Exhalation

Nine stories, each one built the same way: take a single idea seriously, follow it all the way down, and refuse to flinch at where it lands. A merchant in medieval Baghdad finds a gate that opens on the past and learns that nothing he does there can change anything, which turns out to be a consolation rather than a tragedy. A robot dissects its own brain to find out why the world is running down.

The best of them is probably the long one about digital pets — creatures raised by owners over years of real time while the platforms they live on go out of fashion and stop being supported. It is a story about obligation: what you owe something you brought into being and can no longer look after, worked out patiently over a couple of decades of in-story time.

Chiang publishes rarely and revises heavily, and it shows in the sentences — nothing here is decorative. Every story has an afterword explaining where it came from, which is unusual and worth reading. If the complaint about idea-driven science fiction is that the people are furniture, this is the collection to hand over in response.