Just as with his first short story collection, Stories of Your Life and Others, Ted Chiang’s Exhalation is an exquisite book of speculative fiction. The first story, “Merchant at the Alchemist’s Gate,” is set in Baghdad. In it, the narrator recounts his experience with the alchemist’s gate, a portal which allows a user to time travel twenty years in either direction of their life. Framing-wise, this piece is constructed as stories within a story with the alchemist recounting the tales of others to the merchant who in turn tells the king. This is a brilliantly constructed story exposing the continuous and fluid nature of one’s life.

The book’s eponymous story, “Exhalation,” is narrated by a character whose species lives and breathes argon. A strange occurrence prompts the narrator, an anatomist, to dissect himself in order to explore his brain. No pun intended, but this is a breathtaking story which drew me into a universe so distant yet so close to my own.

Spanning four pages, “What’s Expected of Us” is a flash fiction-length piece where small devices called Predictors prove that free will doesn’t exist. This story is succinct and smartly examines the notion of free will.

The fourth story in the collection, “The Lifecycle of Software Objects,” could stand alone as a novella. “Lifecycle” follows the characters Ana and Derek over two decades beginning with both of them working at a company developing digital creatures for a popular online gaming world. As the narrative progresses, the dichotomy between virtual versus reality breaks down and the story instead explores more of the space between virtual versus actual. In the latter, users like Ana and Derek have real, embodied experiences in the virtual gaming world which permeate into their daily lives.

Set in the Victorian Era, “Dacey’s Patent Automatic Nanny” is framed as a piece taken from a museum catalog recounting the invention of an autonomous nanny. “Automatic Nanny” elicits a familiar feeling of nostalgia fueled by popular media around this era while anchoring the reader in the continuous question of the human experiment of questioning what the best child-rearing practices are.

“The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling” is a dual narrative story exploring the proliferation of a new technology which records every second of a person’s life as well as the introduction of written language into a society built on the oral tradition. “Truth” is an interesting investigation into memory and language, exploring ideas like who and what gets remembered and who constructs narratives and what it means to have words absent and present in a given language.

Told from the perspective of a parrot, “The Great Silence” is a fable remarking upon humanity’s destruction of its habitat. It’s a frank commentary on the disastrous effects the Anthropocene has on nature while still maintaining a belief that humanity can right itself.

“Omphalos” is set in a world where religion is dominant and the primary role of scientific inquiry is in pursuit of showing evidence of the divine. The story is told through prayers made by a woman who’s an archaeologist whose faith is tested by a discovery made by an astronomer. Complementarity to other pieces in this collection exploring free will, “Omphalos” poses the theist question of divine intent.

In the final story of the collection, “Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom,” devices called prisms allow users to access and communicate with a version of themselves in a divergent existence. While many of us go through our lives wondering about the “what if?” this story tackles this idea head-on, showing how people react to seeing a different version of themselves and how having that knowledge can make one’s present existence better or worse. As exemplified in Exhalation, Chiang’s writing is a masterclass in how inquisitiveness can shape beautiful and rich narratives which frame and explore worlds in utterly intriguing ways.