Remembering The Future

My maiden voyage into the work of Ted Chiang

Before we begin…

Have you ever found yourself wondering if it is possible to know the future? And if you did know it, would you try to change it? 

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This Story Broke My Heart and Woke My Brain

Photo by Aldebaran S on Unsplash

Let me begin by admitting that I am out of my depth here. I am a layperson whose writing and reading are dominated by my fascination for the nuts, bolts, and dramas of daily life. In the world I know, flawed humans stumble about seeking or rejecting connection, make plans that may or may not work out, confront or avoid their flaws, and hope to find meaning or redemption before they die. These people do not debate deep philosophical questions or discuss Fermat’s principle over morning coffee. They do not expect aliens from space to transform how they see their lives. 

So, I did not expect to be hijacked these last two weeks by Ted Chiang’s novella, “The Story of Your Life.” I came upon it in the middle of his collection Stories of Your Life and Others and have reread it three times. I will read it once more before I have to return the book to the library but I think I will need to get my own copy so I can reach for it again and again. I know it will reveal something new with each reading. Even after going onto other books, I keep picking up this story for the questions it poses, for the writing, for the surprising but elegant structure, for the love and loss that the protagonist remembers even if they have not yet happened. 

The story was made into the movie Arrival which I have not seen although I plan to stream it soonish. I expect the story on the screen will differ from the one on the page. If you’ve read and seen both, please let us know what you think!

Briefly, the story is told by Louise, a linguist who is recruited along with physicists and other scientists by the government to help communicate with aliens called heptapods who visit the earth for reasons no one ever really understands. They do not seek to invade. They do not seek to trade. They simply come and, over time, the Earth teams of linguists and scientists are able to exchange knowledge with the heptapods. The aliens are an “awfully incurious” bunch but accommodate the questions of the Earth teams once the linguists are able to decode their language. 

As Louise becomes more proficient, she discovers two things: that the spoken language of the aliens differs from the written one, and the written one is far richer in scope and dimension than ours. She comes to understand that the written language reflects a core difference between humans and heptapods: humans see/experience events in sequence while the aliens see the beginning, the end and everything in between. Humans tend to think in terms of cause and effect so that “one moment grows out of another, causes and effects creating a chain reaction that grew from past to future.” Heptapods, Louise discovers, view events over an entire span of time and recognize that before actions can be taken, the goals have to be understood. Enter Fermat’s principle which offers the idea that the path from beginning to end-point can take multiple paths, each with their own variables and boundaries. The decision is whether to minimize or maximize. Do the heptapods, like the refracting light in Fermat’s principle, choose the path that takes the least time? Or, do they take another path? Is time the only aspect that can be minimized or maximized or are there equally important aspects that need to be considered? Their decision depends on understanding the effects before taking action that causes them. The most important implication of course, is that heptapods see the future as well as the past. 

And here is where I suddenly understood Chiang’s decision to serve this story up in a way that reflects how Louise’s work with the heptapods opened her ability to remember her future along with her past. We open with a memory of something that hasn’t happened yet but we come to understand that it will. We understand that Louise sees it and has asked herself not if she could change it by making different decisions, but wonders: 

“What if the experience of knowing the future changed a person? What if it evoked a sense of urgency, a sense of obligation to act precisely as she knew she would?” - From “The Story of Your Life: by Ted Chiang

Louise is the narrator of this story but she isn’t telling us the story, she is telling the story to her daughter. She tells it the way we tell our children stories of themselves – with memories. These are not chronological, they are connected the way our sometimes very disparate memories are connected - by a word, a moment of laughter, a desire. There is loss coming which makes these memories more poignant, more important, more painful. Louise knows the beginning and the end of her daughter’s story. She proceeds anyway. 

“From the beginning I knew my destination, and I chose my route accordingly. But am I working toward an extreme of joy, or of pain? Will I achieve a minimum or maximum?” From “The Story of Your Life: by Ted Chiang

In the end Chiang provides a deeply human story of love, joy, and loss that caused a lump in my throat. It also woke my brain in a way that I appreciated. I want to know more about concepts that I have not fully considered or attempted to understand after years of telling myself I was not a “science person” and never studying philosophy or physics, in part because I was terrified of the math that seemed to come with them. I love that Chiang used fiction to explore ideas and make them more accessible without once “talking down” to me, the reader.

