Short Story: Exhalation
Saturday, February 28, 2009 at 11:26AM I really like Ted Chiang's science fiction short story Exhalation. You can listen to a reading of it here, it's about 45 minutes. Don't be scared by the accent of the guy you hear at the start. The guy who actually reads the story has a wonderful voice for the part.
Science fiction (well, any fiction, but especially science fiction) can make us reexamine something by making us look at it from a different perspective. When you're trapped inside a culture or way of thinking, sometimes it helps to escape by asking what an outsider would think of it all. Science fiction has lots outsiders to ask those questions!
I probably shouldn't say much about the story, other than that it's somewhat related to the concept of consciousness, and that it asks about existence itself. Your mileage may vary, but I enjoyed it a lot.
Reader Comments (3)
I'll look into it.
This is deep and very inspiring. I love the way you bring up different topics here.
What a pity that such a widespread interest seems to be shared by only a few (as far as I can tell from the feedback in this thread).
interesting story although it was somewhat of a downer :(
spoiler:
Although not said, the story struck me as some sort of long term observational experiment performed by beings ( perhaps humans? ) with trapping the "intelligent robots" into the chrome dome and seeing how they develop, although needing to eventually end the experiment ( hence the air dilemma )