Exhalation

I picked this book up after listening to the New York Times Top 10 Books of 2019 and hearing it was by the author who wrote the story that the film Arrival was based off of.

I absolutely loved the first story, which is kind of a fable set in medieval Baghdad that uses time travel to explore fate. There's another great story later on that deals with memory, language, and writing by contrasting new technology and old customs.

However, about a third of the entire book is taken up by my least favorite story here, The Lifecycle of Software Objects, which was just a dull story about the morality of our treatment of AI that never really went anywhere interesting.

Overall though, this is a great little set of philosophical sci fi stories that I'm glad I read. The author even had a short little blurb at the end of each story to explain what motivated him to write each of them, which I found very insightful.