JULY 2019 - AudioFile
Three talented narrators—Edoardo Ballerini, Dominic Hoffman, and Amy Landon—share the task of voicing these nine sci-fi stories. The theme of Ted Chiang's thought-provoking collection is technology and its sometimes unexpected impacts on society. The works touch on the topics of time travel, fate versus free will, and artificial intelligence, among others. The narrators effectively deliver Middle Eastern and African accents, along with the voices of robots, and present stories featuring technical details without sounding stiff or unnatural. Chiang himself provides commentary after each of the stories, explaining its inspiration and helping to shed light on its meaning. S.E.G. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
★ 12/17/2018
Hugo- and Nebula-winner Chiang’s standout second collection (after 2002’s Stories of Your Life and Others) explores the effects that technology and knowledge have on consciousness, free will, and the human desire for meaning. These nine stories introduce life-changing inventions and new worlds with radically different physical laws. In each, Chiang produces deeply moving drama from fascinating first premises. The title story follows a scientist whose self-experimentation reveals both the origin and eventual fate of consciousness. In “What’s Expected of Us,” a small device horrifically alters human behavior. Chiang’s rigorous worldbuilding makes hard science fiction out of stories that would otherwise be fable, as in the Hugo and Nebula-winning novelette “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” a time travel story that employs both relativistic physics and an Arabian Nights–style structure. Others grapple with robots parenting humans, humans parenting AIs, the Fermi paradox, quantum mechanics, and what it means to be a sentient creature facing a potentially deterministic universe. As Chiang’s endnotes attest, these stories are brilliant experiments, and his commitment to exploring deep human questions elevates them to among the very best science fiction. Agent: Kirby Kim, Janklow & Nesbit. (May)
From the Publisher
Ted Chiang’s stories are lean, relentless, and incandescent.”
—Colson Whitehead, author of The Underground Railroad
“Ted Chiang writes with such a matter-of-fact grace and visionary power that one simply takes on faith that his worlds and his characters exist, whether they are human or robot or parrot; he is the rare author who makes me feel, also, that he believes in his readers, in our integrity and our imagination.”
—Karen Russell, author of Orange World
“Ted Chiang has no contemporary peers when it comes to the short story form. His name deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Carver, Poe, Borges, and Kafka. Every story is a universe. Every story is a diamond. You will inhale Exhalation in a single, stunned sitting, because true genius doesn’t come along nearly as often as advertised. This is the real thing.”
—Blake Crouch, author of Dark Matter
“Chiang’s long-awaited second collection. . .continues to explore emotional and metaphysical landscapes with precise and incisive prose. . . . Chiang remains one of the most skilled stylists in sf, and this will appear to genre and literary-fiction fans alike.”
—Booklist (starred review)
“An instant classic. . . . Visionary speculative stories that will change the way readers see themselves and the world around them: This book delivers in a big way.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Chiang produces deeply moving drama from fascinating first premises. . . . These stories are brilliant experiments, and his commitment to exploring deep human questions elevates them to among the very best science fiction.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Chiang is always thought provoking, and his latest collection is no exception.”
—Library Journal (starred review)
“Chiang is a master. . . . The Alice Munro of science fiction.”
—LitHub
“Ted Chiang is one of the best science fiction writers in the field today.”
—The Verge
“[Chiang] is so good that this book qualifies as an event.”
—Newsday
“From Ted Chiang’s singular mind comes another innovative and mind-bending collection of short stories. With boundless empathy, curiosity, and wisdom, Chiang asks all the important questions that come with being human. Reading Exhalation is like standing outside on a clear, starry night. Chiang’s writing does what good writing should: make the universe feel both vast and small at the same time.”
—Rachel Khong, author of Goodbye, Vitamin
“Ted Chiang brings to science fiction both the refined human insight of the best contemporary literature and the shapeliness and resonance of myth. Stories of Your Life and Others has proven to be one of the finest collections of the last twenty years, and Exhalation, if anything, outdistances it. Surely the grace, lucidity, intensity, heart, and intelligence of these stories will allow them to endure.” —Kevin Brockmeier, author of The View From the Seventh Layer
“There’s so much excellence in the labyrinth of ideas in Exhalation—machines that question free will, AIs that challenge love, software that shapes memory—what truly astounds is the tenderness that pulses through each story like a heartbeat. When I read Ted Chiang, I am reminded not only of what might be, but what is: our own humanity, realized again and again through wonder, language, and empathy. He is not only at the top of his genre, but a true storyteller, and one of our most skilled and fascinating. I am so excited to live in a world where Ted Chiang is writing.”
—Aja Gabel, author of The Ensemble
JULY 2019 - AudioFile
Three talented narrators—Edoardo Ballerini, Dominic Hoffman, and Amy Landon—share the task of voicing these nine sci-fi stories. The theme of Ted Chiang's thought-provoking collection is technology and its sometimes unexpected impacts on society. The works touch on the topics of time travel, fate versus free will, and artificial intelligence, among others. The narrators effectively deliver Middle Eastern and African accents, along with the voices of robots, and present stories featuring technical details without sounding stiff or unnatural. Chiang himself provides commentary after each of the stories, explaining its inspiration and helping to shed light on its meaning. S.E.G. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2019-02-17
Exploring humankind's place in the universe and the nature of humanity, many of the stories in this stellar collection focus on how technological advances can impact humanity's evolutionary journey.
Chiang's (Stories of Your Life and Others, 2002) second collection begins with an instant classic, "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate," which won Hugo and Nebula awards for Best Novelette in 2008. A time-travel fantasy set largely in ancient Baghdad, the story follows fabric merchant Fuwaad ibn Abbas after he meets an alchemist who has crafted what is essentially a time portal. After hearing life-changing stories about others who have used the portal, he decides to go back in time to try to right a terrible wrong—and realizes, too late, that nothing can erase the past. Other standout selections include "The Lifecycle of Software Objects," a story about a software tester who, over the course of a decade, struggles to keep a sentient digital entity alive; "The Great Silence," which brilliantly questions the theory that humankind is the only intelligent race in the universe; and "Dacey's Patent Automatic Nanny," which chronicles the consequences of machines raising human children. But arguably the most profound story is "Exhalation" (which won the 2009 Hugo Award for Best Short Story), a heart-rending message and warning from a scientist of a highly advanced, but now extinct, race of mechanical beings from another universe. Although the being theorizes that all life will die when the universes reach "equilibrium," its parting advice will resonate with everyone: "Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so."
Visionary speculative stories that will change the way readers see themselves and the world around them: This book delivers in a big way.
