When I was a teenager my dad turned me on to Philip K Dick simply by having them on a bookshelf in our upstairs hallway. The retro-futuristic design of the novels stood out almost as much as the esoteric names of the stories: “Ubik”, “The Simulacra”, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep”. I tried reading them but soon grew impatient or overwhelmed.

I mean shit look at that but pretend you’re 10 years old.

I didn’t get into the novels at first and instead latched onto volumes of his collected short stories. Bite-sized mind-bending nuggets that I gnawed on in the nights before sleep. Most have faded into my mind’s compost but some still stick with me, like the one where a dude was convinced he was a plant.

They introduced me to thought experiments in which the world was eerily close to our own but with slight tweaks to make them

They stoked my young imagination and made me truly wonder and ponder life for the first time.

I often think back to the way I felt opening a weighty volume to a new story, surroundings disappearing while my mind opened to new ideas and concepts.

Not until Ted Chiang have I experienced a sensation that came close to those feelings, which likely have only grown in scale with each recall, bringing me to the first story in Exhalation I want to talk about.

The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling