Ted Chiang does love to explore the counter-factual with empathy and openness where he somehow manages to take himself out of the story in the admirable Virginia Wolfe sense. The OP misses the biting critique hidden in these tales. For example Omphalos, Hell Is the Absence of God, and Tower of Babylon, can all be read as a devastating critique of religion. They all clearly articulate what the world would be like if certain religious beliefs were true. Since those worlds are nothing like our own, the beliefs are false. There is a strong element of cosmic horror in each of these stories that implicitly make a strong case that we are quite fortunate that our religions do not accurately describe nature.
Exhalation is one of my favorites. There is profound lesson about the nature of the mind, expressed simply as a sequence of discovery by a lone scientist in a very alien world. But the world is an idealized, simplified version of our own with much simpler source of work in the physics sense. I very much wanted to know more about the nature of that world, and for the people there to find a way out of their apocalyptic predicament. But that story, like it's world, is hermetically sealed perfection. The fate of our own universe is the same, but with more steps in the energy cycle and a longer timeline. The silence bounding that story is a beautiful choice, one that makes it a real jewel.
Thank you for the valuable and constructive comment!
I just didn't feel like discussing the satire angle was very interesting! In the article:
> In Omphalos, Young Earth Creationism is empirically true2. Astronomers can only see light from stars 6,000 light-years away. Fossilized trees have centers with no rings. The first God-created humans lack belly buttons. The scientists in that story keep discovering multiple independent lines of evidence that converge on creationism: because in that universe, they're simply correct.
I think this section makes it very clear that in one sense, it's a clear satire of religion, or at least Creationism (implied: we do not see this, so it's implausible we're in a YE Creationist world). I didn't think it was worth spelling it out. Also overall I thought anti-religious satire in fiction is fairly common (I remember reading Candide in high school, and Pullman around the same time or a little earlier) and far from what makes Chiang special.
Agree with your thoughts on Exhalation. I hope they make it out, but also completely understand why Chiang ended the story where he did.
TBH I'm glad you left it out! It's an uncomfortable aspect to his stories. His narration hovers above the action with such perfect grace... The satirical element, or its implication, somehow mars that perfection. It is probably better left unsaid by critics and admirers, and left to the individual reader. In truth I shouldn't have mentioned it.
I think OP was incorrect in writing, "thermodynamics appear to work differently", in Exhalation.
I think the thermodynamics works the same and you've nailed it by describing it as hermetically sealed perfection. It's a simpler world where a self-aware being can see and almost feel the march of entropy and their own brief existence being part of that.
Calling Hell is the Absence of God a critique of religion misses the point. Chiang isn’t saying “religion is false.” He imagines a world where God’s existence and Heaven and Hell are undeniable, and shows that even certainty doesn’t solve the problem of suffering or the struggle for meaning. The story critiques the idea that proof would make faith easier, not religion itself.
"story of your life" isn't quite about sapir-whorf but more about the lagrangian view of the world (as opposed to the Hamiltonian). That is difficult to convey in a movie and so the sapir-whorf part got emphasized there.
Also Exhalation is a beautiful story that captures the fact that all life and intelligence lives in the space between low entropy and high entropy. So it's not different thermodynamics.
But overall I align with the sense of admiration the OP has for Ted Chiang. He explores "what if" scenarios with such mastery I feel like I had a dip in a fresh water pool after a read.
Another of my favs (including the title itself) is "Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom".
Interesting observation. Spoilers -> He does the same thing in Tower of Babel, where the topology of the universe is structured in such a manner that the tower can physically reach "heaven", which ends up being a surprise to the reader and the characters at the same time. Masterful stuff.
I want to nitpick two things.
On compatibalism, the first definition presented is the correct one, the framing that "you have to make peace with determinism" isn't quite right. For compatiablists, determinism is freedom, because if one's actions did not follow from prior causes then they would not align with one's internal states.
The other is sneaking in the characterization of Chiang's AI doomer skepticism as a "blindspot". This topic is being debated to death on HN every day so I'll leave that argument for another thread, but IMO it contradicts the tone of the article about a writer whose depth of thought the author was just heaping praise on. I'm not saying its necessary to adopt his views on all things, but I think it deserved more than a footnote dismissal.
