The act of using a robot to do the research instead of a human (which don't appear to exist within the robot's consciousness) offers up a separation between the activity in the story and the reader/humans Chiang is writing about. In a theme that recurs throughout the collection, the robot is trying to understand how memory works and what can be done to improve, extend, and retrieve forgotten memories. When a regulated task appears to take longer than it should for robots in many districts, he comes up with an experiment to determine how robots' brains work, something they don't fully understand. It is the story of a self-aware robot in a society of robots. "Exhalation" focuses on the theme of memory, which features in many of the stories in the collection. Chiang packs in plenty of characterization and setting to make the story feel longer than it actually is. Underlying all of them is a sense of predeterminism, as all that can be done is the will of Allah. Each of the stories Fuwaad ibn Abbas tells the Caliph are different in the protagonists' intentions and the results of their work. When the opportunity presents itself, he begins telling stories of a magical gate to another world to the Caliph of Baghdad. “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” tells the story of Fuwaad ibn Abbas, a merchant fallen on hard times. Two are being published in this collection for the first time. These stories come from a variety of sources: magazines, e-zines, stand-alone volumes. Fortunately, Chiang has published his second collection of stories, Exhalation, a mere 17 years after he published Stories of Your Life and Others. Of course, when Chiang publishes stories, they frequently are in out of the way places and not necessarily easy to find, even if the reader is aware of them.
Ted Chiang does not publish enough fiction, but when he does, it is always the cause for celebration.
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