6/6/2023 0 Comments Exhalation short story![]() I think one added demerit is that many of the stories have a clear narrator that’s telling us what happened (often in what feels like a form of a letter or report – see Exhalation, Dacey’s Patent Automatic Nanny) and quite often, adding in this thoughts about the whole thing. ![]() ![]() It is a pity because The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate has a clever structure wherein the all the smaller stories lead to one big story by the end. This was really obvious in the shorter stories, like The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate and What’s Expected Of Us (both seem to have the message that you can’t change fate). I’m not super familiar with science-fiction short stories, so I don’t know if it’s a trope of the genre, but I found that almost all the stories had a Very Obvious Point and as someone who dislikes clear authorial messages in fiction (I don’t mind reading your treatise but just make it a nonfiction book), it rubbed me the wrong way. It’s always a bit scary to read something by someone that has earned multiple awards for their writing, because what if you don’t like it? That was my experience with Exhalation, a collection of science-fiction short stories by Ted Chiang. ![]()
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