Re #1 It's been several years since I read up on that area of philosophy. I'll need to reread some stuff to decide whether I think the definition I used is a fine enough simplification for sci-fi readers (and, well, myself) vs whether it missed enough nuances that it's essentially misleading.
(Some academic philosophers follow me on substack so maybe they'll also end up correcting me at some point!)
Re #2 ah I don't think of it as "sneaking in". It's more like "this is a view I have, this is a view many of my readers likely also have, given that this is a widely debated topic (as you say) and I'm not going to change anybody's minds on the object level I'm just going to mention it and move on."
The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate is by far my favourite of all Chiang's stories. It is always great intellectual pleasure to read them, however sometimes I find his writing style a bit dry and I don't get so involved emotionally as with Philip K. Dick's stories for instance.
If you like stories of science fiction, I'm surprised no-one mentioned Greg Egan.
"Singleton": what if many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory was real?
The Orthogonal trilogy, starting with "The Clockwork Rocket": what if space-time was Riemannian rather than Lorentzian? Physics explained at https://www.gregegan.net/ORTHOGONAL/00/PM.html
Greg Egan can write character-based science fiction when he wants to as well (you can find it in his short stories), but it has to be a topic that resonates with him personally. Without a resonance, the stories often look like "plausible vignette - fast-forward through technological implications - another plausible vignette with characters already changed by the experience".
I read Understand by him a really long time ago. I thought it was really good. However at the time I didnt understand the motivation of one of the main characters in it and the ending felt unjustified because of that. Years ago someone posted The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate (pdf) by him on here. That one was a trip. He nailed the atmosphere and cadence of One Thousand and One Nights with a time travel story superimposed on top of it. Or it least that's how I remember it. Thought it was very Sufi in how it was told.
I've been an ardent compatibilist for a long time, but I had no idea there was even a term for it. I'm grateful to now have additional context on my own belief system - context I didn't even know existed! It's weird because when I try to explain it to people they often don't seem to get it. It's like everyone gets locked into these false dichotomies... they become unable to look past them!
I loved Arrival but never really bothered to look into Story of Your Life or its author. I guess now I have to go and read all of Chiang's work... Stories about consistent fictional science are indeed a rarity. This is also why I like Sam Hughes' work (aka qntm) - he does this pretty well himself.
OMG I'm so glad this review might have an impact! Please do check out Story of Your Life and then read the other stories!
Without giving too many spoilers away, the short story's plot is simultaneously extremely similar to and extremely different from the movie. YMMV on which one you prefer, fans are divided.
In my experience people who read the short story first prefer the story, and people who watch the movie first prefer the movie. But you might be different! Just read it first and report back what you feel!
I mean, I'm a bit biased towards Denis Villeneuve. The man is literally the modern embodiment of Stanley Kubrick and everything he stood for. His films contain everything that's lacking in modern cinema - decent plots, good writing, slower pacing, artful framing and composition of shots, a dedication to hard sci-fi, respect for source material, very careful attention to lighting and sound design, miniatures so thoughtfully combined with CGI you don't even notice them because it all blends together so seamlessly, as special effects should... I could go on forever. I worship the ground he walks on.
With that said, trying to compare the two would be like trying to compare apples and oranges. Films and prose are two separate mediums. Some things which work well in one don't work in the other. It's like the difference between 2001 the film vs. 2001 the book - perhaps my favorite example since they were simultaneously written and directed as counterparts to each other (as opposed to one being based on the other, as is usually the case).
If you like Chiang, Netflix has an adaptation of his work called “Pantheon” that’s very good. Animated, two seasons, about the rise of uploaded humans.
I don’t know which of his works it’s based on, so can’t say how true it is to the original, but I enjoyed it.
Just chiming in to recommend this show as well. Very well done and it has a complete story arc in 2 seasons which is close to my optimal TV show duration.
