Spectology: The Science Fiction Book Club Podcast

Welcome to our final episode on Ted Chiang's newest short story collection, Exhalation (https://amzn.to/2X5A0JW). Matt & Adrian start by going through all of the stories in this collection, then go really in-depth on a few specifically, just like we did with Exhalation in our last episode (https://www.spectology.com/e/152-exhalation-post-read-re-reading-stories-philosophy-of-mind-the-heat-death-of-the-universe/). 

First 30 minutes: Intro, 2-3 minutes on each story, listing our favorites

29m 10s: "The Lifecycle of Software Objects": Mental & legal frameworks for how to relate to AI

1h 01m 14s: "Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom": Character development & moral thought experiments

1h 17m 02s: "Truth of Fact, Truth of Feeling": How technology changes our cognition & identity

1h 29m 04s: "The Merchant & the Alchemist's Gate": Discussing the medieval Islamic setting

1h 37m 19s: "Omphalos": Short stories as jokes, young Earth creationism

1h 42m 53s: Discussing the structure, endings, & morals of these stories

1h 48m 43s: Wrap-up & outro

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We'd love to hear from you, either by chatting with us on twitter at @spectologypod, sending us an email at mailbox@spectology.com, or submitting the episode to r/printSF on reddit. We'll reply, and shout you out in the next podcast when we talk about your comment.

And if you like the episode, subscribe at spectology.com or whever you listen to podcasts, and share it with your friends!

Many thanks to Dubby J and Noah Bradley for doing our music and art.

This week's minisode is an in-depth discussion of ONLY the title story from Ted Chiang's new collection, Exhalation (https://amzn.to/2RlWfVY). The story "Exhalation" is available for free online at Lightspeed magazine (https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/exhalation/), so we thought we'd start with this to whet everyone's appetite, and give new readers a chance to read something by Chiang to decide whether you want to pick up the full book. 

We dig apart Matt's experience of re-reading this story (something he rarely does), discuss the meaty themes the story presents, and offer a few other stories about the process of science. It's a fun short episode, and we hope you enjoy it & stick around for next week's full dissection of all the other stories in the collection. 

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We'd love to hear from you, either by chatting with us on twitter at @spectologypod, sending us an email at mailbox@spectology.com, or submitting the episode to r/printSF on reddit. We'll reply, and shout you out in the next podcast when we talk about your comment.

And if you like the episode, subscribe at spectology.com or whever you listen to podcasts, and share it with your friends!

Many thanks to Dubby J and Noah Bradley for doing our music and art.

Adrian & Matt are back on their own this month, reading & talking about the short story collection Exhalation, by Ted Chiang. A wonderful collection of short fiction, we've decided to do something a little bit different from the usual. 

With this episode we talk about the power of short-form fiction, why we love Chiang's work so much, and (starting at 43:25) ask each other a couple tough philosophical questions of the type Chiang's stories attempt to answer. 

Books & movies mentioned include (links help support Spectology, go to spectology.com if they're not showing up):

- Exhalation, by Ted Chiang 
- Stories of Your Life & Others, by Ted Chiang 
- Store of the Worlds, by Robert Sheckley 
- The Best Stories of JG Ballard 
- Her Smoke Rose up Forever, by James Tiptree, Jr
- Tobias Buckell's Patreon 
- Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, ed. NK Jemisin 
- The Best SF&F of the Year series, ed. Jonathan Strahan 
- Interview w/ Chiang at Powel's 
- Interview w/ Walter Mosley at Paris Review 

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We'd love to hear from you, either by chatting with us on twitter at @spectologypod, sending us an email at mailbox@spectology.com, or submitting the episode to r/printSF on reddit. We'll reply, and shout you out in the next podcast when we talk about your comment.

And if you like the episode, subscribe at spectology.com or whever you listen to podcasts, and share it with your friends!

Many thanks to Dubby J and Noah Bradley for doing our music and art.