world, with people who are experiencing crises of faith themselves. While she understands that their earth might not have been God's main project, she still believes that God is out there. Instead, she's re-orienting her work to the how rather than the why, which is in line with "secular science." She also tells God that now she will find a purpose for herself rather than relying on God, and I think that is something that everyone can relate to.
I thought this was a great story because of how it combined science fiction with a world that we are very familiar with.
Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom
This was another in-depth story from Chiang, and I thought it had a great message. Prisms are devices that allow us to see a parallel path that would've happened if we made another decision.
It involved a bit of intrigue, which was interesting. This was because the main character, Nat, was involved in a scam. She and her coworker Morrow (the real mastermind) were trying to get a guy to give up his prism to sell to a celebrity (Scott). Scott's husband had died in a car accident but in the prism, Scott's husband Roderick was the one who had survived and Scott had died.
There was one thing that I thought was curious about the prism technology. I think a lot of people viewed the parallel world as another reality. However, in my mind, I just viewed it as a possibility. So for example, some people would be salty that their paraselves gained something that they didn't get in their world. However, is that parallel world not just a possibility of something that could've happened? My reasoning is because the prism doesn't branch off until you tell it. That being said, the story explained that that parallel timeline had always existed, but we just didn't have access to it before.
In any case, like many stories, many people started to lose track of free will. As the gunman who shot Morrow said, if there was a timeline where he did shoot Morrow, why couldn't it be this one? More suicides had also occurred after the introduction of the prism, and there was a discussion about how it didn't quite make sense statistically. Assuming that all parallel universes do in fact exist and are real, I would think that the introduction of prism technology increased this reckless type of mindset in all realities, not only our own.
I thought it was very interesting that this story streamlined back to Nat and Dana, and how our knowledge of the parallel timelines can actually help us be better people and not more reckless people. Nat was at Dana's help groups to scam another member into selling his prims, but I think this was the first time she truly had a question. The gunman caused her to think about why this couldn't be the story line that she could be reckless. As we learn through the story, Nat had issues with drugs, and had a troubled relationship with her family.
Dana explained that the parallel universes branch off in ways that are supposed to statistically make sense with our personalities. For example, a kind person would likely help a grandma across the street 9 times out of 10, and 0 times out of 10 they would push them aside. Something like that. One of Dana's patients, Jorge, had punctured holes in his boss's wheels out of rage. He consulted his paraselves and found that he had not done so in those parallel universes, which was a sign that that was probably out of character for him. Dana's advice to Nat was that we can take steps to become the kind of person whose paraselves tend to do good things. If we act recklessly all the time, our paraselves will reflect that we tend to act recklessly in situations. However, if we make attempts to be kind or to do the right thing, then over time, we do become the kind of person who is kind or does the right thing, and that manifests into our paraselves also being kind or doing the right thing.
In the end, Nat sold the prism to Scott for a hefty sum of money. We were led to believe that maybe she didn't take the money because that would have been "the right thing to do." However, at the end of the story, we see that she did take the money, but she spent it on a bunch of prisms to ease Dana of some of her guilt. When she was young, Dana had blamed her friend Vinessa for drugs and Vinessa had spiralled into delinquency and later crime. Dana always felt guilty about it and tried to help out Vinessa financially. However, the prisms that Nat bought showed Dana that in other prisms where Nat either took on the blame, or shared the blame (according to the truth that both of them had gathered the drugs), Vinessa would've gotten mad at her and spiralled into a bad life. To Nat, that was the right thing to do, as she helped out someone who had helped her.
I really liked the final message of this story, especially the advice that Dana gave to Nat about taking steps to become the kind of person that you want to be. I think we forget that our actions define who we are, and that we need to take action in order to be able to call ourselves the kind of person we want to be.
Overall
I liked that in this short story collection, there were several running themes, such as free will, time travel, and exploring science inward vs. outward.
