Prize and was a finalist for The Believer Book Award, and the story collection White Dialogues (2017), winner of the Rome Prize for Literature 2018–19 and named a best book of 2017 by Bookforum.
Sims's newest book is the story collection, Other Minds and Other Stories (2023).
At Electric Lit he tagged ten books that "take the imaginability of other minds as their explicit subject." One title on the list:
Exhalation by Ted ChiangRead about the other entries on the list.
Ted Chiang is best known for “Story of Your Life,” the basis for the film Arrival, and it remains perhaps the best introduction to his work. In its Sapir-Whorf spin on first-contact,a linguist studies an alien species’ language and learns to see the world the way that they do. As she masters their nonlinear writing system, she begins to experience time nonlinearly too, and Chiang is alive as a stylist to the philosophical and poetic challenges of representing a halfway alien mind in a human body.
In Exhalation, Chiang’s new collection, he extends his curiosity about consciousness to a wider variety of creatures: robots; digital pets; parrots; parallel selves. Throughout, he writes with the same rigor about the connection between minds and bodies, the way that perception shapes experience: whether it is the “cognition engine” of a kind of pneumatic robot (“My consciousness could be said to be encoded… in the ever-shifting pattern of air driving these leaves”), or the vocal learning and contact calls of Puerto Rican parrots. As the parrot narrator of “The Great Silence” reminds us, we do not need to make contact with extraterrestrials to communicate with an “alien” intelligence: “We’re a nonhuman species capable of communicating with them. Aren’t we exactly what humans are looking for?”
--Marshal Zeringue
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