I've never read anything written by Ted Chiang since his writing has always been pegged as science fiction. But I figured that his collection of nine short stories titled 'Exhalation' (2019) is worth a try. No regrets. In this collection, he managed to tread between sci-fi and fantasy, drawing this 101% fantasy reader into his imagined worlds. (Reviews here, here and here.)
The first story was fairly long! 'The Merchant and the Alchemist Gate' was an excellent first story to draw me in. Set in the Islamic Caliphate in the era of Sinbad, a shopkeeper has built a magical gate that could take you twenty years into the future, or twenty years back to see your future self. With this jaunt, and make what you will of the current to improve your lot in life, or not. Perhaps you would fail from greed, and an overload of the sense. What would you do with the knowledge gleaned? What you do with that information decides everything in the future. Sure it was about time travel and paradoxes, and the irony of human choices. But it wasn't too sci-fi to put me off.
She left, and I wandered the streets for hours, crying tears of release. All the while I thought on the truth of Bashaarat's words: past and future are the same, and we cannot change either, only know them more fully. My journey to the past had changed nothing, but what I had learned had changed everything, and I understood that it could not have been otherwise. If our lives are tales that Allah tells, then we are the audience as well as the players, and it is by living these tales that we receive their lessons.
Eponymous story 'Exhalation' came second in this collection. I was intrigued by the story's premise of removable and refillable lungs and humanoids. They're living beings, but not humans in terms of flesh and blood. Their bodies are mechanical and movement is controlled by rods and wires instead of muscles and tendons. The mechanical beings discover and realize that their existence is finite because the air pressure within their universe is being lowered. This contained universe will run out of air at its designated pace, and its inhabitants will die.
We are not really consuming air at all. The amount of air that I draw from each day's new pair of lungs is exactly as much as seeps out through the joints of my limbs and the seams of my casing, exactly as much as I am adding to the atmosphere around me; all I am doing is converting air at high pressure to air at low. With every movement of my body, I contribute to the equalization of pressure in our universe. With every thought that I have, I hasten the arrival of that fatal equilibrium.
The third story 'What's Expected of Us' is short, and unexpectedly enjoyable as a social critique. In this story, a small device called 'Predictor' sets everyone on a path to either normalcy, neutrality or depression and self-destruction. It's pretty much like how we allow our devices that much control over our emotions and well-being.
Typically, a person plays with Predictor compulsively for several days, showing it to friends, trying various schemes to outwit the device. The person may appear to lose interest in it, but no one can forget what it means; over the following weeks, the implications of an immutable future sink in. Some people, realizing that their choices don't matter, refuse to make any choices at all. Like a legion of Bartleby the scriveners, they no longer engage in spontaneous action. Eventually, a third of those who play with a Predictor must be hospitalized because they won't feed themselves. The end state is akinetic autism, a kind of waking coma. They'll track motion with their eyes, and change position occasionally, but nothing more. The ability to move remains, but the motivation is gone.
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