The Little Bit of Ivory

[mtvessel]

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.

Take, for example, the longest story in the book, The Lifecycle of Software Objects. The story, which is about tamagochi-like software entities living in a virtual world and their owners and creators, is beautifully executed, with plausible technical details, but the characters are too nice and reasonable to be very engaging or memorable, and it takes over 100 pages to make its point. Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom has similar problems. It has a very interesting theme concerning the impact of many-worlds interpretations of quantum mechanics on notions of moral value, but explicates it through a series of interactions between parallel versions of mostly bland characters. The two stories that I liked the best were the ones that were most similar to those in his previous collection - Exhalation, in which a pneumatically-powered being discovers a dismaying truth about its universe, and the wonderfully mischievous Omphalos, in which young earth creationism is pushed to a logical conclusion that its adherents will really not like.

What this shows is how very different short-form and long-form modes of genre story-writing are. Short stories rely on clear and effective presentation of a core idea, with characters and background just sufficiently present for that to happen. For longer fiction, compelling character- and world-building are key to maintaining the reader's interest. Writers who can do both are thin on the ground, and the fact that Chiang is outstandingly good at the former but not so good at the latter is no shame. If he was a younger writer I would express the hope that with sufficient practice an outstanding longer-form story might be forthcoming one day, but at the rate of one book's worth of material every fifteen years, that seems unlikely. Like Jane Austen, Chiang seems content to work on his little bit (two inches wide) of ivory with a very fine brush, and his regular appearances in the shortlists for major awards suggests that that's probably a better strategy than producing a mass of mediocre work with the occasional gem.