In both Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” and its cinematic adaptation, the 2016 film Arrival, the protagonist’s story appears out of order. You read (or watch) the narrative as though you are seeing someone put together an intricate puzzle, and it’s not until one critical piece of knowledge— the central conceit of the story — slots into place that you can understand the correct order of events, backwards and forwards.
Reading “Story of Your Life” on its own, I loved it. So, I sought out Chiang’s short story collection Exhalation for more.
What I found is that this structure of the reveal, which makes sense of everything that came before it, is not just a feature of one of his pieces; it’s characteristic of nearly all of them. Chiang’s sci-fi settings are beautifully made, but they are so precise that it doesn’t feel like there’s a lot of room for ambiguity or genuine surprise. Indeed, for a collection called Exhalation, these stories feel oddly airless — each world a wind-up toy with a single trick to play.
The exception to this structure is the fourth and longest story in the collection, “The Lifecycle of Software Objects.” The narrative follows the development of a series of sentient AI creatures called digients. The digients have designers and carers who treat them variously as children, pets, products, aliens, and sexbots, all with accompanying human-led debates about what they could or should be. As the digients grow, they begin to get their own ideas about who they are and how they can express agency in a capitalist world, leading to conflicts with the humans who continue to love them.
“The Lifecycle of Software Objects” breathes. It takes in air from its multiple narrators and unanswerable questions. It outlines a complex and fascinating problem — what does self-determination mean for a digital, artificial life form? — and allows different points of view. In this story, Chiang opens a world where a single reveal isn’t possible, and increasing knowledge of the setting does not resolve its central conflicts. It’s a genuine pleasure to see Chiang changing up his story rhythms while still applying his prodigious imagination for sci-fi, and I hope we see more stories like this from him in the future.
