Ted Chiang: The Secret Third Thing

Ted Chiang does love to explore the counter-factual with empathy and openness where he somehow manages to take himself out of the story in the admirable Virginia Wolfe sense. The OP misses the biting critique hidden in these tales. For example Omphalos, Hell Is the Absence of God, and Tower of Babylon, can all be read as a devastating critique of religion. They all clearly articulate what the world would be like if certain religious beliefs were true. Since those worlds are nothing like our own, the beliefs are false. There is a strong element of cosmic horror in each of these stories that implicitly make a strong case that we are quite fortunate that our religions do not accurately describe nature.

Exhalation is one of my favorites. There is profound lesson about the nature of the mind, expressed simply as a sequence of discovery by a lone scientist in a very alien world. But the world is an idealized, simplified version of our own with much simpler source of work in the physics sense. I very much wanted to know more about the nature of that world, and for the people there to find a way out of their apocalyptic predicament. But that story, like it's world, is hermetically sealed perfection. The fate of our own universe is the same, but with more steps in the energy cycle and a longer timeline. The silence bounding that story is a beautiful choice, one that makes it a real jewel.

If you like Chiang, Netflix has an adaptation of his work called “Pantheon” that’s very good. Animated, two seasons, about the rise of uploaded humans.

I don’t know which of his works it’s based on, so can’t say how true it is to the original, but I enjoyed it.

I think you are mixing up Chang and Ken Liu. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon_(TV_series)

> Chiang’s much weaker at the middle level, where we consider how societies and civilizations collectively face novel technologies.

I’m not really sure this matters. The ideas are interesting for their effects on the characters of the story—going in depth on the world building outside of the characters doesn’t really mean anything. For the author’s example: yes, economic experiments and drug experiments would be cheaper, but like… so what? What does that mean for the characters in the story? His stories aren’t an exploration of ideas for their own sake, they’re created with a purpose, and this middle level world building doesn’t move that purpose forward at all.

Thank you for the valuable and constructive comment!

I just didn't feel like discussing the satire angle was very interesting! In the article:

> In Omphalos, Young Earth Creationism is empirically true2. Astronomers can only see light from stars 6,000 light-years away. Fossilized trees have centers with no rings. The first God-created humans lack belly buttons. The scientists in that story keep discovering multiple independent lines of evidence that converge on creationism: because in that universe, they're simply correct.

I think this section makes it very clear that in one sense, it's a clear satire of religion, or at least Creationism (implied: we do not see this, so it's implausible we're in a YE Creationist world). I didn't think it was worth spelling it out. Also overall I thought anti-religious satire in fiction is fairly common (I remember reading Candide in high school, and Pullman around the same time or a little earlier) and far from what makes Chiang special.

Agree with your thoughts on Exhalation. I hope they make it out, but also completely understand why Chiang ended the story where he did.