The eight other thought experiments in Exhalation, all written during the past 17 years, are equally provocative future scenarios that tread high above the cliched dystopias of so much modern sci-fi. “I did not imagine these advancements would happen.” He explains that his story was a “thought experiment” taken to its logical conclusion, one that asks: “What happens when you develop an emotional connection to a product and the product is taken away?” and: “What is the business case for giving tech consciousness?” (There isn’t one, he says, although he believes it will happen regardless.) “It was an unexpected similarity,” the modest Chiang tells me over the phone, his precise sentences punctuated by long periods of considered silence. More impressive still, the 51-year-old, who has won 27 major science fiction awards, wrote the story in 2010, a whole year before Apple launched Siri. The Jibo story was a sharp example of life imitating art, and a reminder of why Chiang, who until very recently was a technical writer for Microsoft, is revered in the sci-fi community as one of the most exciting thinkers of his generation. When sales stall, Blue Gamma plans to shut down their servers, leaving digient owners distraught. “The Lifecycle of Software Objects” – the novella-length centrepiece of a new short story collection, Exhalation, his first since his 2002 debut, Stories of Your Life and Others – details the efforts of a fictional company, Blue Gamma, to maintain socially conscious virtual “digients”, which owners “raise” for up to 20 years.
The story was about how Jibo, a manufacturer of artificially intelligent “companion” robots for the home, was now shutting down its servers, causing distress to Jibo owners who had come to think of their little robots as part of the family. In March, Ted Chiang, whose 1998 science fiction novella “Story of Your Life” about alien communication became the basis of the Oscar-nominated film Arrival, was sitting at his computer at home in Seattle, when he came across a news story that surprised him. Ted Chiang, one of the most exciting writers in science fiction, tells Eleanor Halls about his fight to escape “the genre ghetto”
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