I also really liked that Chiang's stories tend to end positively. Black Mirror is probably the most popular mainstream science fiction story right now, but its stories tend to end in a depressing manner, showing us how technology is taking over our lives and how life could go very, very bad. As for Ted Chiang, I think he uses science fiction to show us how we can strive to be better people, like a modern day fable.
I would highly recommend this series of short stories!!
Stories
Some of the stories in this collection covered topics that Chiang had already written stories about previously. However, no two of his stories were ever exactly the same, so I definitely found value in reading stories about things he'd already wrote about.
In this collection, I also found that I enjoyed Chiang's story notes even more, because they introduced even more discussion topics that hadn't occurred to me before.
The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate
This was another story that took place in an unconventional location, in an ancient time. In summary, this was a story about time travel and how some events were inevitable, but it showed this in a rather optimistic and peaceful way.
In all of the stories that were told, the people who walked through the time travelling door did not end up changing their timelines. In the first story, Hassan went to the future, and his older self advised him on simple day-to-day choices that would lead him to eventual prosperity. This was a relatively benign use of the door, except for the fact that he did technically steal the box of riches.
The second story related to Ajib, who was less cautious than Hassan. Ajib saw that his older self was rich but living very modestly, so he stole old Ajib's money. Young Ajib spent lavishly. His wife was kidnapped because others were under the impression that he was a rich many. Ajib used the rest of his money to pay the ransom, and lived the rest of his life modestly because he needed to save money for the young Ajib who would eventually come and steal his money. I thought this was a very interesting take on the use of time travel. While Hassan's journey was a constant cycle of prosperity, Ajib's journey was a constant cycle of atonement, as Ajib would spend the rest of his life atoning for his poor decisions as a youngster.
Raniya's story was a really creative use of the door, which I enjoyed. First, she went to the past and saw her future Hassan trying to sell a necklace that she ended up having. In most cases, people would not to engage for fear of disrupting history. However, Raniya thought the opposite, and felt that she was given an opportunity to do something and therefore should do it. This reminded me of Chiang's story note, in which he mentioned that the Islamic faith involved an acceptance of one's fate. While most people's acceptance of their own fate would probably lead to inaction, Raniya viewed fate as taking every opportunity offered.
Raniya recruited her older self in order to create a mini-crowd at the jeweler. I thought it was a very creative use of the door, but at the same time, must be used with caution.
Later on, Raniya got to know the young Hassan and taught him to be a good lover. Again, this was a case of Raniya taking every opportunity presented to her. Of course, she wanted to spend more time with the young Hassan for her own selfish reasons, but she also saw an opportunity to teach Hassan about love so that her younger self would meet a Hassan who was a considerate lover.
The last story was the narrator's own. Fuwaad was the first person in the story who wanted to use the door to change fate. Specifically, he wanted to save his wife from dying. He ultimately ended up arriving in the destination right after his wife died, but was informed that she had only pleasant thoughts of him as she died. Then he was subsequently captured and brought before the authorities, to whom he was presently speaking. I felt that Fuwaad's journey towards realization was also a creative one. He left the situation understanding that maybe there was no need to change his fate, because while his wife did die, she died in circumstances that were less painful than one might expect. I didn't think that Fuwaad gained any particular insight into how his actions might alter timelines, but instead, his story was a more personal one, about why his own timeline was not so bad if left unaltered.
Like Story of Your Life, this short story also tackled time and free will (as do several other stories in this collection). It provided the reader with another interpretation of time. The way I interpreted this story was as follows: the timelines that we are all walking are at a sort of "equilibrium." Let me attempt to explain. All the timelines had played out in a way that was consistent with the characters' personalities, even taking into account their knowledge of the door of years. So all timelines had understood people's personalities and had already accounted for the fact that young Ajib would've stolen money, that Raniya would've gotten involved in helping her future husband, etc. Perhaps the only constant in life is our own personalities and characters, and we can trust that time will play out in a way that is just and fair according to our personal morals and attitudes.
