This week's minisode is an in-depth discussion of ONLY the title story from Ted Chiang's new collection, Exhalation ( ). The story "Exhalation" is available for free online at Lightspeed magazine ( ), so we thought we'd start with this to whet everyone's appetite, and give new readers a chance to read something by Chiang to decide whether you want to pick up the full book. We dig apart Matt's experience of re-reading this story (something he rarely does), discuss the meaty themes the story presents, and offer a few other stories about the process of science. It's a fun short episode, and we hope you enjoy it & stick around for next week's full dissection of all the other stories in the collection. --- We'd love to hear from you, either by chatting with us on twitter at @spectologypod , sending us an email at [redacted], or submitting the episode to r/printSF on reddit. We'll reply, and shout you out in the next podcast when we talk about your comment. And if you like the episode, subscribe at spectology.com or whever you listen to podcasts, and share it with your friends! Many thanks to Dubby J and Noah Bradley for doing our music and art.