What does that mean for our abilities to forgive and forget, to move past horror? And what does that mean for our tendency to recast the past to hold our present selves in the best possible light? If we can remember everything as it really happened, Chiang points out, then we lose the ability to let our traumas and our quarrels get fuzzy with time. That’s why “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling” is so effective: The story lands not only because Chiang has sweated every detail of how a digital memory would function, but because he shows us a human being who is trying to decide whether a digital memory is a good thing or not. Instead, he focuses on how human beings interact with and are shaped by their technologies, like he’s writing a particularly utopian episode of Black Mirror. He’s not necessarily interested in how human beings interact with one another (a few of his stories contain romantic subplots, and they are noticeably less compelling than anything else he writes). Vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-markīut Chiang is just as concerned with the human beings in his stories as he is with their technologies. They have the kind of precise, airtight internal logic that makes a tech geek shiver with happiness: When Chiang tells you that time travel works a certain way, he’ll always provide the scientific theory to back up what he’s written, and he will never, ever veer away from the laws he’s set for himself.

“The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling” imagines a software product that works as a kind of digital memory, always exact and always precise, and puts it in parallel with the way the technology of reading and writing has already shaped human memory.Ĭhiang is thoughtful about the rules of his imagined technologies. “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” imagines a time machine that obeys Einstein’s theory of relativity - essentially a doorway that you walk through from the present, emerging on the other side a fixed period of time into either the past or the future - and riffs on ideas about predestination in an Arabian Nights-inspired nest of stories. But you can always trust that the machine’s inventor has plotted out that pattern with exquisite precision.Ĭhiang writes what could be loosely described as “thinky sci-fi.” His stories tend to introduce a single scientific idea or paradox, and then dramatize it. And this machine is made up of intricately connected parts, all moving in a pattern of such complexity that you can’t always be sure that you’re following it.

The go-to cliché when a critic is reviewing a particularly lovely collection of short stories is to say that they are “jewel-like”: that they are elegant and discrete little gems of story, shimmering away on the page.Įxhalation - the newest short-story collection from Ted Chiang, author of the novella that was adapted into the 2016 Amy Adams movie Arrival - is not jewel-like.

Ted chiang short story collection