Ted Chiang's Soulful Science Fiction
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
We as humans seem to have this unceasing tendency to essentialize -- to believe that everything we do comes from deep-seated psychological needs. We project every action onto some event from years past with a parent, a lover, a friend.
I feel like this is borne out of a desire to believe that behavior is deterministic. That if only we too had undergone the experiences of the person who we're reading about, we too would be that acclaimed sci-fi writer, or famous entrepreneur, or asshole president. It excuses, to some extent, the fact that we are not that person.
But sometimes that's not the case. Sometimes we just build shit for fun. It doesn't all have to be us coming to terms with our distant father.
Zuckerberg, of all people, once had a quote vis-a-vis The Social Network (can't seem to find it) that basically amounted to the idea that they had to make the entirety of Facebook be about his rejection by a girl because the idea of people building something cool for its own sake doesn't make a good movie.
What's interesting for me is I feel like this armchair psychologizing we all do is getting worse. I don't have any evidence to back this up, just a feeling -- as we're exposed to more people's behaviors, we fall back to essentialist attributions of that behavior more and more.
I'm sorry, but you have to admit if you read back your own comment, it's mostly filled with armchair psychologizing.
This reminds me of a great line from a story by Borges:
> El método inicial que imaginó era relativamente sencillo. Conocer bien el español, recuperar la fe católica, guerrear contra los moros o contra el turco, olvidar la historia de Europa entre los años de 1602 y de 1918, ser Miguel de Cervantes.
> The first method that he imagined [in order to write Don Quixote from scratch centuries later] was relatively simple. Learn Spanish well, return to the Catholic faith, fight against the Moors or against the Turk, forget the history of Europe between the years 1602 and 1918, be Miguel de Cervantes.
I highly recommend the story (called "Pierre Menard, Autor del Quijote" or "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote").
http://hispanlit.qwriting.qc.cuny.edu/files/2011/06/Borges-P...
This raises the question: what's a good metric that's used to decide what the narrative is?
That the writer couldn't do this with Chiang is hilarious. Chiang sounds like a great guy at a dinner party: incredibly nerdy and learned, but not playing the normal social games.
I thought that recent article in Vanity Fair about AI risk and Elon Musk was a great example of this instinct to try to reduce everything down to personal traumas or monkey politics. Apparently Musk cannot really be concerned about AI risk, it has to be some ulterior reason: perhaps he's envious of Larry Page! Or it's propaganda for Tesla! Or desperate attention-whore behavior (because he doesn't get enough attention?) or something, anything, which is not, y'know, being worried about creating intelligences without builtin human morality & limits.
Wasn't so sure about the rest of them though, I felt the Babylon story kind of eclipsed all of them.
[1] http://www.audible.com/pd/Sci-Fi-Fantasy/Stories-of-Your-Lif...
"We're sorry. Due to publishing rights restrictions, we are not authorized to sell this item in the country where you live."
Sigh.
Stories Of Your Life takes the central idea of Slaughterhouse-Five and dresses it up with physics. Its good, but its like a remix more than anything.
I'm probably in the minority here, but I didn't really enjoy "The Lifecycle of Software Objects". I though it was too long and, while I work in firmware, the story's software model didn't connect with me.
Are you? I've never met anyone who includes Lifecycle of Software Objects in their favorite Ted Chiang stories
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7886338-the-lifecycle-of...
I haven't audibly exhaled (I am honestly not trying to pun here) at a story this way in quite a while. Thank you.
1. "... they gave thanks that they were permitted to see so much, and begged forgiveness for their desire to see more.” When I discover with mind-blowing physical discovery (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules%E2%80%93Corona_Boreal...) I sometimes feel this way about humanity's great foray into the universe.
2. "He writes the science fiction that would have existed in an earlier era, had science existed then." I interpret this to be a very insightful comment on what SF is. Some people take SF to be inventing stuff, humans always did that sort of thing through mythology (in fact one can argue that in the past we had much more of it and science kills it). OTOH I think the real SF is taking a scientific framework and tweaking parts of it what-ifs to demonstrate aspects of humanity, in way any other work of literature operates. This does require science.
