Ted Chiang writes science fiction short stories built around a single speculative idea pursued with unusual logical precision. Stories of Your Life and Others includes “Story of Your Life”, in which a linguist learns an alien language that changes how she experiences time, as well as stories about mathematics, religion and artificial intelligence. Exhalation gathers later work on machine consciousness, free will, memory and alternate realities, including “The Lifecycle of Software Objects” and the title story. Chiang’s prose is clear and controlled, often resembling a philosophical thought experiment more than action-driven science fiction. Characters matter because they reveal the human consequences of an idea rather than because they carry long adventure plots. His work fits philosophical science fiction, first-contact fiction and speculative short stories. Readers of Greg Egan or Jorge Luis Borges may appreciate the same interest in concepts that reshape the reader’s assumptions. Read more Less
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