Following the virtual pet owners of “Lifecycle,” you feel, on a visceral level, that uncanniness alongside the affection, wonder, and stress of a young parent. But I don’t think Chiang’s point would carry quite so effectively if it weren’t made through watching his characters work out their machine relationships in real time. Interacting with machines has a fundamental ghostliness to it, and while those interactions will evolve and refine, that uncanny valley in socialization will persist. It’s a theme I love, that a lot of people write about, and I happen to agree with Chiang’s outlook that these relationships will neither be exact replicas of human bonds or be totally dissimilar, either. pets in the former, mechanized nannies in the latter. (Who knew they’d resonate so well together!) In “The Lifecycle of Software Objects” and “Dacey’s Patent Automatic Nanny,” Chiang explores different emotional relationships we develop with machines-virtual A.I. The first story, “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” is a time-travel adventure in medieval Baghdad, told like a nested story out of One Thousand and One Nights and it’s pure pleasure to read, melding causal paradoxes with Islamic parable.
It’s remarkable how good these thought experiments are as stories: they’re plotty and richly imagined, with enjoyable characters in high-stakes conflicts. Or take the title story, which is as perfect a Ted Chiang story as you can get it’s so beautifully, dreamily strange I feel like a jerk trying to summarize it, but here goes: an anatomist from a race of robots takes apart his own brain and discovers within it a profound truth about the nature and limits of his universe.
Chiang chases his premise into linguistics, anthropology, geology, special relativity there’s a palpable glee you feel as he follows a character pressing on all the seams of her world. Like Stories of Your Life and Others, Chiang’s second collection Exhalation includes story notes in the back, in which he explains how “Omphalos,” for example, started as the question, “What would the world have to look like for it to confirm young-Earth creationism?” Tree rings in fossils could only go so far back before they’d just stop the mummies of primordial humans would lack navels.
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