The Little Bit of Ivory

Mar 2020
Exhalation - Ted Chiang – Picador, 2019
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It's been - urk - almost fourteen years since I last reviewed a book by Ted Chiang. At the time I expressed the hope that his next one would be a novel. No such luck, alas - The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate is a story in this new collection rather than a stand-alone. It seems that Chiang decided that his metier was the short story and that was where he was going to stay. That said, several of the stories are considerably longer than the ones in Stories of your Life and Others, with a couple approaching novella length. Sadly, those are the least effective ones in the collection, so his choice to avoid the longer literary forms is probably the right one.
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