“Exhalation” by Ted Chiang (2008) | Hacker News Reader

“Exhalation” by Ted Chiang (2008)

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137 pointsmonort33 comments

Having just watched Black Mirror and Westworld, I was totally bummed about how much near-future sci-fi is so goddamned depressing. Yesterday I decided to reread a story I love, "The Lifecycle of Software Objects," coincidentally also by Ted Chiang. It's a nice AI story that you can get through in one sitting. Highly recommend.

Read it here: http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2010/fiction_the_...

That might be my favorite Ted Chiang story overall. Unfortunately Hollywood couldn't touch it with a ten foot pole, so I'm not expecting a movie out of it any time soon. His biblical fiction is quite good as well, and I could see them getting movie adaptations.

I'm not sure that "Lifecycle" is less palatable to mainstream Hollywood than "Hell Is the Absence of God", but would be thrilled to be wrong.

I think Absence could be done as a cool horror movie, kind of like Legion but not shitty and more existential.

Consider "72 letters": it's brilliant, long but no overly long, packed with ideas and plot twists, and it does stand a chance of becoming a Hollywood movie. (Not that the latter is necessarily a good thing, but still.)

s/unfortunately/fortunately

I disagree with your implication that a Hollywood adaptation is the ultimate aspiration of all written works.

I quite enjoyed Arrival. If all of Chiang's stories could get adaptations of similar quality I would be quite happy.

I recently started reading through his work. And although I've enjoyed his stories in general, they have all been solidly in the "depressing" category for me.

So far I have read "Story of your life", "Exhalation", "72 letters", "Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate", "Divide by Zero", "Understand", "What's Expected of us", and "Hell is the Absence of God". I am about 50% through "Lifecycle of Software Objects".

So far, the stories all seem built on the foundation that we reside in an immutable clockwork universe and that the notion of "Free Will" is a complete illusion. It is this combination of absence of free will and "the future is already set and there is nothing you can do about it" that I find depressing. That I am merely a meat robot programmed to act in specific ways and that my actions therefore have no real meaning (because they are no chosen, but simply a result of my program).

The only real exception so far as been "Hell is the Absence of God" which was a black comedy exploration of "what if there really was a God, and he was a complete asshole?" which was depressing in it's own special way :)

That said... On the whole I find Chiang's stories engaging, imaginative, and well crafted. Recommended reading if you like near-future science fiction, AI, time travel, or genetics.

Slight spoilers for Exhalation ahead.

> So far, the stories all seem built on the foundation that we reside in an immutable clockwork universe and that the notion of "Free Will" is a complete illusion.

I do not find this depressing, because that is how reality appears to me. I can't say for sure if that's what Ted Chiang thinks as well, but the way I interpret his work is that he is attempting to point out the beauty in the universe as it is, not as it might appear to be. The protagonist of Exhalation is a perfect example. Having pulled aside the veil to the inner workings of his mind (the movement of air through intricate channels is in principle, deterministic, there is hardly room for "free will"), he finds greater understanding and an expansive wonder at what life is, not depression.

I wholeheartedly agree. I just read Exhalation, and I actually found the end rather uplifting. When presented with the same realities we face, the focus on the positive and the still unknown exemplifies the best of the human spirit (even if presented through the lense of an alien).

I didn't get anything about a lack of free will from that story -- it's more a reflection of the inevitability of thermodynamics. Their life is driven by a pressure gradient, we're driven by a similar entropy gradient.

There's a story I read a few years ago, I think from Wilson, about the universe as it stretches out in time, hundreds of trillions of years from now, into the heat death of the universe. It's the same concept, thermodynamics, but a different scope.

[rot13 spoiler]Gur ebobg qvfpbiref gung vg unf ab frys. Vg vf whfg gur pheerag fgngr bs gur pbzcyrk, culfvpny fgngr znpuvar vafvqr vg'f urnq.[rot13]

... which is not precisely an argument against free will. Imho it's a close cousin though.

