When I recently finished reading Ted Chiang’s 2019 sci-fi collection Exhalation, what lingered most about his futuristic short stories was how contemporary they felt. In a world where news reports about AI-powered robo?carers and aggressive algorithms have become familiar, Chiang’s otherworldly tales have an uncanny relevance.

Things really hit home when I read a colleague’s description of the “metaverse”, a virtual reality proposed by large Silicon Valley tech companies such as Facebook and Microsoft, where we could carry out the day-to-day business of living via avatars.

My colleague wrote that if these companies built their own metaverse platforms, with proprietary headsets acting as gateways, the result could be “a collection of isolated worlds, forcing digital citizens to pick where they spend the bulk of their time”. This is the exact premise of “The Lifecycle of Software Objects”, one of Chiang’s stories.