The Lifecycle of Software Objects [Hardcover]

Everything else I've read by Ted Chiang has been a slam-dunk work of genius, where all the conceptual threads get tied up in some amazing way. This book is not like that, which is both good and bad. The conceptual stuff here isn't as unique as in his previous work - this territory has been mined, in various ways, going at least as far back as the Asimov robot novels. Nonetheless, Chiang gives an interesting spin on it. The strength of the book is that it sets up a scenario that feels much more real and grounded in human emotion and motivation than his other works have been - more so than most contemporary science fiction, for that matter. The problem is, we don't actually get the character development that the story cries out for. This is a story that, unlike his previous stories, doesn't actually fully work as a conceptual sketch, despite the rich possibilities hinted at. Maybe Chiang has outgrown the short story format, and for some reason hasn't elected to take the plunge into a true novel, which this could easily have been, and a great one at that. So let me throw out some unsolicited advice: Ted, quit your day job and go for it. If this is what your sketch of a novel looks like, I'm already sold on the real thing.

If this were a Greg Bear or Vernor Vinge novel, _Lifecycle_ would be the prologue. Curtain would close and you would suddenly be 500 million miles in the future and everything is different but plausibly progressed from the initial conditions. If you're a scifi fan then that opening sentence tells you most of what you need to know. If Greg Egan wrote this book the rest would be... oh right, he did write that book: _Diaspora_.

First you need to get over the hurdle that this is a book about virtual intelligence and AIs when the idea is as worn as the hills now. 10 years? That's stone age. It'd be like writing a serious, thoughtful book about vampires. But I think Chiang manages to pull it off. He's a more 'human' writer than most of the hardcore scifi writers - they care mostly about the tech and the AIs, but _Lifecycle_ cares more about the people and it has more of a sensitive touch. There are no answers here, but plenty of more human questions about what it means to be intelligent and from there, alive.

The book itself is marvelously produced. The materials are top quality, it feels good, and the illustrations and mind maps are gorgeous. At Amazon's price I feel I got my money worth from the whole experience. Come at this gently and I think you won't be disappointed - but I think this is only going to appeal to a narrow range of people who can sit between Clement and LeGuin. If you're in that zone, grab this immediately. And think about it when you're done.

It is difficult to overstate the profound skill with which Ted Chiang wields the written word. He writes at such a higher level than just about any other contemporary author that it's hard to discuss his work except by reference to itself.

Chiang burst on the scene with an extraordinary collection, Stories of Your Life, one of the best short story collections ever written. The hallmark of Chiang's craft is his fusion of each facet of the story - its prose, its pacing, its imagery, its plot, its ideas - to create a single, polished effect. Yet his stories are always undergirded by logic and close observation.

Since that anthology, Chiang has published a couple of superbly crafted stories. The Merchant and the Alchemist is one of the better time travel stories ever; and Exhalation enchants with its prose.

"The Lifecycle of Software Objects" approaches iconic themes from AI in an interesting and carefully crafted way. The title is taken, for those who are not familiar with programming, from object-oriented programming, where particular software entities called "objects" undergo specific technical phases. It's a clever title, even brilliant, reminiscent of Gibson's title "Count Zero" but much more thematic.

The prose is more spare and somewhat less intense than in most of his stories (sentences are shorter, syntax is simpler), a change probably chosen to mirror the clarity of the software artifacts being described, or perhaps to try and make his famously subtle prose more accessible to modern readers (I was disappointed that even Chiang, one of the best prose stylists out there, finally succumbed to the modern de rigeur inclusion of profanity in any work of fiction, although at least in this case it's not gratuitous and it's limited to one page). The ideas are discussed with complete plausibility - Chiang is superb at writing about the milieu of people who work with software. Chiang here is tackling a pair of ideas on software that had been best approached probably by Greg Egan in the first chapters of his wonderful novel "Diaspora", in Egan's "A Kidnapping" in his collection Axiomatic, and earlier by Asimov in Bicentennial Man. Chiang updates and infuses new ideas into this.

The pacing was not as taut, I felt, as some of his stories. I wanted to learn a bit more about the office milieu where Derek and Ana worked, and more troubling, some of the ideas toward the end were discussed expressly rather than residing seamlessly and implicitly into the fabric of the plot. Moreover, the slightly dull protagonist herself was less interesting than the brighter, edgy, but flawed protagonists in stories like "Understand" or "Stories of Your Life".

One minor complaint is that the illustrations, although executed with considerable skill in their own right, were at times inconsistent with the text to which they were juxtaposed. For example, one item is described as "obsidian" with a wraparound display (pages 22 and 24) is illustrated on page 25 in gray and without the display. The illustration on page 53 on the one hand almost functions as a spoiler for the events that transpire on its facing page 52, while at the same time getting a number of details completely wrong. So the illustrations are both too accurate and too inaccurate: they are too accurate to be called merely impressionistic (like those in the new editions of Salem's Lot, for instance), but they are too inaccurate to be representational for what, especially by their placement, they seem to be striving to illustrate.

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