Andrew Smith's Reviews > Exhalation

A collection of short stories, some very short and others novella length, all posing interesting questions. I was attracted by the Goodreads rating – anything north of 4 tends to draw my attention – and I enjoy a dip into science fiction every now and then. There’s some sci-fi I can’t read, that’s the stuff with killer monsters and gizmos that can extract characters from an otherwise inescapable death. But if it has a whiff of ‘maybe’ about it then I’m generally in.

Like all collections, some here worked better for me than others, but on the whole I was struck by how intelligent the offerings were. Of the two very short stories I preferred the one about how we might all be turned mad if we discovered there’s no such thing as free will to the proposal that alien life has been with us all along, in the form of parrots. A recurrent theme was that of artificial intelligence and I particularly appreciated a long tale about of a group of people who became obsessed with raising virtual pets, whose intelligence developed to the point that their interactions became close to that of humans communicating with each other. This tale asked a raft of philosophical and ethical questions – many of which I found very hard to answer.

Another story I really enjoyed explored the possibility that at some point you’d be able to record every act in your life and play it back should you so wish. This story prompted a plethora of possible benefits and drawbacks. For instance, would I really want to replay something I remember very fondly - what if I was disappointed to learn that it wasn’t such a profoundly positive experience after all? And how would life be if every time we bickered about who did or who said what someone would call up the actual event or conversation to prove somebody right and the other wrong? What a different world it would be.

The only drawback I found – and this is a very personal thing – is that there is a good deal of technical language used and though it provided a degree of plausibility it also meant that I sometimes got lost in the detail (it also reminded how me how much of a neophyte I am when it comes to this stuff). But overall I found this an accomplished and hugely thought provoking group of stories.