Like the other comment said, this isn't a Ted Chiang adaptation though, it's based on a few short stories by Ken Liu. You can read one of the stories here:
Nitpick (and overall I agree with tfa): "In Exhalation, thermodynamics appear to work differently". I'd say it works the same, but in a very simplified universe, so it gives you a much better understanding of the concept. Which is again, pretty genius.
Oh and "I think he doesn’t understand the power of this singularity-level technology he just introduced." <- I think he does, but this take would make for a much more boring and less powerful story.
Not addressed in tfa but there is one story where writing is first introduced in a society, and before that they had 2 concepts of truth: "The real truth" and "What all parties find convenient". So powerful, I think we do this more that we think, see also that story about that guy that needs coming to terms with his own memory.
Read Ted Chiang people. Any new book of his is an insta-buy for me. I think Greg Egan is up there with Ted Chiang btw, his stories are much longer but still have this high level of scientific and thoroughly structured imagination.
> Many of his readers, even in their otherwise rave reviews, miss this. Multiple reviewers complain about how the science in his stories are “unrealistic” (e.g. strong Sapir-Whorf is “discredited”). They expected hard science fiction; Chiang was doing something different. Chiang created different universes with internally self-consistent scientific laws, using science fiction and alternative science as a vehicle for exploring philosophical progress and human relationships.
This is being overly kind. "What if religion was actually true?" does not create a universe with internally self-consistent scientific laws; it creates a universe full of impossibility from which you then pick and choose one or two things to focus on, and end up with not science fiction but fantasy.
It's not impossible from a scientific perspective for a planet to be terraformed and seeded with intelligent life by some overly advanced spices (you can say "god-like"). Or to create a simulation with intelligent life in it and to save some resources by starting 6000 years ago from a complex seed state rather than simulating 16 billion years of physics to see the intelligent life emerge or not. That would be rather inconvenient for the PhD studying simulated intelligent life, he'd better just purchase and rearrange some pre-computed data.
The difference between science and religion doesn't lie in disagreement over particular facts or any facts at all, the difference is in the approach. Religion can explain anything but predicts very little (except for sociological phenomena which it predicts rather well). Science is built around making verifiable predictions but doesn't in fact give any answers, only theories that are (mostly) consistent with observable events (so far). They can however agree or disagree over any particular set of facts. Take any religious belief and you can build a scientific world where it is true.
> some overly advanced spices (you can say "god-like")
You really can't. They're very different.
> It's not impossible from a scientific perspective for a planet to be terraformed and seeded with intelligent life by some overly advanced spices (you can say "god-like"). Or to create a simulation with intelligent life in it and to save some resources by starting 6000 years ago from a complex seed state rather than simulating 16 billion years of physics to see the intelligent life emerge or not.
True enough. But such a world would be very different from a world in which the bible was literally true, and a world in which the bible is actually literally true is genuinely scientifically impossible. You would have to redefine an unimaginably large number of things and you would still have a world full of impossible contradictions to the point that nothing could be said.
> Take any religious belief and you can build a scientific world where it is true.
You can't, because the beliefs are fundamentally unscientific and self-contradictory. There is no possible world in which the god that actually religious people believe in exists as they believe in him; there are possible worlds in which an entity with approximately the same gross physical properties exists, but such an entity is nothing like the actual religious god.
> You can't, because the beliefs are fundamentally unscientific and self-contradictory. There is no possible world in which the god that actually religious people believe in exists as they believe in him; there are possible worlds in which an entity with approximately the same gross physical properties exists, but such an entity is nothing like the actual religious god.
Why not? I don't think it's likely and I definitely don't build my life under an assumption that this is true.
However I just can't see how this can be ruled out by scientific means. Our world doesn't have to follow any laws at all, this whole thing can be a bad dream of a sleeping giant.
> However I just can't see how this can be ruled out by scientific means. Our world doesn't have to follow any laws at all, this whole thing can be a bad dream of a sleeping giant.
If you took that hypothesis seriously you'd still be able to apply predictions and laws. Giving up on trying to understand it is what's unscientific.
> science is built around making verifiable
> predictions but doesn't in fact give any
> answers, only theories
This is just redefining "theory" and "answer" to the point of meaninglessness.
Darwin didn't know a lot of things about evolution or biology, and I'm sure he had questions about some of those things. If you could talk to him today you could give him answers to those questions, and the reason for that is that those answers are found in theories and scientific progress in general.
But yes, it doesn't provide "answers" in the mushy religious sense, i.e. "what is it all for?".
> The difference between science and
> religion doesn't lie in disagreement
> over particular facts or any facts at all
Yes, it does. You're just implicitly excluding all the parts where religious texts make empirical claims about reality as unimportant or allegory, because religion has already lost those arguments.
Do you think Galileo clashed with the Catholic church over heliocentrism because the church didn't understand what religion should and shouldn't be making claims about?
The point being, a theory only holds "true" until it's superseded by a better theory. Furthermore, multiple conflicting theories can be in use at the same time in the absence of a good unifying theory. In the end science neither says nor cares what is "true", it just looks for theories that are good at predicting stuff.
"Answers" in a common sense are supposed to be "true" and "permanent" or at least that's how I understand the word.
EDIT apparently the comment above got extended, so I'll address some of newer points too.
> You're just implicitly excluding all the parts where religious texts make empirical claims about reality as unimportant or allegory, because religion has already lost those arguments.
No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying all these claims can be as well true in a different (fully consistent and scientific) world. Furthermore, if you assume we live in a simulation then basically anything becomes possible in OUR world too, including Jesus walking on water turned into wine. It's just our simulation overlords had a good sense of humor.
The reason why we don't usually consider simulation theories is not because they're false (this can't be proven), but because they aren't practical and don't predict much. Even if we do live in a simulation, this simulation so far seems to follow some consistent internal "laws" so we can as well study those. Not that it means anything, but helps us to exterminate those who neglect these laws so it's a survivorship bias in action.
> "Answers" in a common sense are supposed to be "true" and "permanent"
I would argue that answers are supposed to be useful for the purpose motivating the question.
Q: What is the price of gas?
A1: The number of units of some other good or service demanded by a seller in echange for a given quantity of it.
A2: about $4.00/gal
A1 is, I would say, both "true" and "permanent". Assuming it is at least approximately accurate, though, A2 is much more of an answer in most cases the question is asked, even though it is at perhaps only approximately and in any case at best transitorily true.
The goal of science is to disprove our theories so we can find out if they are true, and hopefully replace them with improved versions.
The goal of religious study is to try to prove that it is not impossible, not that it is a probably reading of what happened. To find some absurd way of reconciling different stories. I have no idea how you can call that an answer.
Well these "answers", whether absurd or not, were good enough for societies to live by them and survive for millennia.
Furthermore, even though you can argue that science can give some answers, it definitely under-delivers on questions like "what is good and evil" or "why you should have kids". Some of those are covered by the "humanism" neoreligion, some of them aren't. This whole experiment is very modern, it's not clear what are long-term survival rates of societies that completely give up on religions in a classical sense. It could turn out that societies that believe in nonsense have an edge over the ones that don't, after all this matches our experience all the way up until the 20th century.
I agree science doesn’t give good answers for good and evil, for me religion gives even worse answers. For example the Bible is clearly in favor of slavery as an institution. Other religions like Buddhism are for me better.
The scary part is that there may not be a good or evil, and the answers we have are just made up stuff.
> Religion can explain anything but predicts very little (except for sociological phenomena which it predicts rather well).
No, it doesn't.
I mean, it does the horoscope thing where it makes predictions vague enough that people can retrospectively fit whatever actually happens into them easily, but that's not actually predicting very well.
Religions are to a big extent codified traditions and many traditions emerged and persisted because they benefited their bearers in one way or another. That's fundamentally different from horoscopes.
> Religions are to a big extent codified traditions and many traditions emerged and persisted because they benefited their bearers in one way or another.
