“Exhalation by Ted Chiang is a collection of short stories that will make you think, grapple with big questions, and feel more human. The best kind of science fiction.”
—Barack Obama, via Facebook
“Lean, relentless, and incandescent.”
—Colson Whitehead
“Illuminating, thrilling. . . . Like such eclectic predecessors as Philip K. Dick, James Tiptree, Jr., Jorge Luis Borges, Ursula K. Le Guin, Margaret Atwood, Haruki Murakami, China Miéville, and Kazuo Ishiguro, Chiang has explored conventional tropes of science fiction in highly unconventional ways. . . . Individual sentences possess the windowpane transparency that George Orwell advocated as a prose ideal. . . . It is both a surprise and a relief to encounter fiction that explores counterfactual worlds like these with . . . ardor and earnestness. . . . Human curiosity, for Chiang, is a nearly divine engine of progress.”
—Joyce Carol Oates, The New Yorker
“Masterful and striking. . . . A fusion of pure intellect and molten emotion. . . . Represents the ideal definition and practice of all science fiction. . . . [Chiang’s] career thus deservedly joins those of only a handful of past masters who likewise did their best work in miniature: Edgar Allan Poe, Harlan Ellison, Ray Bradbury, Theodore Sturgeon. . . . His challenging and rewarding fiction proves that a sizable and appreciative audience exists for the kind of speculative fiction that doesn’t merely offer cosmic explosions, but instead plucks both heartstrings and gray matter in equal measure.”
—Paul Di Filippo, The Washington Post
“Deeply beautiful. . . . These stories are carefully curated into a conversation that comes full circle, after having traversed extraordinary terrain. . . . [Exhalation] is as generous as it is marvelous, and I’m left feeling nothing so much as grateful for it.”
—Amal El-Mohtar, The New York Times Book Review
