“Omphalos” by Ted Chiang (collected in “Exhalation: Stories”)

I don’t know how best to talk about “Omphalos” without either spoiling major aspects of it or get super weird in talking about the spiritual argument it proposes. Suffice to say this is the sort of story that reads like letters to God and then offers explicit commentary about that setup through SF, and while it takes maybe too long to get there in relation to “Omphalos”’s length, I found it ends stronger than it starts. Those who demand their stories have concrete plot points would likely reject this, but then again, they’d have stopped reading this anthology before “Omphalos”.

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