Exhalation
This was the title story. It took place in a world inhabited by machines who breathed argon. There was much curiosity about memory and how it was created and stored. The narrator decided to open up their own brain and discovered that memories and thoughts were the result of air moving through their valves, rather than physical things. What seemed to be malfunctions was actually changing air pressure, causing these machines to operate more slowly.
I thought that this story had environmental undertones. After the narrator communicated to their peers that the changing air pressure was causing them to move more slowly, there were large movements to promote actions that lower air pressure above ground. I thought this was a pretty direct parallel to rising temperatures in the earth that we live in. Unfortunately, it hasn't been so easy here on earth to convince others that this is a real issue.
The earlier discussion about the concept of memory was very interesting to me. In the world of Exhalation, the popular theory was that memory was written on gold foil, because when machines died, gold dust remained. It's always been a small curiosity for me. While the physical contents of my brain are the same as most other people's why is it that my memories are different? What gives our brains this sense of individuality and consciousness? This wasn't one of the main topics of discussion in this story, but I still thought the theories for these automatons were interesting.
While the narrator was discussing how society was working towards lowering air pressure to maintain their species, the narrator commented on what a miracle it was for them to even have lived at all. I thought this was a surprisingly optimistic ending for such a case, but I guess that isn't too far out of left field, considering that society was already working towards improving the species' chances of survivel.
In Chiang's notes, he discussed how existence of humans and similar sentient beings innately cause disorder (such as changing air pressure levels, or in our case, rising temperatures). This made sense. Then Chiang said that we were only able to exist because the world was in a highly ordered state to begin with. This was a little more difficult to me to wrap my head around. How were disordered beings able to arise from a highly ordered environment? Perhaps a way of rephrasing it would be that only when we have consistency, can we then proceed to have inconsistency. Only when we had consistent physics, could then disordered forms such as ourselves have a framework in which to live. It's an extremely abstract theory, one that I think would require more sitting and thinking about.
While Exhalation was probably supposed to be the "big story," the one drawing all of the focus because it was the name of the book, I didn't find this story as compelling. It was interesting, but it wasn't my favourite. Rather, I enjoyed the stories that dealt more with discussions on human personalities and character.
What's Expected of Us
This was a very short story, but slightly haunting. There was a device called a predictor, which was basically a beeper with a negative time delay. This meant that rather than beeping after you pressed a button, it would beep before you pressed a button, effectively time travelling.
At first, the predictor was a fun gadget, but people were driven to a catatonic state called akinetic mutism. Since the predictor was predicting everything they would do anyway, it didn't seem like there was any reason to make an effort. The short story ends with the narrator telling us to feign free will, presumably for our own sanity. This was rather haunting to me, due to the helplessness of the narrator's voice.
In light of the other short stories of Chiang's that I'd read though, I refuse to feel so pessimistically about the predictor. As powerful as the predictor may seem, it is just a button. How does it know when someone will press the button? My theory is that it is still based on the button-pusher's character. A button would predict that you would push a button because the button would figure that based on the circumstances and based on the type of person you were, you would press that button at that time. So similarly to The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate, if we stay true to ourselves, then I think it would be easier to understand that free will isn't the be all and end all, but we also have some say in determining our futures.
The Lifecycle of Software Objects
Man, this was a deep read. It was about people and their relationship with their AIs whom they effectively trained from birth to the age of 20. Due to financial struggles, two characters were forced into difficult situations. Ana considered taking a job at a company that might be able to port their AIs to a more popular server, at the cost of wearing a patch at work that would affect her mental and emotional state (to make her more focused on her job). The group of AI carers had also received a proposal from Binary Desire, a company interested in developing AIs into sexual companions.
