Admittedly the story is not centered around emotion it’s more of a philosophical fantasy, like a Borges or Calvino story. I don’t think the characters in “Exhalation” behave in a particularly robotic manner. I think it might be because we associate the coldness of metal with emotional coldness I’d bet that the earliest stories of rag dolls coming to life didn’t portray them as being unemotional.

The idea that robots don’t feel emotions is even older than the word “robot” Tik-Tok, the mechanical man of Baum’s Oz, predates Čapek’s work by many years, and Tik-Tok was described as being incapable of emotion. Your protagonist and his fellow mechanical beings remind me a little of Asimov’s positronic robots: Why do we envision these sorts of beings as confined to logic, whereas we’re not? I thought that was an interesting observation, and I wanted to try presenting it in a more concrete form. We eat food because we’re radiating a high-entropy form of energy, and we need a low-entropy form of energy to compensate we’re entropy generators. We radiate energy at pretty much the same rate that we absorb it we’re not actually increasing the amount of energy we contain. He notes that we usually say that we eat food because we need the energy it contains, but that’s not completely accurate. The second was the chapter in Roger Penrose’s book The Emperor’s New Mind in which he talks about entropy. I always thought that was a terrific image, and it stuck with me for years. He can see a little spool of punch-tape slowly unrolling inside of himself, and that’s his consciousness, more or less. This comes as a shock to him, but once he gets over his surprise, he decides to open up his chest and take a look at his inner workings. Dick story “The Electric Ant.” It’s about a guy who goes in to see his doctor and is told he’s actually a robot. There were two inspirations for the story. Thank you for taking the time to speak with us about your story, “Exhalation”! Where did this one come from? Series: The Tales of Gorlen Vizenfirthe.Series: From the Lost Travelers’ Tour Guide.People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction!.

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