The longest, the moving and magisterial “The Lifecycle of Software Objects,” spans more than a hundred pages the shortest barely cracks four. No two of Exhalation’s stories are alike. The word “genius” gets bandied around a lot these days Exhalation proves that Chiang deserves it.įor the true brilliance of Chiang’s work lies in his range and versatility as a storyteller. It’s immediately clear, too, why Chiang is so revered in genre circles, or why his small body of work has swept just about every science fiction award you can name. Exhalation is the sort of book that’s so good it’s hard to know what to say about it besides “read it.” Every sentence fits every word glimmers the level of precision, like an engineer crafting a line of code, is evident in every line. Yet if two decades are the cost of admission for stories as immaculate as these, so be it. Exhalation is his first book in nearly two decades-since 2002’s Stories of Your Life and Others-and brings together the mere seven (!) stories he’s published in the last 17 (!!) years, plus two new stories written for this book. New work from the notoriously non-prolific Chiang is, to put it mildly, an event. But the patient reader who heeds Fuwaad’s-and Chiang’s-entreaty will find a narrative every bit as dizzying and mindbending as the writer’s reputation suggests: 1001 Arabian Nights by way of Back to the Future Part II. It’s true that “The Merchant,” at least in its opening pages, bears little resemblance to Arrival’s alien invasion dramatics, or for that matter, the sci-fi genre in general. But it doubles as a preamble for Chiang’s entire oeuvre, especially for those first-time readers who, lured by the author who wrote the short story that inspired 2016’s soulful sci-fi blockbuster Arrival, are likely double-checking the dust jacket right around now to make sure they picked up the right book. “If it pleases your Majesty,” he offers, “I will recount it here.”įuwaad’s loquacious introduction is the perfect beginning for “The Merchant,” which loops tales within tales and riffs on the intricate narrative structure of 1001 Arabian Nights. “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” the first story in Ted Chiang’s luminous new collection Exhalation, opens with a benediction: “O mighty caliph and commander of the faithful, I am humbled to be in the splendor of your presence.” Our narrator, Fuwaad ibn Abbas, informs us that he was born “here in Baghdad, City of Peace,” and that he has spent his life as a “purveyor of fine fabrics…silk from Damascus and linen from Egypt and scarves from Morocco that are embroidered with gold.” Now, he stands in attendance before the caliph “without a single dirham in my purse,” but with a strange and winding story to tell.
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