In the end, Derek decided to sign a contract with the latter company so that Ana wouldn't have to wear the patch. Derek actually had romantic feelings for Ana. He knew that by doing this, he would lose Ana's friendship, because Ana would rather sacrifice herself than turn her AIs over to Binary Desire which she likely deemed inappropriate. In a scene where Ana's AI Jax was playing with another AI and copied some inappropriate acts that they'd seen on TV, she immediately stopped what was happening. I think Ana truly saw Jax as a child, and couldn't accept that a child would become a sexual being. On the other hand, Derek would rather sacrifice his AIs Marco and Polo rather than seeing Ana's personal relationships affected. Specifically, Ana was in a relationship and while it hurt Derek, it hurt him to think that Ana would have problems with her boyfriend because of the patch. In addition, the AIs were actually interested in the proposal from Binary Desire because it offered them more independence (e.g. the possibility of becoming a corporation that could carry out its own actions in the real world). So I think the juxtaposition here was that Ana was unwilling to see her child grow up, whereas Derek was willing to accept that the more these AIs developed, the more they'd crave free will. I think this was also supposed to hint to us that Derek prioritized his feelings for Ana over his feelings for Marco and Polo, whereas Ana prioritized her feelings for Jax over her feelings for her boyfriend.
The AIs were feeling lonely as their home, Data Earth, became deserted. It was something that didn't occur to me, but made sense in the context of the AIs. To them, Data Earth was their first true home. Ana tried getting Jax to go on Real Space (the more popular virtual world) to go on a computer, but he didn't like it. This was very reminiscent of issues with old social media platforms, or old games that we humans like to go on.
In Chiang's notes, he went into detail about the idea of putting effort into relationships. As we could see, Ana, Derek, and their Digient community were willing to put lots of work into their relationships with their AI. For many people, since they don't see AIs as real people, maybe they're less willing to put in that much effort into taking care of an AI. Such is the case with, say, abandoned Neopoets accounts, etc. To many of us, AI is simply a form of entertainment and that is why we don't spend much time on them. I don't have any arguments against this, especially because AI in our current day and age is still very primitive, and I would not say that it is conscious at all.
However, Chiang points out that some people maintain the same attitudes when it comes to their human relationships. I'm sure many of us know people who refuse to put effort into their relationships with family, friends, lovers, etc. I myself am sometimes guilty of this as well. When it comes to parenting an AI, I think the results of a loving relationship would be more apparent, since they would manifest into something more visible. For example, as Chiang mentioned, some people put minimal effort into parenting their child. As long as that child is fed, that child will still be alive and would grow and age like all humans. That being said, that child might be emotionally distant. On the contrary, if no time was spent with an AI, it would remain at the same level of intelligence as it was before. When Digients had rolled out, some users got frustrated with trying to teach their Digients new tricks. I would imagine it would be easy for them to get bored of a Digient who couldn't do what they asked them to, and that Digient would be suspended soon enough.
The concept of AIs being legal corporation was not explored in too much depth, but it was brought up as a kind of endgame for the AIs. Marco and Polo wanted to become corporations to experience more freedom. Polo had brought up the possibility of editing their reward maps, and Derek had to remind them that editing their reward maps was not a good idea because it could lead to dire consequences. Marco showed pretty advanced reasoning, because he basically implied that he was willing to accept the consequences of his own mistakes. He just wanted the opportunity to make those mistakes more than he didn't want the consequences.
Back to the concept of legal corporations though. Chiang said he felt legal corporations were the shiny, glitzy part of AI, and the dirty work was the actual raising and parenting of the AIs. I think this is related to the idea of AIs being created with all of their knowledge already vs. AIs needing to be taught and trained. I think most of us expect the former, and I admit that is one of the things that scares me about AIs becoming extremely advanced. Unlike the AIs that need to be trained, AIs that are ready made don't really have life experience that will keep them alive. Through their lessons with Ana and Derek and other humans, I think the Digients would have amassed a lot more practical human-related knowledge that made it easier for them to get along with humans, as opposed to AIs that were created to do one thing, without considering whether they'd get along with humans.
