** 12th book of 2021: Sci-Factoids **
To be a nerdy American millennial is to have unprecedented privilege in asking ‘what if?’
Not only do we benefit from sci-fi’s boom in American pop-culture, but wikipedia and search engines enable curiosity about time-paradoxes or quantum theory to be answered in an instant.
So despite, or perhaps because of my proclivities in such pursuits, I found Exhalation underwhelming.
As written in Truth of Fact, Truth of Feeling: We are made of stories, and nothing can change that. What sets a story apart from a wikipedia article is the setting and the characters, which allow synthesizing human emotion with interesting idea. This is Chiang’s achilles heel: settings were often flat and characters felt recycled from story to story.
The Life Cycle of Software Objects, perhaps through it’s length and ability to go deeper into some of the characters was the only story I really enjoyed, and I appreciated pithy quotes in Truth of Fact, Truth of Feeling, such as: * “We became cognitive cyborgs as soon as we became fluent readers. *
Finishing the book felt like a chore, it may just be that sci-fi short stories are not my thing.
Alchemist’s Gate: ★★☆☆☆ Exhalation: ★★☆☆☆ Life Cycle of Software Objects: ★★★★☆ Truth of Fact, Truth of Feeling: ★★★☆☆ Omphalos ★★☆☆☆ Anxiety is the dizziness of Freedom ★★☆☆☆