Ted Chiang, _Exhalation_

MY READING HISTORY with science fiction: vexed. As a person with an interest in literature generally, I felt under a kind of obligation to sample the masters and read at least one book apiece by Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. LeGuin, Samuel Delany, and William Gibson. Nothing ever really clicked, though. I read some more books by Delany, but not his fiction, and I never connected strongly enough with any of the others to be much tempted to pick up a second book. As for Frank Herbert and Neal Stephenson, I was not able to finish even one.

This book was getting such good reviews, though, that I thought, okay, got to at least give him a fair trial (this being volume # 6 of the "read more short story collections" program here at Loads of Learned Lumber).

And it is great. 

I have already bought and am looking forward to reading Chiang's first collection of stories (Exhalation is the second).

What is different about Chiang? As in a lot--most, I guess--science fiction, he assumes some kind of now-remote possibility has become possible, and uses the resources of invented characters and settings to play out the conflicts and developments that might follow from that actualization. The possibilities employed here are not particularly novel ones, I suspect, within the sci-fi domain: artificial intelligence, the trans-human, multiple universes, speculations about free will and time travel. Chiang seems so wise, though, so humane, so interested in the minds and feelings of his characters (Sci-fi often stumbles at this, I feel), that his fiction delivers the satisfactions and insights of literary fiction while starting from different premises. Delany was good at this, too, and Delany writes extremely well, but Chiang seems to me head, shoulders, and upper torso above all the other sci-fi writers I have read, Delany aside.

Chiang also seems alert to the way institutions and culture would shape the kinds of possibilities he imagines. LeGuin had the anthropology covered, but Chiang seems additionally skillful in imagining how (for example) market forces and family dynamics would be a part of the possible futures that technological change might unlock.

I wonder if he is working on a novel.