This was a very in-depth story, and I think that was because this story spanned 20 years. We saw how Ana and Derek's relationships with their AIs developed and also changed throughout the years. I do admit I was pretty skeptical of the AIs throughout the story. I could understand that Ana and Derek would be attached to the AIs as their creators and trainers, but at the moment, I think I myself would not be able to build that kind of relationship with an AI, let alone put that much effort into raising it like a child.
Dacey's Patent Automatic Nanny
This was another story about technology in parenting. It was written in the format of old articles, which was interesting. Reginald Dacey devoted much effort into developing a nanny. He was convinced that a mechanical nanny would be rational and consistent and therefore better than any human nanny or mother ever could be. His son continued the endeavour and ended up raising his own illegitimate son Edmund with a mechanical nanny. However, the result was that Edmund was uanble to cohabit with humans.
In the final few paragraphs of the story, Lionel reflected on his studies. He understood that Edmund's inability to cohabit with humans was a failure on his part, and a disproving of his father's work. Reginald had devoted most of his time to his work and spent little time on Lionel, and Lionel in return spent his life trying to prove his father's work, as a way to earn his father's approval even after his death. In doing so, he failed to see that his father's focus on technology deprived Lionel of the one thing he wished for, which was his father's love.
In Chiang's notes, he brought up a few studies that I looked up myself and was slightly horrified by. Several of these studies on parenting likely would not have been approved of at all today due to the ethical reasons. The idea of putting a study before a child's well-being is horrifying to us in the 21st century, but I wonder if these studies were considered acceptable in the past.
The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling
This short story covered two story lines. The first story line was about a piece of technology called Remem, that would record actual events from a person's point of view. This exact piece of technology was brought up in the first season of Black Mirror, so the discussion around this type of technology was familiar, but I much appreciated the more hopeful turn that Chiang took with this story. The second story line was in a historical setting, about a Tiv man who is the only person in his village who knows how to write. These two story lines at first seem to contradict each other with their final messages. However, I think that these stories show us that perfect memory, like many other things in life, has its upsides and downsides.
The story line about Remem is written from the point of view of a journalist. He wrote a bit about the development of the Remem technology. His personal journey was related to reconciling with his daughter Nicole. He'd had a fight with his daughter and had misremembered that Nicole was the one saying hateful things. Years later, when he was trying to gather accounts of himself in other people's members, he realized that he was in fact that one who said them. He had twisted memory to make himself out to be the victim. He hadn't realized that Nicole had harboured negative feelings towards him and it was a big surprise when he also found out that Nicole had gone to therapy to learn to let go. The biggest takeaway from this story line was that the journalist realized the biggest strength of this technology was not to settle petty he-said-she-said disputes, but for people to see their faults for what they really were as a starting point to atone for them.
In the Black Mirror episode the Entire History of You, a husband used this technology to determine that his wife was having an affair. Black Mirror showed us how this technology could save lives. However, if Ted Chiang were to continue this story, perhaps he would show how the wife would come to accept that she'd cheated on her husband because there was clear evidence of it, and she would have to learn how to atone for her betrayal of his trust.
The second story line was about a man called Jijingi who had learned how to write from a missionary called Moseby. His Tiv village relied on oral tradition and so even the concept of writing was very new to him. He soon learned how writing was a way for people to remember things, as well as a deeper understanding of speaking (i.e. how the story teller would structure his phrases differently).
The Tiv village was invovled in a dispute with other villages over who they should merge with for administrative reasons. In theory, the village should've merged with the village with whom they were closest in terms of family links. Jijingi went through old administrative records to see what past elders had said was their closest familial relation and presented it to his father as the one true answer. Jijingi's father scolded him because while it was factually correct ("vough"), it was not right ("mimi").
