Exhalation: Stories by Ted Chiang [Little Shop of Stories?]

I don’t remember when I read this. I assume I picked it up at Little Shop of Stories as an impulse purchase, there’s no record I purchased it at Amazon or had it on my wishlist. Additional evidence is that this was one of the best books I’ve ever read, and that more often comes from the curated selection at LSOS.

I talked about this book to anyone who would listen, and there are only a handful of books I can say that about. And what’s amazing is I didn’t write about it here. So I’m rectifying that mistake.

I can’t find my copy, but that is almost certainly because I forced someone to borrow it.

This is an amazing collection of literary science fiction stories. The writing is smooth and flawless and the ideas are fun and clever.

The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate is one of the best time travel stories I’ve ever read — the problem of suspense in time travel narratives is difficult to come by, but this story’s convention works perfectly for that. The setting is also unique, almost reading like an Aesop’s Fable.

Exhalation, from which the book’s title is taken, is an amazing bit of hard science world building.

It’s been a while, but I don’t remember there being a weak one in the bunch. Funny, poignant, interesting… this book’s got it all.

Go read it. Now.

The Bookish Life of Nina Hill by Abbi Waxman [Little Shop of Stories]

There is an issue I have with some narration that I struggle to articulate. I want my third person narrator to be… Consistent? Clear as to what it is?

There is a line that (I feel) shouldn’t be crossed tentatively. Either the third person narrator is a character, or it is a neutral conduit for information. It throws me out of the story when the narration suddenly has a personality for the sake of making a joke, and then doesn’t.

The narration of Hill does that a couple times, and it bothers me more than it probably should. All in all, this is an okay slice of life novel about a single young woman in LA.

Perhaps the characters were not as outlandish as the book seemed to think they are. Maybe not a lot happens here. But for some reason I ploughed through the novel, and I have no regrets.

Perhaps a nice low impact story with a happy ending is want I was looking for these days.

As a side note, I feel like I’ve read a disproportionate number of books lately with characters who love books so much. Maybe that’s always been the way with books– authors usually like books, and write what you know, right?

The Toll (Arc of a Scythe) by Neal Shusterman

This is one of the the few series that both my son and I have read. Shockingly, to me, we don’t have much in common in specific books. Though, on the face, we should.

Neither of my kids read as much as I envisioned when they were little, as I read to them every night, for probably a decade. They both have a love of story, there is no doubt. But picking up a book is rarer than I’d like.

Their counter-argument is that they read *all the time*, by which they mean social media. And they’re not… wrong. And maybe my way of thinking is old-fashioned. Of course, I know there was disappointment in some quarters when I didn’t immediately dive into a Christmas-gifted edition of Tom Sawyer when I was 9 or 10. So perhaps we all fail to live up to elder expectations.

But it makes having a series in common all the more rewarding when it happens.

The Arc of Scythe series is good, though it requires me to do quite a bit if disbelief suspending in its very premise. Society has become “post-mortal” due to nannites in the blood that repair the body, and rejuvination processes that can rebuild a body if the brain has not been destroyed. People are generally “deadish” instead of “dead”. So that’s fine.

There is also an ubercomputer that manages everything for everyone. It has the sum of human knowledge at it’s disposal, and runs simulations on actions and outcomes to determine the best possible path. That’s fine, a common sci-fi trope. It’s a benevolent entity that is firmly grounded in Asimov’s laws-like principles.

But– now we have an overpopulation problem. To solve that overpopulation problem, they decide that some humans will become “Scythes”, an organization outside of the uber-computer’s control that are tasked with killing a certain percentage of the population.

Why not branch out to other planets? Settle the moon or Mars? Well, they tried that, and everyone died in explosions.

Why not keep trying, if the alternative is people getting randomly killed on Earth? I DON’T KNOW.

Well, there’s a bit of a reason, and it relates to the ending of The Good Place. [SPOILERS AHEAD]

It boils down to infinity being just too much. In order to live with purpose, time has to matter. If you have all the time in the world, a lack of motivation settles in and everything goes to crap. If you don’t know how much time you have… well, best get to livin’!

If you accept that premise that death gives life purpose, then this is a pretty satisfying series all around.

Myself, I’d prefer to give infinity a whirl.