Religions are a lot more than just codified traditions, but yes, some traditions are have benefits. That doesn't mean that the religion as a whole is good at predicting anything, it just means that they occasionally preserve things that are beneficial. But because what is codified is codified without systematic knowledge of what works or how it works, the preservation of benefit is essentially random with weak selective pressure acting in the aggregate of beliefs, and with a very big "past utility is no guarantee of future utility" even on the bits that are useful, because the utility of the tradition may be tied to conditions that are not preserved, while the tradition itself is blindly perserved.
> But because what is codified is codified without systematic knowledge of what works or how it works, the preservation of benefit is essentially random with weak selective pressure acting in the aggregate of beliefs
But you agree this must be much better than random? Evolutionary pressure on species is also rather weak: unfit specimen survive and fit specimen die due to chance all the time. But look where it got us when averaged over long periods of time.
I don't buy the "systematic knowledge of what works or how it works" part. That's what NLP scientists used to say about neural nets while building monstrous systems based on "systematic knowledge of grammar". You definitely don't have to understand "how it works" to be able to make good predictions.
> But you agree this must be much better than random?
Well, no, without a definition of what domain it is supposed to be better in, and what the actual alternative it is being compared to more concretely than "random" (irreligious humans don't behave randomly, and, in fact, even without religion preserve traditions, some of which are useful), and probably some argument to make the case, no, I'm not going to agree with that.
> You definitely don't have to understand "how it works" to be able to make good predictions.
You have to actually make predictions to make predictions, certainly. And religion is manifestly very bad at making predictions where it does make them, and the things you are talking about are very much not predictions, they are memes in the original sense.
I think this is a case of trees and forest. Scifi doesn't require "a universe with internally self-consistent scientific laws." Or, if you want to hold on to that interpretation, there is no scifi. Not even the ones that uphold our current knowledge of physics, since that is known to be incomplete.
Scifi --to me, but to many others as well-- is a thought experiment in prose. Like any work of fiction, it needs to have some consistency, but certainly not total. We can "suspend our disbelief."
The story you refer to is consistent, though. It stays away from details that would break that. It can do that, because (1) realism is not the goal of the story, and (2) a practically omnipotent God is given, which allows every possible scenario.
> Scifi --to me, but to many others as well-- is a thought experiment in prose. Like any work of fiction, it needs to have some consistency, but certainly not total. We can "suspend our disbelief."
Then what, for you, is the distinction between Sci-fi and Fantasy? I think if you draw that line where most people draw it and think through what Chiang is actually doing, he's on the other side of it.
Whatever definition you settle on, it would be more sensible if it didn't disqualify the works that immediately come to mind when we say 'sci-fi' despite them usually exhibiting bad relativity and thermodynamics.
I don't think the distinction is meaningful. The lack of a line is why we ended up with the term speculative fiction.
Well, feel free to send my review to anybody cool living in SF or East Bay, especially people new to the area! Maybe they'd read the review and think they'd vibe well with me :)
Hell is the Absence of God is one of my favourite stories of all time. Ted Chiang is truly incredible. The short story anthologies are unbelievable. Every one a banger.
It's really cool that you ask 10 people their favorite chiang story, and chances are, you'd get 11 answers. And he didn't even write that many more than 10 stories!
Really tells you both how talented he is, and how different stories just speak to different people.
> Chiang’s much weaker at the middle level, where we consider how societies and civilizations collectively face novel technologies.
I’m not really sure this matters. The ideas are interesting for their effects on the characters of the story—going in depth on the world building outside of the characters doesn’t really mean anything. For the author’s example: yes, economic experiments and drug experiments would be cheaper, but like… so what? What does that mean for the characters in the story? His stories aren’t an exploration of ideas for their own sake, they’re created with a purpose, and this middle level world building doesn’t move that purpose forward at all.
Ted Chiang does love to explore the counter-factual with empathy and openness where he somehow manages to take himself out of the story in the admirable Virginia Wolfe sense. The OP misses the biting critique hidden in these tales. For example Omphalos, Hell Is the Absence of God, and Tower of Babylon, can all be read as a devastating critique of religion. They all clearly articulate what the world would be like if certain religious beliefs were true. Since those worlds are nothing like our own, the beliefs are false. There is a strong element of cosmic horror in each of these stories that implicitly make a strong case that we are quite fortunate that our religions do not accurately describe nature.
