“The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling” imagines a software product that works as a kind of digital memory, always exact and always precise, and puts it in parallel with the way the technology of reading and writing has already shaped human memory.Ĭhiang is thoughtful about the rules of his imagined technologies.
“The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” imagines a time machine that obeys Einstein’s theory of relativity - essentially a doorway that you walk through from the present, emerging on the other side a fixed period of time into either the past or the future - and riffs on ideas about predestination in an Arabian Nights-inspired nest of stories. But you can always trust that the machine’s inventor has plotted out that pattern with exquisite precision.Ĭhiang writes what could be loosely described as “thinky sci-fi.” His stories tend to introduce a single scientific idea or paradox, and then dramatize it. And this machine is made up of intricately connected parts, all moving in a pattern of such complexity that you can’t always be sure that you’re following it. The go-to cliché when a critic is reviewing a particularly lovely collection of short stories is to say that they are “jewel-like”: that they are elegant and discrete little gems of story, shimmering away on the page.Įxhalation - the newest short-story collection from Ted Chiang, author of the novella that was adapted into the 2016 Amy Adams movie Arrival - is not jewel-like.
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