Exhalation

Unfortunately, I think my expectations for this book ended up working against it. In a sea of interesting, thought provoking science fiction short story collections, I think this struggled to stand out.

Exhalation contains some interesting themes and thought experiments such as a gate that teleports a person 20 years into the past, located in ancient Cairo. The world realizes that free will doesn't exist due to the invention of a device that will accurately predict whether you will push a button or not. Neopets that you actually have to raise and nurture in the metaverse. God is proven to be real, but what if the real ground shattering discovery comes from realizing the true nature of his relationship to humanity?

Each of these puts forward a premise that ranges between fascinating and.. eh okay.. and each executes the story in the same way. The Merchant and The Alchemist Gate, the story with the time travel gate, didn't do or say anything interesting that hasn't been thoroughly explored in the countless other time travel stories we already have. The story of the predictor device that proves a lack of free will was unrealistic and silly. The Digient (Neopets) story was far too long and didn't adequately explore any of the themes it introduced, but rather jumped all over the place in commenting on parenthood, personhood, consent, technological obsolesce, and intelligence but not spending enough time with any of these.


But there were some that I enjoyed and I thought were executed quite well, namely the later stories, Omphalos (God is REAL), The Great Silence (a plea from Grey Parrots, who are dealing with extinction, to humanity to recognize that intelligent life exists under your nose, you don't need to look to the stars), and Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom (a story where people can activate a device that creates a parallel universe that diverges from the point of activation). I found these thought provoking, but they existed in a larger collection of weaker stories.

It is difficult to communicate exactly what I wished these stories would have been, or how they could have hit harder for me. Looking at some of the other short story collections I've read in the past, they either did more to explore the central theme or had a very interesting premise. Some examples of collections I've loved are Hellions by Julia Elliott and Lake of Souls by Ann Leckie.

I really expected to like this more than I did, so it is painful to not resonate with it as much as I'd hoped to.