A Son of the Rock

Picador, 2019, 359 p.

Despite never having written a novel (well, he certainly hasn’t published one) Ted Chiang has made a huge reputation for himself in the SF world. This is his second collection (after Stories of Your Life and Others.) Many of the ones here are thought experiments, intriguing and impeccably worked out. All are very well written.
The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate take its form and inspiration from The Arabian Nights. The titular merchant is telling his tales (within his tale) to the Caliph of Baghdad. His encounter with a man calling himself an alchemist leads to his travelling through a Gate of Years – in essence a time machine resembling an MRI scanner in appearance. Constraints apply but paradoxes are excluded. Well told but the “Arabic” voice wavered a little.
Exhalation won the BSFA Award in 2009. Looking back at my comments all those years ago I find I was very harsh. In this reading it was more a brilliant allegorical evocation of entropy and relativity wherein a difference in air pressure rather than energy as such is the universe’s driving force.
What’s Expected of Us describes a device in which a light flashes one second before its activating button is pushed – no matter how much the operator tries to trick it – and the implications that fact has for free will. The premise here is very like an unpublished story of mine yet is on the other hand entirely different.
By far the longest story in the book, The Life Cycle of Software Objects, is almost beyond novella length and follows the development of digients, software simulations of animals designed to behave as glorified digital pets, taught to speak and grow, able to interact with humans and have their consciousnesses transferred to robot bodies in the real world.
Dacey’s Patent Automatic Nanny is the story of a mechanical device constructed in order to minimise the failures of human upbringing of children and its ramifications for three generations of the inventor’s family. It gives a nod to the legendary Thackery T Lambshead.
The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling’s narrator contrasts the introduction of a new technology whereby memory is set to become outsourced to digitalisation (and possibly deleteriously divorced from emotion) with the impact writing had on a tribal, oral tradition.
The story The Great Silence is actually the text from an Art Installation (also called The Great Silence) for which Chiang was asked to provide a narrative but absolutely works as a standalone story. It concerns the Fermi Paradox and humans’ inability to understand other creatures. It’s narrated by a(n endangered) parrot.
On the Earth depicted in Omphalos, essentially ours but with subtle place name spelling changes, there is direct evidence – ancient wood lacking tree rings at its centre, navelless mummified human bodies, abalone shells without early growth layers – that God created the universe in its entirety a few thousand years ago. Our narrator is an archaeologist whose faith is disturbed by astronomical observations which appear to show a different planet from his, is at its centre.
Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom delves into the ramifications of using a device called a prism (Plaga interworld signalling mechanism) each of which enables communication with a parallel world which branched off at the exact moment it was activated.
Pedant’s corner:- a missing comma before a resumption of direct speech (x2,) “It’s been more thirty years since I read that” (… more than thirty years … .)