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parenting, craving “not more contact
with a person, but more contact with a
machine.”
Where that brief story plays with
the format of dry catalogue copy, “The
Great Silence,” which is even briefer, is
the most lyrical and the most heart
rending story in the collection. The nar
rator is a parrot from a forest in Puerto
Rico, whose species is facing extinction.
“Hundreds of years ago, my kind was
so plentiful that the Río Abajo Forest
resounded with our voices,” the parrot
says. “Now we’re almost gone. Soon this
rainforest may be as silent as the rest
of the universe.” A larger silence is the
mystery that eludes solution:The universe is so vast that intelligent life
must surely have arisen many times. The uni-
verse is also so old that even one technological
species would have had time to expand and fill
the galaxy. Yet there is no sign of life anywhere
except on Earth. Humans call this the Fermi
Paradox.... The Fermi Paradox is sometimes
known as the Great Silence. The universe ought
to be a cacophony of voices, but instead it is dis-
concertingly quiet.Even as humans search for extraterres
trial intelligence, the narrator observes,
they can’t hear the messages being sent
by an imperilled species on their own
planet.
In another small bombshell of a story,
“What’s Expected of Us,” a newly de
veloped gadget called a Predictor flashes
a green light a second before you press
a button, thereby undermining the no
tion of free will. As it turns out, the Pre
dictor is a sort of miniature time ma
chine. (“The heart of each Predictor is
a circuit with a negative time delay; it
sends a signal back in time.”) One of
the consequences of the Predictor is an
existential malaise suffered by people
who can no longer believe in their own
volition—“akinetic mutism, a kind of
waking coma.” The narrator, whose
message is being sent “from just over a
year in your future,” has urgent advice
for the inhabitants of this world:
Pretend that you have free will. It’s essen-
tial that you behave as if your decisions matter,
even though you know they don’t. The reality
isn’t important: what’s important is your belief,
and believing the lie is the only way to avoid a
waking coma. Civilization now depends on
self-deception. Perhaps it always has.Another sort of civilizational threat
is illustrated in the parable “Exhalation,” where we learn that “the great
lung of the world, the source of all our
nourishment,” is gradually failing. Al
ready, everyone depends upon artificial
lungs, regularly refilled with air, for sur
vival. Individuals who have died when
their lungs are depleted can be revived
by installing full lungs, but, puzzlingly,
they fail to retain their old memories.
To explore the matter, the narrator, who
isn’t exactly human, undertakes to in
spect his own brain:
I began by removing the deeply curved plate
that formed the back and top of my head....
What I saw exposed was my own brain.... I
could tell it was the most beautifully complex
engine I had ever beheld, so far beyond any de-
vice man had constructed that it was incontro-
vertibly of divine origin.Still, as the “great lung of the world”
fails, all life must fail; there is no escap
ing this common fate—although the
tale ends with a sanguine “valediction”
to future inhabitants. (“Contemplate
the marvel that is existence, and rejoice
that you are able to do so.” ) Partly in
spired by Philip K. Dick’s “The Elec
tric Ant,” in which the protagonist dis
covers that he’s a robot whose sense of
reality is determined by a punch tape in
his torso, “Exhalation” manages to end
on a tonal note of uplift very different
from Dick’s.
The long, brooding “The Truth of
Fact, the Truth of Feeling” continues
these meditations on memory, explor
ing what happens when digital mem
ory (“Remem”) is introduced into a per
son’s “lifelog”:
Right now each of us is a private oral cul-
ture. We rewrite our pasts to suit our needs and
support the story we tell about ourselves. With
our memories we are all guilty of a Whig in-
terpretation of our personal histories, seeing
our former selves as steps toward our glorious
present selves.
But that era is coming to an end. Remem
is merely the first of a new generation of mem-
ory prostheses, and as these products gain wide-
spread adoption, we will be replacing our mal-
leable organic memories with perfect digital
archives.Once we acquiesce to the digital doc
umentation of what really happened,
rather than what we might wish to be
lieve happened, we can no longer take
refuge in our “subjective” selves. If this
were a dystopian vision of a cyborg fu
ture, such a development would rein
force our sense of humankind’s diminishment through scientific technology
(as in Orwell’s “1984,” in which Big
Brother never fails to keep us in his
sight). But Chiang’s vision of the fu
ture turns out to be unexpectedly op
timistic. After all, the narrator observes,
writing itself is a technology, and we
became “cognitive cyborgs as soon as
we became fluent readers.”
Of the nine stories in “Exhalation,”
the most ambitious is the novellalength
“The Lifecycle of Software Objects,” a
painstakingly detailed account, actually
a scientist’s log, charting the (erratic,
unpredictable) histories of persons in
timately involved with developing a
new, ingeniously programmed species
of virtual robots (“Blue Gamma di
gients”). A virtual digient can be down
loaded into a physical body, and there’s
a touching scene in which one such di
gient, Jax, approaches his human men
tor, Ana, startled to see “little hairs” on
her arms:
Jax brings up a hand and extends a thumb
and forefinger to grab some of the hairs. He makes
a couple of attempts, but like the pincers of a
claw vending machine, his fingers keep slipping
off. Then he pinches her skin and pulls back.
“Ow. Jax, that hurts.”
“Sorry.” Jax scrutinizes Ana’s face. “Little lit-
tle holes all over your face.”“The Lifecycle of Software Objects”
moves swiftly, perhaps not very grace
fully by literary standards: “Another year
passes”; “Two more years pass. Life goes
on.” Eventually, by degrees, we come to
understand that Jax is not a mere ma
chine, at least in Ana’s eyes: “She imag
ines Jax maturing over the years, both
in Real Space and in the real world.
Imagines him incorporated, a legal per
son, employed and earning a living....
Imagines him accepted by a generation
of humans who have grown up with
digients and view them as potential
relationship partners.” In other words,
Ana and Jax have become mother and
child. Chiang, in his appended notes,
remarks without irony that working
with A.I.s will require “the equivalent
of good parenting.”
Indeed, irony is sparse in Ted Chiang’s
cosmology. It is both a surprise and a
relief to encounter fiction that explores
counterfactual worlds like these with
something of the ardor and earnestness
of much youngadult fiction, asking
anew philosophical questions that havebeen posed r
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