If you love science fiction and want something really different, this might be the best thing you read all year.
Exhalation is a series of science fiction short stories with inspirations ranging from ancient Arab storytelling traditions to Monty Python sketches. I know this because Chiang provides a brief commentary at the end of many of the stories as to how it came about. As you might imagine, this diversity of inspirations creates an enormous variety in the stories. You might follow a portal to the past at the back of a store in medieval Bagdad. You might read the lab notes of an alien scientist dissecting his own brain. You might discover an invention that proves that free will is as false as it is necessary to life.
This series of short stories does exactly what science fiction is supposed to do – help you think outside yourself and your world view to different ways of being. What I think makes it particularly appealing to people already fond of this genre is that this is not a primer to speculative fiction. He is not here to introduce you to the tropes of time travel, artificial intelligence, alien life, and so on. He is here to take those ideas and play with them. Where these tropes are often used to tell large scale stories about the future of humanity, Chiang’s stories feel deeply grounded and personal in a way that transforms them from the ordinary. It’s easy to say that artificial intelligence should be granted personhood as a general philosophical perspective, but at what point? And to what extent? What are the mechanisms that might be employed in the evolution of artificial intelligence towards personhood? And what does that teach us about what personhood is, or what family is? What does that teach us about free will and choice?
That’s not to say that I think folks new to the genre wouldn’t also get a lot out of these books. If you have shied away from the scale of most science fiction, or aren’t particularly interested with the technological or scientific focus of most science fiction, this much more grounded approach might be the thing that gets you into it.
If you are considering reading it, I suggest you skip reviews. Go into it knowing as little as possible. Let the story take you on an unexpected journey. Let it build up your expectations and then subvert them in ways that seem inevitable in hindsight.
For folks who enjoy audiobooks, this one is excellent.