3. "Chiang’s vision of a world without faith, in which the certain and proven existence of God is troubling, rather than reassuring." This is absolutely true, if the existence of God were to be proven beyond doubt (which, if you think about it seems paradoxical) existence would be intolerable, much more so than if the reverse was proven.
4. "I believe that the universe is deterministic, but that the most meaningful definition of free will is compatible with determinism”. Spot on! "We must believe in free will -- we have no choice." - Isaac Bashevis Singer
5. “There’s a book by Umberto Eco called ‘The Search for the Perfect Language,’ ” he said. Great book that I would recommend to anyone.
6. "In “Understand,” he pointed out, the protagonist learns to reprogram his own mind." After finishing Snow Crash I have been thinking that some form of brain hacking should be possible using light pulses and linguistics as input (http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/11187/are-the-langu...).
Altogether an amazing guy, ordering his books from Amazon right now.
You'd want a backup before trying anything substantial.
There are examples in Peter Watts' work too. Siri in Blindsight, and Lianna in Echopraxia.
Being a Chiang fan is frustrating though because he writes so little!
I don't like how the movie makes her daughter to be dying of a disease. In the book, she dies in a climbing accident, which the protagonist knows full well will happen but does nothing to prevent it, thus demonstrating how committed she was to an immutable, deterministic future.
I liked the story better. I think it helped that the actress reading the story in the audiobook was excellent.
The problem I had with the story, if I understood it correctly, is not that she chose to be committed, but that she actually had no choice. This is, essentially the part of the story I found problematic. It was explained enough to bypass my suspension of disbelief, but not enough to provide an explanation I could accept. How do you have free through without free action?
I would love to revisit the story and find evidence to support that point, or to find that I misread or misunderstood, but I unfortunately don't have a way to do that right now. :/
My interpretation of the phone call is that it demonstrates the reverse causality that is now possible thanks to her new understanding. It doesn't mean the cause nor the effect are mutable, just that they are now accessible in a different order than is typical.
I think in the movie the decision to have the child is also immutable. So when in the final scene she commits to that path - it is because of the paradoxical freedom born of fatalism that she manages to be cheerful. There is literally no other way things could go - so why worry?
If she's selfish - she's deterministically, immutably selfish. Under the new model - the concept of a "change" to the future through action is incomprehensible. The future just "is".
There is nothing in the movie that explicitly supports this.
(Spoilers ahead.) My take is that as she learns the language, her mind is changed. Not only can she remember the future, she comes to understand that she cannot change it. Just like the other heptapod knew it was going to die, but came to Earth anyway because the future is immutable.
Giving her free will introduces a paradox: the future which she remembers will no longer exist if she veers off the path. Unless she can see all possible futures, which is a different story to Arrival altogether (see Dune). The whole visit could be pointless in any case (again, spoilers) if Earth decides not to help the heptapods in the far future. The entire plot hinges on an immutable future.
It's possible that she decided to have the child knowing what would happen to her, and that's why she can see that future, but that's still her making her own selfish decision. If she wouldn't have done that, then she wouldn't "remember" having a child. I think this is why they changed how the child dies from the book. In the book she dies in a perfectly preventable accident. In the movies is kind of pre-arranged. Making her die in an accident that the mother know is going to happen would have been very obviously evil when it's been proven she can sometimes act on knowledge of the future. The book makes the situation maximize the fatalism of the character: she knows her daughter is going to die in that climbing trip, yet she can't do anything to avoid it, she's just an observer, a passenger in her own life.
> The heptapods are neither free nor bound as we understand those concepts; they don't act according to their will, nor are they helpless automatons. What distinguishes the heptapods' mode of awareness is not just that their actions coincide with history's events; it is also that their motives coincide with history's purposes. They act to create the future, to enact chronology.
> Freedom isn't an illusion; it's perfectly real in the context of sequential consciousness. Within the context of simultaneous consciousness, freedom is not meaningful, but neither is coercion; it's simply a different context, no more or less valid than the other. It's like that famous optical illusion, the drawing of either an elegant young woman, face turned away from the viewer, or a wart-nosed crone, chin tucked down on her chest. There's no "correct" interpretation; both are equally valid. But you can't see both at the same time.
> Similarly, knowledge of the future was incompatible with free will. What made it possible for me to exercise freedom of choice also made it impossible for me to know the future. Conversely, now that I know the future, I would never act contrary to that future, including telling others what I know: those who know the future don't talk about it. Those who've read the Book of Ages never admit to it.
