Tom Dheere

An interesting short story that started off reminding me strongly of Asimov, but eventually established its own voice- sort of. With its first pages Exhalation presents us with a narrative that leaves us uncertain about the rules of this universe. The characters are clearly not people as we know them, though they think and communicate as we do. The opening reminded me of the Asimov short stories "A Feeling of Power" (with the discovery/rediscovery of fundamental knowledge) and “The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline” (except Chiang's story mimics the format of a scientist's magazine article instead of a scientific research paper). These similarities weren't a bad thing, but kept the first pages from feeling fresh and new to me. After that, as the unnamed narrator makes discovery after discovery, the similarities that struck me weren't drawn from other science fiction stories but real-world natural philosophers. The main dissection of the brain was strongly reminiscent of Newton's exploration of his own eye with a needle, then the musings on the nature of the narrator's universe can't help but bring to mind the work of Copernicus and Carnot. Again, by no means a bad thing, in fact Chiang clearly meant for these comparisons to occur to the reader, but the problem I had was that after mirroring the ideas in this fictional universe Chiang doesn't do much with them- he describes some instances of unrest and despair, but then ends the story with a message of hope. It's a nice message of hope, to be sure, equally applicable to our world as it is to the fictional one, but it's not one that had much of an impact with me. I was already planning to continue with my life, despite the inevitability of death and the seemingly inevitable heat death of the universe, and while this story reminded me of that decision, it didn't inspire me in any way that I wasn't inspired before. Scratch that last sentence, actually, it did inspire me to revisit Asimov's The Last Question at some point in the not-too-distant-future. Now there's a 5 star science fiction story that does the heat death of the universe right.… (meer)