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I became aware of Ted Chiang‘s book Exhalation: Stories (2019) when it was recently promoted on Bookbub (I get an email from them daily). I was curious, so I looked the book up on Amazon.

First of all, 90% of its Amazon reviews are four and five stars. That’s pretty impressive.

Secondly, under “Editorial Reviews,” there’s a long, long list of quotes from professional reviewers giving the book high praise. Even former President Barack Obama said:

“A collection of short stories that will make you think, grapple with big questions, and feel more human. The best kind of science fiction.”

Joyce Carol Oates of “The New Yorker” said:

“Illuminating, thrilling. . . . Like such eclectic predecessors as Philip K. Dick, James Tiptree, Jr., Jorge Luis Borges, Ursula K. Le Guin, Margaret Atwood, Haruki Murakami, China Miéville, and Kazuo Ishiguro, Chiang has explored conventional tropes of science fiction in highly unconventional ways. . . . Individual sentences possess the windowpane transparency that George Orwell advocated as a prose ideal. . . . It is both a surprise and a relief to encounter fiction that explores counterfactual worlds like these with . . . ardor and earnestness. . . . Human curiosity, for Chiang, is a nearly divine engine of progress.”

Paul Di Fiippo of “The Washington Post” invoked the names of Harlan Ellison, Ray Bradbury, and Theodore Sturgeon, all of whom I adore as writers.

On top of that, his work has won numerous awards including several Locus Awards, Hugos, Nebulas…the list goes on.

I found “Exhalation” was available at my local public library. You’d think I’d be excited to get my hands on such an esteemed book by such an esteemed author.

However, I’ve been disappointed before, especially by books and authors that have been so esteemed and won so many awards.

I will admit that since “Exhalation” is a series of short stories, I read only some of them.

After reading “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” I almost took the book back to the library, but that would have been unfair. I thought I should at least read “Exhalation,” the anthology’s flagship story. I did.

I also read “What’s Expected of Us,” “Dacey’s Patent Automatic Nanny,” and “The Great Silence.”

Of them, I liked “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” the best, but that’s probably because it’s a time travel story.

All of the stories are interesting. All of them are well written. All of them are clever and intelligent.

All of them are boring.

If you read them, you might disagree. There is human angst in at least some of them (“Exhalation” contains no humans and “The Great Silence” is told from the point of view of an intelligent, sapient parrot). The social commentaries contained therein are obvious. “Exhalation” is easily a statement about climate change and entropy. “The Great Silence” speaks to humanity’s tendency to be more destructive than constructive and to seek lofty goals while ignoring the wonders right under our noses.

You could say that these missives are “the thinking person’s science fiction short stories” because they are designed to engage the reader in thinking.

However, I suspect that in spite of the author’s best efforts, they were too abstract, too detached, and too alien, at least for me.

I’ve often thought that if a science fiction writer could craft a tale about a truly alien alien (rather than the human-appearing or at least the human acting, thinking, and feeling aliens we’re used to), it would be so alien that no one could relate to it. At best, the reader would come away totally baffled and at worst, totally bored.

That so many people have given this book terrific reviews and so many august science fiction organizations have conferred the highest honors on the author may mean I’m missing something. I probably am.

Or, as I’ve suggested on occasion, the current gatekeepers of the genre filter “good” through a highly selective lens, one that we old school science fiction readers don’t readily recognize. Maybe that lens has influenced the modern readership as well.

I was curious about Chiang himself so I took a look at his Wikipedia page (I know).

Here’s something interesting:

Ted Chiang was born in 1967 in Port Jefferson, New York. Both of his parents were born in Mainland China and immigrated to Taiwan with their families during the Chinese Communist Revolution before immigrating to the United States. His father, Fu-pen Chiang, is a distinguished professor of mechanical engineering at Stony Brook University. His mother was a librarian. Chiang graduated from Brown University in 1989 with a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science.

He attended the Clarion Workshop in 1989 and I know from having looked into the workshop, that it not only focuses on training writers in the art of crafting science fiction, but specifically stories that heavily lean towards highly progressive perspectives. As a writer (hardly anywhere near Chiang’s stature), that is something I would aggressively avoid.

This seems to be the core behind everything Chiang writes:

Chiang has said that one of the reasons science fiction writing interests him is that it allows him to make philosophical questions “storyable.”

I’d interpret that as saying Chiang is a philosopher who communicates using science fiction. This is opposed to a science fiction writer who attempts to communicate a “meta-message” in their stories.

That’s probably why I am returning Chiang’s book to the library having not read all of the contents. As an undergraduate, I enrolled in a beginning Philosophy class twice and twice I dropped out. I found it all too abstract and boring, especially when the instructor engaged the class in a conversation on the nature of “chairness” (what makes up the concept of “chair”).

This isn’t to say you wouldn’t enjoy Chiang’s writing. If you do, you have plenty of company. Go for it.

As for me, I just want to read a good story, enjoy a bit of escapism, and though I enjoy tales that have a wider message than just providing entertainment, in the end, I’d rather be dazzled than attend a lecture hall disguised as fiction.