Ted Chiang is an unclassifiable phenomenon. His second collection, Exhalation, is recommended by both Barack Obama and Alan Moore. How do you file someone who appeals to minds as different as those? His short stories are magnificent thought experiments, packed with precise erudition, as if Borges had written a series of Black Mirror.
The story I’ve chosen, ‘Omphalos’, asks what the pursuit of science would look like in a world where God was definitively, provably real; that the Creation could be dated, and evidence of it was everywhere. What would it mean to be a scientist in a world like that? Chiang makes this feel astonishingly vivid, and when doubt intrudes into the cosy scientific world he sets up it lands with frightening intensity. But the collection is full of moments like this. It is just beautifully done.
Collected in Exhalation, Picador, 2019
A Personal Anthology 