Exhalation is a wonderful anthology; the stories and novellas in this collection are delightfully clever, without sacrificing soul. Most of the stories seem to gravitate around the central theme of free will, but there is an exciting variety of ideas and delivery.

As to where Ted Chiang's work fits into the scifi landscape, I think it's on par with PKD / Greg Egan in terms of creativity while being markedly more accessible (though readers would certainly benefit from a vague interest in science). However, as is often the case with such creative ideas, it is sometimes difficult for the story to live up to the concepts. This was true on a couple of occasions, but on the balance, this is still a must-read.

Some brief comments on the stories, with no spoilers:

• The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate: a "just-so" story about time travel, in which everything is nice and self-consistent.
• Exhalation: a gorgeous hard-scifi story about a robot who dissects his own brain, and in so doing, runs into the second law of thermodynamics. This story gave me a much better intuition for entropy!
• What's Expected of Us: a brief but incisive exploration into free will.
• The Lifecycle of Software Objects: could be a novella. An emotive and thoughtful exploration of relationships with digital beings. Reminds me of the film Her
• Dacey's Patent Automatic Nanny: a brief and fanciful tale of a boy raised by a robot
• The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling: how will we adapt to the Black Mirror style memory review? Very nice contrast with the introduction of written language to tribes. In some senses, it is a more faithful representation of what happened, but it also brings many downsides
• The Great Silence: short one about how parrots may be sentient but unable to communicate
• Omphalos: an amazing story in which physics is consistent with creationism, with one major caveat...
• Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom: are our decisions still meaningless even in the many-worlds interpretation of QM?

Highlights

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Spoilers below

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• Exhalation
• What's Expected of Us
• The Lifecycle of Software Objects
• Dacey's Patent Automatic Nanny
• The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling
• Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom