“Past and future are the same, and we cannot change either, only know them more fully,” our narrator explains. A series of linked tales-within-the-tale show that the goal of the time traveller must be insight, not intervention. The new collection starts with “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” a quirkily original exploration of time travel set in a mythical, ancient Baghdad and told as if it were a tale out of “The Arabian Nights.” Here, Chiang imagines time travel as a “gate” through which one steps into another dimension to confront a past or future self without having the ability to affect anything in that dimension. When an entire story is metaphorical, focussed on a single surreal image, it’s helpful that individual sentences possess the windowpane transparency that George Orwell advocated as a prose ideal. If Chiang’s stories can strike us as riddles, concerned with asking rather than with answering difficult questions, there is little ambiguity about his language. are addressed in plain, forthright prose.

Contemporary issues relating to bioethics, virtual reality, free will and determinism, time travel, and the uses of robotic forms of A.I. In his new collection, “ Exhalation” (Knopf), his second, Chiang again presents elaborate thought experiments in narrative modes that initially seem familiar. Dick, James Tiptree, Jr., Jorge Luis Borges, Ursula K. Le Guin, Margaret Atwood, Haruki Murakami, China Miéville, and Kazuo Ishiguro, Chiang has explored conventional tropes of science fiction in highly unconventional ways. Like such eclectic predecessors as Philip K. (The novella was the basis for the Academy Award-nominated film “ Arrival.”) Other stories in the collection reinterpreted the Biblical Tower of Babel, imagined an industrial era powered by Kabbalistic golems, and revisited the oldest of theological arguments regarding the nature of God. not one window, but a million,” he could not have anticipated the genre of fiction to which we have given the inexact term “science fiction.” Still less could he have anticipated the sort of literary-humanist science fiction associated with Ted Chiang, whose début collection, “ Stories of Your Life and Others” (2002), garnered multiple awards in the science-fiction community, and contained the beautifully elegiac novella “Story of Your Life,” which reëxamined the phenomena of time and memory in terms of language. When Henry James remarked, in his preface to “ The Portrait of a Lady,” that “the house of fiction has . . .

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