Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I've long since discovered that professing a mildly negative opinon of a piece of sci-fi will not be popular. Sci-fi enthusiasts are just that -- enthusiasts -- and nobody else reads it. Chiang is one of the better science writers out there, at least when he sticks to essays and other nonfiction. So here goes nothing. In Exhalation, Chiang attempts something fiendishly difficult: Writing about very complex scientific and (especially) philosophy-of-science topics through fiction. Making correct points about the science and the philosophy is hard enough -- and good science writers are worth their weight in gold -- but adding to that challenge the idea of compelling story-telling and characters? Fughettaboutit. I doubt Tolstroy could have pulled that off, had he heard of quantum physics. And Chiang very much does not pull it off. He barely tries. The "stories" here are just cover. They're gimmicks, presumably fashioned to put his book in a different section of the bookstore where it might be noticed. There are no notable characters, to say nothing of character development. Except for one story (the first in the collection) no settings to speak of. And the stories themselves are clearly secondary to the explanations he gives of the philosophical problem he's addressing. Several are WAY too long. The short ones are better, because one doesn't expect much in the way of typical story elements in something that lasts 6 or 8 pages. But when you're reading a 70 page short story you kind of expect to care about characters, form a picture of the setting in your head, and engage with a real story. The topics he's writing about are at the same time old and new: Time travel, the alternate universe theory of quantum physics, artificial life forms, memory assistance devices, and so forth. Not much is in here that you would not have encountered as a philosopher of science in the 1970's. All of it has been written about more compellingly elsewhere, by scientists as well as general subject authors. Even by sci-fi authors on occasion! That Chiang's attemps are in this particular form is unusual, but that doesn't make the impact any more powerful. There are a couple very well done pieces in here. The first story, about time travel and taking place in 17th century Baghdad and Cairo, is lovely and moving. Another, about a robot alien whose world is dying, and who is journalistically describing the reaction of its inhabitants to that news, is spare and unexpectedly beautiful. But the two centerpieces are absolute duds. One is an endless story about creators of software "animals" and their relationship through the real-virtual divide. The subject isn't all that interesting and in any case it drags incessantly. The human characters -- a common problem here -- are boring, generic and lazily drawn, which makes the whole "difficult question" a lot less compelling. And the vague "sometime in the near future" setting is barely addressed. It feels like something written by a high school geek for a special project in English Lit. The second showcase, the last in the collection, is a little better: A story about a machine that can connect people to their "alternate selves" in another universe. It has a little verve to it, and the characters have some dimensionality, but in the end it kind of fizzles out too and gets us nowhere with the characters. The ironic thing about sci-fi is that at its best it tells us something about ourselves, rather than the unfamiliar people n the stories. When you're done you feel like you've been shown something that any great novelist could show you, just from a different direction. Chiang doesn't do that here at all. Exhilation isn't terrible. The writing's pretty solid (if uninspired -- Chiang REALLY needs to take a lesson in how to fit his dialog, which is always the same and in exactly the same tone as his prose -- to his characters). The issues are real and very much worth pondering. But this should have been a collection of essays, not stories. It would not have sold as well, but it would have read a whole lot better.