Today
First contact · Semasiographic writing · Free will without alternatives
Ted Chiang, 1967–
Fewer than twenty stories and novellas so far, and an implausible number of awards: four Nebulas, four Hugos, six Locus Awards, and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.
Collections: Stories of Your Life and Others (2002) and Exhalation (2019).
Chiang on free will and determinism
“I believe that the universe is deterministic, but that the most meaningful definition of free will is compatible with determinism.”
On the view that his SF is unusually humanistic:
“I do want there to be a depth of human feeling in my work, but that’s not my primary goal as a writer. My primary goal has to do with engaging in philosophical questions and thought experiments, trying to work out the consequences of certain ideas.”
Two languages
Heptapod A — spoken. Sequential, like ours.
Heptapod B — written, and not a transcription of speech. A single semantic figure is composed all at once, so the writer must know the end of the sentence before beginning it.
Chiang builds the story on verb conjugation and bilateral symmetry: the shape of a body and the shape of a grammar as related problems.
Semasiographic writing
Semasiographic systems convey meaning without encoding speech — mathematical notation, musical notation, road signs. They are not writing of a language.
Heptapod B is semasiographic all the way down, and learning it changes how Louise experiences time.
Fermat’s principle and the Book of Ages
Fermat’s principle of least time: light takes the path that minimizes travel time — which can be stated as though the light already knows where it is going. A teleological description of a physical fact.
The Book of Ages: a book containing everything that will happen. If you could read it, could you act otherwise? If you could not, in what sense was the future ever open?
Reading notes: “Story of Your Life”
- To prepare, Chiang — originally trained as a computer scientist — spent five years researching linguistics.
- The setup is familiar: first contact. But it is also a story about how humans tell stories, to themselves and to others, about themselves.
- It is a story about time with no literal time travel. Like “New Rose Hotel,” it is told retrospectively, exploiting the difference between plot and narrative: the main thread concerns Louise’s attempts, with the physicist Gary, to communicate with the heptapods, interspersed with memories of watching her daughter grow up — each with a thematic connection to the whole.
- Chiang’s use of Fermat’s principle, and the paradox of the Book of Ages, lends the story philosophical as well as personal resonance.
- Do you agree with the narrator’s decision to have a baby, given what she knows will happen?
- Unlike the film adaptation, Arrival (Villeneuve, 2016), Chiang’s story never establishes why the heptapods came to Earth. If you know the film, which version works better, and why?
Where we have been
| unit | the fantastic is | and it estranges |
|---|---|---|
| 1–2 | an intrusion into the ordinary | the ordinary |
| 3 | a new world to travel to | our own era’s confidence |
| 4 | a buried past surfacing | modernity |
| 5 | inner space | the self |
| 6 | the body and the sign | what we take as given |
For Thursday
Our last meeting before finals: SF and the prediction of artificial intelligence.