It's an argument for materialism and against dualism. It's a physical process that gives rise to consciousness, not a soul like thing that's separate from the material world.

Stepping back though, it's a voyage of inquiry and discovery and subsequent changes in civilization. None of that challenges free will, any more than fMRI does in our world. We have peered into the brain, and seen electrical signals that we don't understand. When we die, these go away, never to return.

(ob not xkcd: stimulus, response, stimulus response. Don't you ever think?)

Well, does it matter if you actually have free will, or does just feeling like you do suffice? If it does matter, what if the state machine is so complex that the future can't be known? If you can't determine the difference between free will and the alternative, and nobody and nothing else can, what's the difference?

To me, lack of free will isn't a problem as long as there aren't entities that can (or will) take advantage of that. It feels like worrying about the heat-death of the universe (appropriately enough).

First story by Chiang I read years ago, and loved it. Took me a while to remember who it was by when I looked for it again later.

I assume it's coming up because the movie Arrival [1] is based on Chiang's "Story of you Life" [2]?

[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543164/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Story_of_Your_Life

A sizeable contingent of Hacker News readers love Ted Chiang's stuff so it's not uncommon for links to his stories to surface on HN from time to time, but I think you're correct that Arrival's success has revived interest in his older stuff.

Futher discussion just over a week ago, where Exhalation was called "one of the best SF stories ever written", and several other recommendations were made:

Ted Chiang on Seeing His Stories Adapted and the Ever-Expanding Popularity of SF

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13053377

A friend just gave me a book of TC stories and I'm really enjoying them!

Arrival was, well it was a Hollywood movie, but I was so glad to see linguists in a film I had to see it and enjoy it.

The site is down for me, here's a mirror:

https://www.pastery.net/skwyyr/

Another favorite Ted Chiang short story: "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate". To me, it's one of the few stories that manage to incorporate time travel and still have it be meaningful while avoiding paradoxes.

What's great is that it's a straight sci-fi story that could be dropped into the Zipes adaptation of One Thousand and One Nights and none would be the wiser.

Definitely. It's actually one of those stories that I wouldn't be surprised if it inspires some new ideas for those who try to do serious research on time travel (or the polite way to say time travel among physicists: closed timelike curves.)

There's a splendid audio version at http://www.uvulaaudio.com/merchant.html

The first book about time travel I read nailed it — The Technicolor Time Machine.

This is one of my favorite short stories and such a fantastic metaphor for climate change.

I think you may have not entirely understood where he was going with that. It's a metaphor for entropy. It's actually a much more poignant and beautiful topic than something as short-term and universally inconsequential as climate change on earth.

That is indeed a more interesting interpretation. Thank you for making this already great story even greater to me!

Also a metaphor for the Simulation Hypothesis!

I like the way the narrator-hero is trapped in a sinister bell jar world and yet works optimistically to improve his knowledge of it. Regardless of outcome he sees no malevolence built into reality.

More than a metaphor, it is actually about entropy.

> It's actually a much more poignant and beautiful topic than something as short-term and universally inconsequential as climate change on earth.

I disagree- these mechanical people are well-nigh immortal and will leave to see the end of their world, no one alive today on earth will live to see the heat death of the universe. However, we might just get to experience the effects of climate change.

The beauty of literature is we can both the right - our interpretations of the work is what matters. Additionally, while they are inspired by them,authors do not necessarily do a 1:1 mapping of real world issues to their stories

Do you remember how they were talking about pressure equalization or looking for other universes that existed at a lower pressure? It's a pretty direct mapping from the story to (neg)entropy; it's not related to climate change except in the very vaguest sense.

Ted Chiang's stories on Kindle (including "Exhalation", "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" and "The Lifecycle of Software Objects"), if on-screen reading is tiresome: https://www.dropbox.com/s/wbhdyer9qfpexcm/Stories%20accessib...

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