Yeah, I can tell it’s looking at what makes something alive and emotional attachments to things (it’s like the Velveteen Rabbit but sci-fi) but because the story had more room to unfold, I managed to get really attached to the characters and the point behind the story got properly obscured. So I was feeling pretty meh about the book until I read the longest story, The Lifecycle of Software Objects, and was blown away. I suppose if I was still a literature student, I would be happy for this but I’m passed that stage. It just makes the message/point behind the story that much clearer and decreased my enjoyment. I think one added demerit is that many of the stories have a clear narrator that’s telling us what happened (often in what feels like a form of a letter or report – see Exhalation, Dacey’s Patent Automatic Nanny) and quite often, adding in this thoughts about the whole thing. It is a pity because The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate has a clever structure wherein the all the smaller stories lead to one big story by the end. This was really obvious in the shorter stories, like The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate and What’s Expected Of Us (both seem to have the message that you can’t change fate).

I’m not super familiar with science-fiction short stories, so I don’t know if it’s a trope of the genre, but I found that almost all the stories had a Very Obvious Point and as someone who dislikes clear authorial messages in fiction (I don’t mind reading your treatise but just make it a nonfiction book), it rubbed me the wrong way. It’s always a bit scary to read something by someone that has earned multiple awards for their writing, because what if you don’t like it? That was my experience with Exhalation, a collection of science-fiction short stories by Ted Chiang.

Exhalation by Ted Chiang