Ted Chiang’s diverse collection of short stories challenges the limits of the speculative fiction genre. The settings vary from an argon-based planet to medieval Baghdad, and the narrators are just as varied, including a parrot, archaeologist and mechanical being. Each short story grapples with how setting only one characteristic of society askew can have a dramatic impact on our understanding of humanness.
At first glance, Chiang’s short stories share similar themes to the Netflix anthology series Black Mirror. “The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling” introduces Remem, a new technology that records every moment of your day and allows users to auto-recall memories. The narrative shares a striking similarity to the Black Mirror episode, “The Entire History of You,” as the narrator recalls past familial arguments. Unlike Black Mirror, however, Chiang’s stories have a distinct philosophical edge without being downright dystopian. The narrator, who is a journalist, considers Remem’s potential impact on social interactions and imagines the scenario outlined in “The Entire History of You” as just one possible outcome.
“The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling” bounces between the Remem narrative and a second historical fiction sub-story, narrated by a man from the Tiv, a community in Nigeria and Cameroon. The man is the first to learn how to read and write in his town and eventually concludes that this type of communication is incompatible with his community’s oral tradition. Chiang takes a potentially dystopic situation and provides several vantage points for readers to contemplate how societies communicate and what’s subjectively ‘good.’
The Black Mirror creators, on the other hand, synthesize their understanding of the contemporary and serve us a steaming, ready-made dystopia. Charlie Brooker, the architect of Black Mirror, argues the episodes are “all about the way we live now—and the way we might be living in 10 minutes’ time if we’re clumsy.” The true horror of Black Mirror as a dystopic series is not that it’s speculative, but inevitable.
Meanwhile, Chiang not only speculates on how technology will influence our future but also proposes a variety of scenarios within that future. In the case of Remem, the journalist concludes, “People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we’ve lived; they’re the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments. Which is why, even when we’ve experienced the same events as other individuals, we never constructed identical narratives: the criteria used for selecting moments were different for each of us, and a reflection of our personalities.” Chiang’s attention to the personal is what makes his narratives engaging and his use of the short story format all the more impressive.
Evan Kindley, a reporter for The Nation, argues that for audiences, “the idea of spending weeks or years exploring a dystopian world is unappealing on its face, not only because these worlds are bleak but because, after a while, you get the point already.” In Exhalation, audiences move in-and-out of each short story so quickly that often the dystopic element is set up but never comes to full fruition. In the short story “Exhalation,” a scientist, who is a member of a mechanical race, discovers how their world will eventually end, yet readers never experience it firsthand. The story is structured as a series of letters, where we contemplate the meaning of life with Chiang’s robotic scientist rather than view the destruction of his argon-based world.
Exhalation constructs a series of alternate realities that allow readers to contemplate their present in tandem with mechanical beings, parrots and evangelical archeologists. Despite the likelihood that one of these dystopic scenarios will one day come true, we will continue to think, discuss and live:
“All my desires and ruminations are no more or less than eddy currents generated by the gradual exhalation of our universe. And until this great exhalation is finished, my thoughts live on.”
Stats
Title: Exhalation
Author: Ted Chiang
Publication Year: 2019
Pages: 350