Beim Lesen war ich lange der Meinung, das Buch insgesamt recht belanglos zu finden — weder besonders gut, noch besonders schlecht. Ich hätte ihm wohl so drei Sterne gegeben. Die ersten Geschichten des Buches haben einfach nicht besonders mit mir räsoniert. Mehrere der späteren Geschichten hingegen fand ich richtig gut; sowohl thematisch als auch dramaturgisch. Diese haben das Buch für mich insgesamt so sehr aufgewertet, dass ich es auf jeden Fall empfehlen würde.

This is an excellent, outstanding and highly original collection of short stories.Ted Chiang observes our society as it is today and combines those observations with clever tie-ins of speculative and science fiction. And he is immensely talented at that. I also enjoyed his author's notes to each of the stories.Every story in this book will give you a lot of food for thought. If you like this kind of story, I highly recommend you read Exhalation.PS: The Great Silence: How to break my heart in 10 minutes or less.Notes on the audiobook: I listened to this on audible audio and it was a good production. Chiang reads the author's notes himself. 

I am sorry, why do I feel like, after most of these short stories, that I need to retreat into a far away forest hut to think over my life? I did not anticipate this level of potential deep thought that could arise from a simple science fiction short story collection. I have considered buying a few copies just to give them out as presents. Most of the stories were absolutely fantastic and some hit me delayed or didn't spark anything special within me. But the topics are so diverse that it is almost certain that anyone will be impacted by the thoughts in some capacity.

Fantastic collection of short stories examining themes of free will, time travel, memory, artificial intelligence, and parallel universes. Most of the stories are fast paced and do an excellent job at exploring the nuances of these topics. Unfortunately the only story which did not work for me, The Lifecycle of Software Objects is also the longest one, making up nearly a third of the collection. Favourites: What's Expected of Us, The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling and Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom

stories that impress me: 1.The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gat Everything is a cycle: what you do in the past affects who you will be in the future. Even if what you do is going to the future, there is no way to change your destiny. 2.Exhalation The idea of a man looking at his own body and experimenting on himself is a bit scary, but fascinating, impressive, and very graphic. 3.The Lifecycle of Software Objects I love what the author said about this story in the story notes part. "Sex isn't what makes a relationship real; the willingness to expand effort maintaining it is." I also like how he incorporated the issues he wanted to discuss into the daily life instead of talking about them in an unrealistic way. 5.Decay's Patent Automatic Nanny It makes total sense to me that children raised by robots are more accustomed to interacting with them. Look at our younger generation now, who find digital screens a natural part of their lives. I bet playing computer games is more appealing to them than hiking or walking in nature. 6.The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling "I" believed we shouldn't use technical methods to "remember" everything because it was unnecessary and troublesome. It would bring more conflict to families. So I thought this story was about s the downsides of technology until it showed that the truths "I" remembered were just some subjective "truths" that I wanted to believe. That changes everything. 9.Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom Definitely one of my favorites. We always think about" What if…". What if I study harder for this exam, what if I choose this job, what if I notice something wrong with my partner/parent that day…? So the idea of actually having a device you can use to check what would have happened if you had chosen another way is really appealing.

Ich mochte bereits die erste Kurzgeschichten-Sammlung von Ted Chiang daher habe ich mich sehr auf dieses Buch gefreut. Insgesamt hat mir diese Sammlung nicht ganz so gut gefallen wie die erste, aber dennoch gefiel sie mir insgesamt gut. Meine Lieblingsgeschichte war direkt „The Merchant and the Alchemist‘s Gate“. Die Geschichte war spannend und überraschend emotional. Auch „Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom“ gefiel mir sehr gut. Eigentlich hatten alle Geschichten interessante Konzpte allerdings blieben mir nicht alle gleich im Gedächtnis. Teilweise habe ich mir gewünscht das die Geschichten länger wären da ich das Konzept gerne noch mehr erforscht hätte, hingegen fand ich „The Lifecycle of Software Objects“ etwas zu lang. Insgesamt sehr zu empfehlen wer faszinierende und kreative Ideen mag. 3.5*

This is exactly what I expect modern science fiction stories to be. - Fascinating concepts, partly new but mostly improvements and updates on existing popular ones like time travel, paralel universes and artificial life - Showing the implications of these concepts, not only on human life in general, but also the emotional and personal results, demonstrated on well-done relatable characters - Great writing. Chiang finds a different voice in every of his stories and changes the style according to the topic which made every of the stories feel unique. - Inclusion of scientific explanations I also liked that most of the stories had an ending that was either feel-good and/or left the reader with a question. The ideas and concepts used were all really interesting for me, especially pairing off science and religion, which I hadn't seen done before. Giving this book a 5 star rating does not mean I loved all of the stories, but I loved a lot and could appreciate the others for what they did. While I´d liked to praise the book for how good it is, my love of this book has been conveyed enough and will be by other as well, so I want to voice some criticism, too. I noticed that Chiang´s attempts to avoke emotions with his endings didn´t always work 100% for me, sometimes small parts of it didn't feel entirely realistic within the context. Also, The Lifecycle of Software Objects had so many instances of telling instead of showing that it ended up being really noticable. However, these things didn't spoil my enjoyment and I can still recommend this to everyone who likes scifi.