On Ted Chiang's "Stories of Your Life and Others"
After a three-month hiatus in 2023, I forced myself back into reading. I capped off the year with Ted Chiang’s short story novella collection Stories of Your Life and Others. The version I found contained the original eight stories and four additional pieces from Chiang’s other collection Exhalation: Stories.
The futility of using time travel to change the past
I’m not proficient enough to critique Chiang’s work, but his fascination with deterministic time travel stood out to me. Three stories – Story of Your Life, What’s Expected of Us and The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate - deal with time travel, specifically the type of time travel where the future loops back into its past.
Each story features a future that has already happened and cannot be changed. Chiang fancies a deterministic view - a timeline that is fixed and immutable. In The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate, everything has already occurred. Hassan, the protagonist, cannot at any point stop himself from doing something he has already done. He cannot change what is yet to come. Free will does not exist in this world because everything has happened and will happen. Hassan can only follow the path set for him.
Forbidden knowledge as cognitohazards
From this foundation, the stories delve into questions of free will. If one can peer into the future but not change it in, does free will truly exist? How does one cope with this knowledge?
This is fitting, since the stories Understand, Division by Zero, Story of Your Life, and What’s Expected of Us ask what to do when forbidden knowledge becomes known. How do we cope with it? How do we ignore it and go back to the previous state of affairs? Can we?
These stories exhibit the myriad ways people react to such exposure - be it extended cognitive abilities once thought impossible, a true understanding of reality that shatters the status quo, or knowledge of events yet to transpire.
Rage against the cognitohazard
Exhalation stood out for its novelty – a story about the eventual death of a universe. The inhabitants of this universe are sentient mechanical beings that depend on pressurised air for survival. Air powers them and grants them sentience via their internal pneumatic system. Parallel to how our universe needs entropy (which we’re running out of, by the way) to survive, the universe in Exhalation requires a pressure differential, something that keeps reducing with time. The narrator becomes aware of their universe's eventual death and ponders the existential significance of what is imminent.
Do Androids dream of electric sheep and inalienable rights?
The Lifecycle of Software Objects is an interesting read, though it went on longer than necessary. The length made the impending doom seem more ominous, which I appreciated. Written before the current AI boom bubble, the story meditates on how people might care for AI assistants if they showed emotions, growth, and change over time – a system that evolves with you.
If she’s learned anything raising Jax, it’s that there are no shortcuts; if you want to create the common sense that comes from twenty years of being in the world, you need to devote twenty years to the task. You can’t assemble an equivalent collection of heuristics in less time; experience is algorithmically incompressible.
Ted Chiang, "The Lifecycle of Software Objects", 2010
Chiang also explores the concept of obsolescence and the high cost of maintaining hardware and software once they're considered obsolete. It shows the lengths people would go to ensure such a product's survival, but considering the rot economy we live in, I have no hope of a tech company open-sourcing their product before going defunct. Nevertheless, these are topics worth pondering. Does an AI entity that evolves over time have the same value as a human child, or are we comparing apples to oranges? Is time spent accruing virtual experience in a hotbox equivalent to spending twenty years in real-time gaining experience?
Those were my thoughts on Stories of Your Life and Others and the other stories from Chiang's collection. Each story is smart and explores its topics in great detail. It's a very enjoyable collection and since it's not hard science fiction, the barrier to entry is very low. Tower of Babylon is immensely enjoyable, and re-watching Arrival - a movie that holds a special place in my heart - after reading Story of Your Life elevated my appreciation for it.
If you’re interested in short stories novellas and science fiction, I recommend getting a copy.