Exhalation

Every story is a thought experiment—like the best episodes of Twilight Zone. I was completely absorbed. I still talk about stories in this collection. "The Great Silence," the story from the perspective of a (critically endangered) Puerto Rican parrot, left me choked up. "Omphalos," a pseudo-epistolary story from a timeline where creationism is real and science and religion are closely intertwined. I'm still telling people about those about 4 months after reading them.

I've not read anything else by Ted Chiang, and after getting this I noticed he also wrote the story that Arrival was based on (which I have seen and enjoyed) so I was looking forward to this.

The stories collected here all share a common humanity, while they are still kind of sci-fi based (and one isn't even written from the point of view of a human).

These stories definately made me think, but especially The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate (I am a sucker for time travel stories, and this one works better than a lot of them because of the way the premise is set up), The Lifecycle of Software Objects (the story notes at the end really shed some light on the author's intent with this one), The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling (a wonderful exploration of memory and how it effects us), and Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom (a bit of a con-man story with some sci-fi trappings - really interesting premise).

I will definitely need to check out his other collection and go from there!