Here are some of the questions he left me to pursue further. Feel free to let me know your thoughts or point me to resources that will help:

• Free will. What is at the center of the debate about free will? Does it exist or, as some argue, is it an illusion? Or both? Chiang himself argues the case for “compatibilism,” which holds that it is possible for a “robust free will to be compatible with causal determinism.” Determinism, as defined here, holds that everything humans do flows from what came years before (cause) and “the laws of nature”-- in other words history and the things that we as humans are hard-wired to do. I grew up hearing about free will in the context of religion/sin and whenever my elders wanted to make a point about taking responsibility for my actions and the consequences that followed. I am pretty sure they wouldn’t have appreciated an argument that suggested my actions were a natural progression of all that had happened in the world down to that moment and I had no choice in the matter. 

• Time and Memory. Thinking sequentially is natural for me, for most of us. Yet I have, in the past, wondered how time really works and how memories really work. During the first of my few experiences with LSD many years back, I “remembered” events that had both happened and those that had not. They were vivid and when certain events unfolded even years later, I recalled them from “before” in a kind of deja vu experience. Perhaps this is evidence of a deterministic universe or perhaps the acid simply opened the doors to my own character and the feelings, thoughts, ideas that would continue to shape me. Either way, I find I am open to the idea that we can’t know all we know when we think only one way. 

• How did he DO that? Finally, as a writer, I marveled at how the structure of this story reflected its central themes. It reads as though Chiang, like his narrator, was able to see it as a whole from the beginning and selected the structure that would maximize the delight and engagement of the reader. When I revisit the story I will be looking closely at the scaffolding as he called it in this Believer interview. I want to know how he did it. 

Here are a few more Ted Chiang links for you:

• Wondrous Curiosity: Review of Ted Chiang’s Stories of Your Life and Others (Berkley Fiction Review)Wanted: More Books Like This

• Manifold Interview: Ted Chiang on Free Will, Time Travel, Many Worlds, Genetic Engineering, and Hard Science Fiction - If you have the time, this is interesting. From Chiang’s interview with two physicists I learned the difference between “hard science fiction” and the rest of science fiction. I also found myself absorbed in the conversation about free will which begins at minute 12:15 and ends at the 29 minute mark.

Wanted: More Books Like This

I’m going to step deeper outside my comfort zone and am looking for recommendations. Let me know of any science fiction or speculative fiction you would recommend and why. I’m planning a look at this world of fiction in a future newsletter. 

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In the meantime check these out for your TBR list

A look at the comments for last week’s newsletter reveals what a couple of Sparkers who are also writers will are reading:

• Elizabeth Aquino: I’m looking forward to Maggie O’Farrell’s new novel, as I loved Hamnet. I’m currently reading a fantastic novel titled Perma Red by Debra Magpie Earling.

• Michael Estrin: Michael Estrin expects to mark the shift from summer to autumn by switching from nonfiction to fiction. His summer-into-September reading includes Before the Storm by Rick Perlstein and will “probably” read Reaganland next. “I’m not sure what I’ll pick up next. Ross Macdonald has been on my TBR for years, so this might be the year I crack into his Lew Archer novels. I was also on a Kim Stanley Robinson kick in the spring. I’ve been thinking about reading his Mars trilogy.”

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Ciao for now.

Gratefully,

Betsy

P.S. And now…your moment of Zen: Dangling By A Thread

There it was, a blossom suspended in mid-air by an almost invisible tendril of spider web whose origins were also invisible. 

Calling for Your Contribution to “Moment of Zen”

What is YOUR moment of Zen? Send me your photos, a video, a drawing, a song, a poem, or anything with a visual that moved you, thrilled you, calmed you. Or just cracked you up. This feature is wide open for your own personal interpretation.

Come on, go through your photos, your memories or just keep your eyes and ears to the ground and then share. Send your photos/links, etc. to me by replying to this email or simply by sending to: elizabethmarro@substack.com. The main guidelines are probably already obvious: don’t hurt anyone  -- don’t send anything that violates the privacy of someone you love or even someone you hate, don’t send anything divisive, or aimed at disparaging others. Our Zen moments are to help us connect, to bond, to learn, to wonder, to share -- to escape the world for a little bit and return refreshed. 

I can’t wait to see what you send!