Exhalation

[stoutfellow]

I've begun reading Ted Chiang's short story collection _Exhalation_, and I'm finding it, as expected, to be a delight. I'm currently midway through "The Lifecycle of Software Objects", which I've read before; it was, justly, the Hugo winner for Best Novella in 2011. I'll probably give a full review after I'm done with the collection, but I thought I'd mention "What's Expected of Us", a short and somber reflection on the question of free will. By chance, I'm also grinding my way through Hilary Bok's _Freedom and Responsibility_, a full-scale philosophical treatise on the subject, and the device which Chiang uses in his story is (probably by coincidence) a simplified version of a thought-experiment Bok uses in her book. (Bok is a professor of philosophy at Johns Hopkins, and the daughter of former Harvard president Derek Bok and philosopher Sissela Bok - I also have two of *her* books in my library - but she was also, for a long time, one of the front-pagers at Obsidian Wings under the handle of "hilzoy"; I still follow her Twitter feed.)