That right there pretty much sums up the point I had trouble with. How does knowledge make it impossible to exercise free will? Or since it's stated the other way around, is it that you just don't know the things you would be compelled to change, so it's not that you see all of the future, but that you only see the future that you can't or won't change?
In any case, I find "Conversely, now that I know the future, I would never act contrary to that future" hard to accept at face value. I find it hard to reconcile how free will will coexists with a system like this, since I imagine someone will try to fight that purely on principle. Maybe those people would know little or nothing about the future though, since their desire to change it would prevent it's knowledge in the first place.
Finally, "including telling others what I know: those who know the future don't talk about it. Those who've read the Book of Ages never admit to it." is odd to me. Why do they not talk about it? To me, this implies a lack of free will, otherwise again, someone would talk about it, even after the fact. Is it really that people do not or is it that they can not, because I can't really see do not being followed.
In the end, I'm left with a very muddy and inconsistent view of how this works because of those explanations. Then again, doing this well may have been an impossible task for me. If there isn't an explanation that blends free will and knowledge of the future that exists, or in a way I can understand and accept, the alternative for this story is no free will, and while consistent, it's also bleak and disconcerting, since I'm not sure there's much that's quite as bad as knowledge of the future and along with it knowledge that you can do nothing to change it. Either you never want to change it, which points to sentience being a lie, or you do but cannot, in which case you are a prisoner in your own body. :/
However, then the question arises: How do you reconcile the fact that some beings can see the future when there are other beings in the world that have free will (and thus are able to change the future that the former see)?
I consider the explanation in the book sufficient, though. I don't expect my fiction to be perfectly consistent with everything, and this particular story passes my personal, subjective bar.
Sure, and that's your prerogative. For me, the explanation made me think about some of the mechanics more than I had bothered to up to that point, and what I viewed as inconsistencies actually detracted from the story and ruined some of the immersion. It changed my opinion of the story from "great" to just "very good, with some problems".
In the end, the movie was a bit more hand-wavey on the specifics, but in this case, I found that to provide for a tighter story, and one in which I wasn't plagued by some confusion at some point. So, I subjectively liked the movie as a story more, as it was more able to sustain a suspension of disbelief in my opinion, but that's not to imply I disliked the short story.
Any other recommendations?
"... In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography."
You'll need to like, or be open to, 50s-60s style sci-fi, however.
For Lem, try Solaris, or His Master's Voice. He often dealt with how alien intelligence is impossible to understand (compare Wittgenstein: if a lion could speak we would not understand him). He also wrote many satires (Pilot Pirx / Fables for Robots).
The English translations of the Strugatsky Brothers you commonly get aren't good as they're translated from (I think) German, not Russian, but the new direct translations from Olena Bormashenko are MUCH better, they flow so much better. Stay away from the old ones.
Get Hard To Be A God, or maybe Stalker.
Also seconding Borges, and perhaps Umberto Eco, and Hesse's The Glass Bead Game.
I've been a fan of Chiang for a very long time. I'm a real fan of superintelligence fiction [2] and "Understand" [3] was the first to catch my attention.
[1] http://dresdencodak.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/2009-09-2...
[2] https://ask.metafilter.com/286008/Seeking-Hyperbrain-Books-F...
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20140527121332/http://www.infini...
Division by Zero: https://web.archive.org/web/20110319012240/http://www.fantas...
> A brilliant mathematician wrestles with the consequences of her earthshattering proof.
Understand: https://web.archive.org/web/20110527120639/http://www.infini...
> An experimental treatment bestows a regular person with superintelligence, propelling him into a dangerous series of mindgames.
Story of Your Life: https://web.archive.org/web/20101206050220/http://guccipiggy...
> A talented linguist reflects on her life as she struggles to grasp the meaning of an alien language. Nebula Award (Best Novella). [this is the story the recent film Arrival is based on]
Seventy-Two Letters: https://web.archive.org/web/20010802144026/http://www.tor.co...
> In a world where mystical scrolls impart animating power, a shocking discovery threatens to upend society.
Hell is the Absence of God: http://www.e-reading.club/bookreader.php/70896/Chiang_-_Hell...
