Name: Exhalation
ISBN: 9781529014488

Exhalation

ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR • Nine stunningly original, provocative, and poignant stories—two published for the very first time—all from the mind of the incomparable author of Stories of Your Life and Others Tackling some of humanity’s oldest questions along with new quandaries only he could imagine, these stories will change the way you think, feel, and see the world. They are Ted Chiang at his best: profound, sympathetic, revelatory. Ted Chiang tackles some of humanity’s oldest questions along with new quandaries only he could imagine. In “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” a portal through time forces a fabric seller in ancient Baghdad to grapple with past mistakes and second chances. In “Exhalation,” an alien scientist makes a shocking discovery with ramifications that are literally universal. In “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom,” the ability to glimpse into alternate universes necessitates a radically new examination of the concepts of choice and free will.

What Hacker News says

zachlattaOct 2026

I’m reading Exhalation by Ted Chiang right now and every single story is blowing my mind.

Extremely prescient ideas that feel like they were written today in a world with AI, but many of the essays are 15 years old or older!

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quirinoOct 2026

Ted Chiang is incredible, my favorite writer.

I also recommend "Exhalation", though that has nothing to do with AI.

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GooblebraiSep 2026

> In some ways, the scale of this phenomenon resembles an episode of mass cognitive dissonance, or even a population-level folie à deux. It’s worth asking if something about our internal mechanisms for gauging the passage of time has changed

Ted Chiang's Exhalation short story comes to mind

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Joe_BoogzSep 2026

Ted Chiang is such an amazing scifi author. I find his work incredibly refreshing and thought-provoking. Personal favorite is the short story Exhalation, I think about it all the time and I highly recommend it.

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sblozJul 2026

Since the author starts with a short story about AI I want to recommend one about technology and progress in general: "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling" from Exhalation by Ted Chiang.

I think about it a lot in conversations like this. The story does a much better job of telling it, so I won't summarize more than: It's a discussion about how technology changes culture and how its very hard to judge if that's a good or bad thing.

It's online https://web.archive.org/web/20140222103103/http://subterrane...

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mkw5053Jul 2026

1. I loved the Paper Menagerie

2. I just picked up Exhalation by Ted Chiang from SFPL like 3 hours ago, perfect timing it seems (although they only had a large font edition, which is somehow more difficult to read)

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