Title : Exhalation
Author : Frederik Backman
Narrators : Ted Chiang, Eduardo Ballerini, Dominic Hoffman, Amy Landon
Genre : Sci-fi
Publisher : Random House Audio
Listening Length : 11 hours 22 minutes
Rating : 3/5
Narrator Rating : 3.5/5

I picked this audiobook of 9 separate tales because they were rooted in sci-fi. And they are, but they also attempt to answer philosophical questions. While I did like some of the stories (the 1st and the 2nd), they are heavy on the science and light on character development and emotion.

Since I was expecting sci-fi, I was not quite prepared for the first story “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” which is situated in Cairo and Baghdad of the medieval times. That one read like a pleasant fable – like one from Aesop – albeit one with a time-travel gate. Still the prose seemed to flow, the events were interesting and the characters engaging. I listened on in delight.

The second story is “Exhalation” and is about a robot population which notices a dissonant note in their orderly and precise existence and analyze it to come upon a surprising and dispiriting revelation. The third tale “What’s expected of Us” is short, and finished before I had time to grasp it.

The fourth story “The Lifecycle of Software Objects” was long and about developing and growing virtual, AI-based animals. It tried to use the “animal growing” to make points about bringing up children. This one read like a litany of events. There was no character development so I didn’t really care about the humans in it. The fifth “Dacey’s Patent automatic Nanny” read like a layman-friendly scientific research paper.

While the concepts in these stories are interesting – also why I completed the book instead of giving it up halfway – these would have been better presented as essays. As stories, these, except for the 1st 2, are rather thin on the “story” aspect.