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A review by billyjepma
Exhalation by Ted Chiang
5.0
This was exceptional. Chiang’s writing isn’t flashy or stunningly verbose, but it is gentle and precise and moving. The stories in this collection, while technically science fiction, feel like something much more than that. They grapple with a variety of themes and genre tropes but ever retread familiar ground. Instead, they find new and fascinating ways of conveying familiar, lasting emotions. And that’s something few writers can do as smoothly as Chiang does here.
Not every story hits its mark perfectly—although more than a couple do—but everyone is told with such palpable care and sincerity that I was never bored and always enamored.
This was my first experience with Chiang’s work—outside of the film “Arrival,” which is brilliant in its own right and based off of/inspired by one of his earlier stories—and it’s going to stick with me for a very long time.
Not every story hits its mark perfectly—although more than a couple do—but everyone is told with such palpable care and sincerity that I was never bored and always enamored.
This was my first experience with Chiang’s work—outside of the film “Arrival,” which is brilliant in its own right and based off of/inspired by one of his earlier stories—and it’s going to stick with me for a very long time.