> An unbeliever struggles with the question of faith when God is scientific fact and angels routinely visit the earth. Hugo, Locus, Nebula Awards (Best Novelette).
What's expected of us: http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/21st_century_science/lectures/w...
> A simple time machine undermines the concept of free will, with disastrous consequences.
The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate: https://web.archive.org/web/20120911120914/http://www.dregst...
> An ancient alchemist introduces a traveling merchant to a mysterious time-traveling gateway. Hugo, Nebula Awards (Best Novelette).
[I looted these from here, fixing the broken links I could and excluding the ones I couldn't: http://www.metafilter.com/98974/This-isnt-your-grandfathers-... -- there are a few more links in there, including some essays.]
I wonder how many of us have, at some point, harbored the (if poorly formed and not at all thought-through) beginnings of such an idea.
A script based on another of his stories,
“Understand,” is also in development.
The challenge, as you say, would be to do justice to the story and not turn it into some kind of car-chase/superhero mess.
That noted, I'm happy to see people take an interest in reading fiction again. It was nice with Harry Potter. It's nice with Ted Chiang. My hope is that the accessibility and popularity inspire additional interest in fiction reading, and I'm sure it happens as with music. There's a catch though.
The unfortunate part is that both JK Rowling and Ted Chiang are, practically and reasonably speaking, genre authors and that can be limiting to growth as a reader. I love genre works of quality, because, just being real here, the signal-to-noise ratio of quality-to-sub-par in certain genres is abhorrent. It's like finding a great "Metal" proximity band like Tool, checking out all their work, and wanting more, going back into the category and finding...definitely not more Tool.
I'm very happy for him and hope he enjoys the success, fiscal rewards, and, best of all, freedom to write!
Take careful note, all would-be writers:
>In 1989, he attended the Clarion Workshop, a kind of Bread Loaf for sci-fi and fantasy writers...
Sure, he's a hobbyist but that's a hobby that's been going for almost 30 years. Practice makes better. He's no overnight sensation...y'all just finally found him.
>“But what makes any human being a good, reliable worker?” he asked me. “A hundred thousand hours of good parenting, of unpaid emotional labor. That’s the kind of investment on which the business world places no value; it’s an investment made by people who do it out of love.”
This is an absolutely wonderful perspective, and can truly be applied to creative endeavors as well.
Among other things, Ted Chiang is excellent at non-linear storytelling, and at communicating complex and nuanced ideas through narrative.
The actual definition of a genre is based on sales demographics ("do people who buy SciFi buy this book?" - why Vonnegut is in Literature, and LeGuin is in fantasy), but if I had to pick... SciFi is about consequences (what happens when....) Fantasy is about narrative (a story about a boy....) Literature is about a message that cannot be communicated any other way than the story that is told.
I have no idea how to tell you what Arrival was about without retelling the story.
I'll leave a much better writer than me to do the arguing, Ursula K. LeGuin, although I realize you won't read either of these articles because you're too busy "working on [your] own things now," but I'll post them because they're great.
Ursula K. Le Guin talks to Michael Cunningham about genres, gender, and broadening fiction. [1]
> And that, of course, is the lingering problem: The maintenance of an arbitrary division between “literature” and “genre,” the refusal to admit that every piece of fiction belongs to a genre, or several of genres.
> Realism is of course a tremendous and wonderfully capacious literary genre, and it has dominated fiction since 1800 or before. But dominance isn’t the same thing as superiority. Fantasy is at least as immense as realism and much older — essentially coeval with literature itself. Yet fantasy was relegated for fifty years or sixty years to the nursery.
On Serious Literature. [2]
> But it [Genre fiction] was dead, dead! God damn that Chabon, dragging it out of the grave where she and the other serious writers had buried it to save serious literature from its polluting touch, the horror of its blank, pustular face, the lifeless, meaningless glare of its decaying eyes! What did the fool think he was doing?
1. https://electricliterature.com/ursula-k-le-guin-talks-to-mic...
Sturgeon's Law, 90% of everything is crap
re: overnight success, Ted Chiang got a Nebula Award for "Tower of Babylon" (1990) which was his first published work when he was 23. He wasn't writing for extremely long before he was recognized for his talent.