My interpretation of this was that while Jijingi had the right answer (assuming the elder from all those years back had not lied), merging with that village might not be in the best interest of Jijingi's village. In other words, whether something is right requires context.
In the end of his story line, Jijingi decided to burn his diaries. This, I didn't quite understand, but I think it was a manifestation of Jijingi realizing that he put too much weight in to what was vough and not what was mimi. In other words, I think it was representative of Jijingi's attitudes towards writing, as opposed to his actual thoughts.
I liked how these two stories worked together. The journalist's story told us how technology could be used for the better, and Jijingi's story told us how we need to use technology in the right way. I think this mindset is applicable to most new technologies. Most new technology probably serves a useful purpose. However, it is important to not be over-reliant on them to the point that we forget our morals, or what is important.
The Great Silence
This story was a little bit different from the others, but it was still interesting. In the author's notes, Chiang said it was a collaboration with a piece of artwork, but as we can see, this story still invokes lots of discussion on its own.
This story juxtaposes humans' search for extraterrestrial life with the fact that we have creatures with near-conscious levels of understanding here on earth. This theme is also discussed in the next short story, Omphalos. I was also reminded of a film I watched recently, Ad Astra. The parrot narrator in this short story wanted to point out the hypocrisy in human nature, the need for friends in the universe but ignoring the ones right next to them.
I think this was a softer piece, in that it was less about the hard science and the impacts on society, but more an appeal to the emotions. Throughout the story, the narrator parrot points out the hurtful things that humans have done, their condescension, or their "inadvertent" damaging of ecosystems, but the narrator parrot doesn't end their story hatefully. Instead, it ends with the very loving message of "You be good. I love you."
Omphalos
This was a really cool story, and reminded me a bit of the Tower of Babylon. In Chiang's notes, he said that much of science in the 1600s was meant to prove creationism, but instead disproved the idea that the world realtively young. He thought it would be interesting to explore the result of the science had aligned with creationism. The issue was that astronomy from before then already functioned under the principle that the Earth was not at the centre of the solar system and humans were not the centre of the universe.
Like Hell is the Absence of God, I thought it was cool that Chiang wrote a science fiction story with a discussion of the Christian faith. Dorothea was a devout Christian and she was a scientist because she wanted to show others the greatness of God. Through her narrations (in the forms of prayers to God, and later a letter to her cousin Rosemary), we find out that some of the evidence in line with creationism include tree rings that don't go on forever (i.e. have a finite start date), humans (primordial beings) who were created by God and therefore did not have navels (as those are connected by the umbilical cord to their mothers), and crustacean shells that are completely smooth. I thought these were very cool ideas.
Lawson's paper theorized that the aetherial winds on earth were following the movements of 58 Eridani, which probably orbits something else: another planet that might be the true centre of the universe. If that is the case, our earth is not actually the centre of the universe, but a castoff, an experiment, or just an accident. I did think that Lawson made quite a few big leaps to get from 58 Eridani's orbit to theories on our existence, but I guess it wouldn't have been a big jump in this alternate earth where humans had always believed that they were at the centre of the universe. It was also curious that humans had believed they were at the centre of the universe despite believing in a heliocentric solar system model rather than a geocentric one.
Dorothea's narrations were all prayers to God until she learned of Lawson's paper. Then she wrote a letter to her cousin Rosemary talking about her crisis of faith. In that letter, she described herself as a secular scientist, which I thought curious, because in our world, she likely would not be called such. I wonder if she had decided to change her ways to become a more secular scientist after learning of the paper.
I think Dorothea's eventual journey back to God is something that we might see in our world, with people who are experiencing crises of faith themselves. While she understands that their earth might not have been God's main project, she still believes that God is out there. Instead, she's re-orienting her work to the how rather than the why, which is in line with "secular science." She also tells God that now she will find a purpose for herself rather than relying on God, and I think that is something that everyone can relate to.