Exhalation is one of my favorites. There is profound lesson about the nature of the mind, expressed simply as a sequence of discovery by a lone scientist in a very alien world. But the world is an idealized, simplified version of our own with much simpler source of work in the physics sense. I very much wanted to know more about the nature of that world, and for the people there to find a way out of their apocalyptic predicament. But that story, like it's world, is hermetically sealed perfection. The fate of our own universe is the same, but with more steps in the energy cycle and a longer timeline. The silence bounding that story is a beautiful choice, one that makes it a real jewel.
Thank you for the valuable and constructive comment!
I just didn't feel like discussing the satire angle was very interesting! In the article:
> In Omphalos, Young Earth Creationism is empirically true2. Astronomers can only see light from stars 6,000 light-years away. Fossilized trees have centers with no rings. The first God-created humans lack belly buttons. The scientists in that story keep discovering multiple independent lines of evidence that converge on creationism: because in that universe, they're simply correct.
I think this section makes it very clear that in one sense, it's a clear satire of religion, or at least Creationism (implied: we do not see this, so it's implausible we're in a YE Creationist world). I didn't think it was worth spelling it out. Also overall I thought anti-religious satire in fiction is fairly common (I remember reading Candide in high school, and Pullman around the same time or a little earlier) and far from what makes Chiang special.
Agree with your thoughts on Exhalation. I hope they make it out, but also completely understand why Chiang ended the story where he did.
TBH I'm glad you left it out! It's an uncomfortable aspect to his stories. His narration hovers above the action with such perfect grace... The satirical element, or its implication, somehow mars that perfection. It is probably better left unsaid by critics and admirers, and left to the individual reader. In truth I shouldn't have mentioned it.
I think OP was incorrect in writing, "thermodynamics appear to work differently", in Exhalation.
I think the thermodynamics works the same and you've nailed it by describing it as hermetically sealed perfection. It's a simpler world where a self-aware being can see and almost feel the march of entropy and their own brief existence being part of that.
Calling Hell is the Absence of God a critique of religion misses the point. Chiang isn’t saying “religion is false.” He imagines a world where God’s existence and Heaven and Hell are undeniable, and shows that even certainty doesn’t solve the problem of suffering or the struggle for meaning. The story critiques the idea that proof would make faith easier, not religion itself.
"story of your life" isn't quite about sapir-whorf but more about the lagrangian view of the world (as opposed to the Hamiltonian). That is difficult to convey in a movie and so the sapir-whorf part got emphasized there.
Also Exhalation is a beautiful story that captures the fact that all life and intelligence lives in the space between low entropy and high entropy. So it's not different thermodynamics.
But overall I align with the sense of admiration the OP has for Ted Chiang. He explores "what if" scenarios with such mastery I feel like I had a dip in a fresh water pool after a read.
Another of my favs (including the title itself) is "Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom".
Interesting observation. Spoilers -> He does the same thing in Tower of Babel, where the topology of the universe is structured in such a manner that the tower can physically reach "heaven", which ends up being a surprise to the reader and the characters at the same time. Masterful stuff.
I want to nitpick two things.
On compatibalism, the first definition presented is the correct one, the framing that "you have to make peace with determinism" isn't quite right. For compatiablists, determinism is freedom, because if one's actions did not follow from prior causes then they would not align with one's internal states.
The other is sneaking in the characterization of Chiang's AI doomer skepticism as a "blindspot". This topic is being debated to death on HN every day so I'll leave that argument for another thread, but IMO it contradicts the tone of the article about a writer whose depth of thought the author was just heaping praise on. I'm not saying its necessary to adopt his views on all things, but I think it deserved more than a footnote dismissal.
I appreciate the nitpicks!
Re #1 It's been several years since I read up on that area of philosophy. I'll need to reread some stuff to decide whether I think the definition I used is a fine enough simplification for sci-fi readers (and, well, myself) vs whether it missed enough nuances that it's essentially misleading.
