I’ve just finished Ted Chiang’s Exhalation, and I need to talk about it. Ever since I read The Lifecycle of Software Objects, I knew I had to read the rest of the collection. Exhalation was named one of the New York Times best books of the year in 2019. They are excellent stories, but in many ways unusual. So let’s investigate: what sets Chiang’s work apart?
First, let’s take a look at the namesake story, Exhalation (spoiler warning, if you haven’t read Exhalation, I recommend you pick it up!). This story is strange, weird with a capital D. The protagonist is an argon powered robot, living in a syringe-like universe, encased in chromium. Over the course of the tale we watch the robot perform an autopsy on its own brain, discover that the machinations of his mind are based on air pressure, and that the pressure of the universe is depleting. One day, he and all his fellow robots will die. He then asks us to contemplate, what that might mean for life in the universe in general.
Notably absent from this story is any form of traditional character conflict. This robot is never accosted, never interrogated, does not even contemplate his relationship with other robots other than a vague fear that his desire to dissect himself will be deemed unwise. The character is not in any immediate peril, yes his environment is dying, but it will happen long after the robot has expired naturally. As far as I can tell, the vast majority of the story takes place with the robot alone in his home office.
So why, then, is this story fascinating? Why is it entertaining? It appears, on the surface, to break many of the traditional “rules” of storytelling. There are many different sources of pleasure in reading, the pleasure of awaiting conflict, the pleasure of fanciful descriptions, of clever dialogue. Chiang has mastered the pleasure of investigating an idea. Chiang uses a character’s personal revelation to walk you through a concept, but, in order for this to work, I believe he needs to provide something new, something novel, for both the character and the reader. Exhalation becomes more than a story about robots, it becomes a contemplation of the inevitability of death, a memento mori in the traditional sense.
The second ingredient, after proposing an interesting speculative concept, is to use characters to illustrate the moral ramifications of an idea. To use an example from The Lifecycle of Software Objects: Chiang could say, outright, that it is probably wrong to erase the memory of an A.I. But it is much more powerful when he casts a child-like animal in the role of an A.I., shows it experiencing its first time rolling down a hill, and then has the CEO wipe its memory. At that point the feeling is guttural. He doesn’t have to tell you it’s wrong.
I think, if you are trying to do this for yourself, you might run this litmus test: is there some way my sci-fi concept could ruin a person’s life, or perhaps change it for the better? Might this idea make someone depressed, emotionally unstable, elated? Might it have different consequences for different people?Chiang uses this technique in several stories, and I think it’s one of the easier techniques to adopt for your own writing.
Let’s play with an idea, say, simulation theory, the idea that we’re all living in a computer simulation. What if this was verifiably true? Can you give two different characters different perspectives on this idea? Maybe one of them decides life is meaningless if their actions are completely programatic, maybe another believes it doesn’t change anything, the sky is still blue, captain crunch still tastes good, literally nothing has changed. Now, make them husband and wife, or father and daughter. This creates the potential for drama, disagreement, allows characters to explore the concept without feeling didactic, and I also think is a key ingredient for digging deep finding that sense of novelty.
Chiang is not the first writer to work in this mode. Borges work was certainly in this vein. Even Lovecraft, to an extent, used a similar method of investigation to drive his horror. But I think this style of storytelling is often overlooked. If you enjoy science philosophy, I encourage you to write down your ideas as thought experiments, to put a character in a place where they are perfectly suited to benefit from, or be destroyed by, a new world view. Your readers might even learn something in the process.