I thought this was a great story because of how it combined science fiction with a world that we are very familiar with.
Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom
This was another in-depth story from Chiang, and I thought it had a great message. Prisms are devices that allow us to see a parallel path that would've happened if we made another decision.
It involved a bit of intrigue, which was interesting. This was because the main character, Nat, was involved in a scam. She and her coworker Morrow (the real mastermind) were trying to get a guy to give up his prism to sell to a celebrity (Scott). Scott's husband had died in a car accident but in the prism, Scott's husband Roderick was the one who had survived and Scott had died.
There was one thing that I thought was curious about the prism technology. I think a lot of people viewed the parallel world as another reality. However, in my mind, I just viewed it as a possibility. So for example, some people would be salty that their paraselves gained something that they didn't get in their world. However, is that parallel world not just a possibility of something that could've happened? My reasoning is because the prism doesn't branch off until you tell it. That being said, the story explained that that parallel timeline had always existed, but we just didn't have access to it before.
In any case, like many stories, many people started to lose track of free will. As the gunman who shot Morrow said, if there was a timeline where he did shoot Morrow, why couldn't it be this one? More suicides had also occurred after the introduction of the prism, and there was a discussion about how it didn't quite make sense statistically. Assuming that all parallel universes do in fact exist and are real, I would think that the introduction of prism technology increased this reckless type of mindset in all realities, not only our own.
I thought it was very interesting that this story streamlined back to Nat and Dana, and how our knowledge of the parallel timelines can actually help us be better people and not more reckless people. Nat was at Dana's help groups to scam another member into selling his prims, but I think this was the first time she truly had a question. The gunman caused her to think about why this couldn't be the story line that she could be reckless. As we learn through the story, Nat had issues with drugs, and had a troubled relationship with her family.
Dana explained that the parallel universes branch off in ways that are supposed to statistically make sense with our personalities. For example, a kind person would likely help a grandma across the street 9 times out of 10, and 0 times out of 10 they would push them aside. Something like that. One of Dana's patients, Jorge, had punctured holes in his boss's wheels out of rage. He consulted his paraselves and found that he had not done so in those parallel universes, which was a sign that that was probably out of character for him. Dana's advice to Nat was that we can take steps to become the kind of person whose paraselves tend to do good things. If we act recklessly all the time, our paraselves will reflect that we tend to act recklessly in situations. However, if we make attempts to be kind or to do the right thing, then over time, we do become the kind of person who is kind or does the right thing, and that manifests into our paraselves also being kind or doing the right thing.
In the end, Nat sold the prism to Scott for a hefty sum of money. We were led to believe that maybe she didn't take the money because that would have been "the right thing to do." However, at the end of the story, we see that she did take the money, but she spent it on a bunch of prisms to ease Dana of some of her guilt. When she was young, Dana had blamed her friend Vinessa for drugs and Vinessa had spiralled into delinquency and later crime. Dana always felt guilty about it and tried to help out Vinessa financially. However, the prisms that Nat bought showed Dana that in other prisms where Nat either took on the blame, or shared the blame (according to the truth that both of them had gathered the drugs), Vinessa would've gotten mad at her and spiralled into a bad life. To Nat, that was the right thing to do, as she helped out someone who had helped her.
I really liked the final message of this story, especially the advice that Dana gave to Nat about taking steps to become the kind of person that you want to be. I think we forget that our actions define who we are, and that we need to take action in order to be able to call ourselves the kind of person we want to be.
Overall
I liked that in this short story collection, there were several running themes, such as free will, time travel, and exploring science inward vs. outward.
I also really liked that Chiang's stories tend to end positively. Black Mirror is probably the most popular mainstream science fiction story right now, but its stories tend to end in a depressing manner, showing us how technology is taking over our lives and how life could go very, very bad. As for Ted Chiang, I think he uses science fiction to show us how we can strive to be better people, like a modern day fable.
I would highly recommend this series of short stories!!