In discussions about free will, a lot of people say that for an action of yours to be freely chosen—for you to bear moral responsibility for that action—you must have had the ability to do something else under exactly the same circumstances. Philosophers have argued endlessly about what exactly this means. Some have pointed out that when Martin Luther defended his actions to the church in 1521, he reportedly said, “Here I stand, I can do no other,” i.e., he couldn’t have done anything else. But does that mean we shouldn’t give Luther credit for his actions? Surely we don’t think he would be worthier of praise if he had said, “I could have gone either way.”
Then there’s the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which is popularly understood to mean that our universe is constantly splitting into a near-infinite number of differing versions. I’m largely agnostic about the idea, but I think its proponents would encounter less resistance if they made more modest claims about its implications. For example, some people argue that it renders our decisions meaningless, because whatever you do there’s always another universe in which you make the opposite choice, negating the moral weight of your decision.
I’m pretty confident that even if the many-worlds interpretation is correct, it doesn’t mean that all of our decisions are canceled out. If we say that an individual’s character is revealed by the choices they make over time, then, in a similar fashion, an individual’s character would also be revealed by the choices they make across many worlds. If you could somehow examine a multitude of Martin Luthers across many worlds, I think you’d have to go far afield to find one that didn’t defy the church, and that would say something about the kind of person he was.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to everyone at the Sycamore Hill and Rio Hondo workshops for reading my early drafts. Thanks to Karen Joy Fowler, Molly Gloss, Daniel Abraham, Benjamin Rosenbaum, Meghan McCarron, Geoff Ryman, Moses Tsenongu, Richard Butner, and Christopher Rowe for their feedback on various stories. Thanks to Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla for the invitation to collaborate. Thanks to Tim O’Connell for believing in this book, and to Kirby Kim for believing in me. And thanks to Marcia Glover, for everything.
PUBLICATION HISTORY
These stories were originally published as follows:
“The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” Fantasy and Science Fiction, and by Subterranean Press, 2007
“Exhalation,” Eclipse Two, Night Shade Books, 2008
“What’s Expected of Us,” Nature, 2005
“The Lifecycle of Software Objects,” Subterranean Press, 2010
“Dacey’s Patent Automatic Nanny,” The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities, Harper Voyage, 2011
“The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling,” Subterranean Online, 2013
“The Great Silence,” e-flux, 2015
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ted Chiang’s fiction has won four Hugo, four Nebula, and four Locus awards, and he is the recipient of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. His debut collection, Stories of Your Life and Others, has been translated into twenty-one languages. He was born in Port Jefferson, New York, and currently lives near Seattle, Washington.
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ALSO BY TED CHIANG
Stories of Your Life and Others
Copyright
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2019 by Ted Chiang
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
This page constitutes an extension of this copyright page.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Chiang, Ted, author.
Title: Exhalation / by Ted Chiang.
Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, [2019]
Identifiers: LCCN 2018030957 (print) | LCCN 2018031993 (ebook) | ISBN 9781101947906 (ebook) | ISBN 9781101947883 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN Classification: LCC PS3603.H53 (ebook) | LCC PS3603.H53 A6 2019 (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018030957
Ebook ISBN 9781101947906
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover design by Na Kim
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