I finished Exhalation by Ted Chiang the other day, and I was extremely pleased with it! It's cover-to-cover grade-A sci-fi good-shit.
Two of the stories blew me away with their creativity: the titular "Exhalation", and "Omphalos". Both of these went beyond sci-fi in their "what-if" propositions, and were fantastic.
"The Lifecycle of Software Objects" had me plucking at old ideas on the tragedy of abandoning digital pets. How we could craft digital entities that are designed to be loved and cared for, then have them inevitably be abandoned to exist, forever awaiting a pixellated meat-on-bone that would never come again until the death of their battery. While heartbreaking as a child, it really was a mercy that the Tamagatchi creators had the creatures eventually "die"; not for the creatures -- they were just few lines of code and some pixels -- but for those who cared for them that inevitably needed to move on.
I think I'll need to pick up the author's other collection, and perhaps just delve more into Scifi short stories in general!