(Full review to come)

This was a thoughtful, fascinating, and engaging short fiction collection, with many stories which I enjoyed. My favourite story of Exhalation, and also the one which I found the most stressful, was ‘The Lifecycle of Software Objects’. In this, the narrative follows a protagonist involved in the development of an alternative to pets in a world that has moved entirely online. As technology continues to expand, the role and space for digients starts to shift, eventually leading people to ask questions about how sustainable the project is and just how ‘real’ their connection to their digients are. 

Another story that took my interest in Exhalation was the final one, ‘Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom’. This follows Nat, who works in a store selling and restoring prisms: devices through which you can speak to alternate versions of yourself from universes from which you made different decisions. As a recovering addict, Nat is unsettled to realise that she has unconsciously slipped into unhealthy habits in the form of a scam run by her colleague, and she starts to wonder how she can break out of the cycle she seems to be stuck in. The overarching question running throughout this story is whether it is a good thing to know what would have happened if you made different choices, and the story explores this theme with a lot of nuance, showing the positive and negative experiences of the prisms.

I would recommend Exhalation to anyone who enjoys short fiction, but I would also recommend it to those who enjoy science fiction and would like to try reading some short fiction.