(Some academic philosophers follow me on substack so maybe they'll also end up correcting me at some point!)
Re #2 ah I don't think of it as "sneaking in". It's more like "this is a view I have, this is a view many of my readers likely also have, given that this is a widely debated topic (as you say) and I'm not going to change anybody's minds on the object level I'm just going to mention it and move on."
The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate is by far my favourite of all Chiang's stories. It is always great intellectual pleasure to read them, however sometimes I find his writing style a bit dry and I don't get so involved emotionally as with Philip K. Dick's stories for instance.
If you like stories of science fiction, I'm surprised no-one mentioned Greg Egan.
"Singleton": what if many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory was real?
The Orthogonal trilogy, starting with "The Clockwork Rocket": what if space-time was Riemannian rather than Lorentzian? Physics explained at https://www.gregegan.net/ORTHOGONAL/00/PM.html
Greg Egan can write character-based science fiction when he wants to as well (you can find it in his short stories), but it has to be a topic that resonates with him personally. Without a resonance, the stories often look like "plausible vignette - fast-forward through technological implications - another plausible vignette with characters already changed by the experience".
I read Understand by him a really long time ago. I thought it was really good. However at the time I didnt understand the motivation of one of the main characters in it and the ending felt unjustified because of that. Years ago someone posted The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate (pdf) by him on here. That one was a trip. He nailed the atmosphere and cadence of One Thousand and One Nights with a time travel story superimposed on top of it. Or it least that's how I remember it. Thought it was very Sufi in how it was told.
The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate is SO good. I tear up every time I reread it.
If you haven't already done so, check out The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling.
I've been an ardent compatibilist for a long time, but I had no idea there was even a term for it. I'm grateful to now have additional context on my own belief system - context I didn't even know existed! It's weird because when I try to explain it to people they often don't seem to get it. It's like everyone gets locked into these false dichotomies... they become unable to look past them!
I loved Arrival but never really bothered to look into Story of Your Life or its author. I guess now I have to go and read all of Chiang's work... Stories about consistent fictional science are indeed a rarity. This is also why I like Sam Hughes' work (aka qntm) - he does this pretty well himself.
OMG I'm so glad this review might have an impact! Please do check out Story of Your Life and then read the other stories!
Without giving too many spoilers away, the short story's plot is simultaneously extremely similar to and extremely different from the movie. YMMV on which one you prefer, fans are divided.
In my experience people who read the short story first prefer the story, and people who watch the movie first prefer the movie. But you might be different! Just read it first and report back what you feel!
I mean, I'm a bit biased towards Denis Villeneuve. The man is literally the modern embodiment of Stanley Kubrick and everything he stood for. His films contain everything that's lacking in modern cinema - decent plots, good writing, slower pacing, artful framing and composition of shots, a dedication to hard sci-fi, respect for source material, very careful attention to lighting and sound design, miniatures so thoughtfully combined with CGI you don't even notice them because it all blends together so seamlessly, as special effects should... I could go on forever. I worship the ground he walks on.
With that said, trying to compare the two would be like trying to compare apples and oranges. Films and prose are two separate mediums. Some things which work well in one don't work in the other. It's like the difference between 2001 the film vs. 2001 the book - perhaps my favorite example since they were simultaneously written and directed as counterparts to each other (as opposed to one being based on the other, as is usually the case).
If you like Chiang, Netflix has an adaptation of his work called “Pantheon” that’s very good. Animated, two seasons, about the rise of uploaded humans.
I don’t know which of his works it’s based on, so can’t say how true it is to the original, but I enjoyed it.
I think you are mixing up Chang and Ken Liu. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon_(TV_series)
Oh, I think you’re right. Oops!
That was a really fun show. It got even better at the end
Just chiming in to recommend this show as well. Very well done and it has a complete story arc in 2 seasons which is close to my optimal TV show duration.
Like the other comment said, this isn't a Ted Chiang adaptation though, it's based on a few short stories by Ken Liu. You can read one of the stories here:
https://bigthink.com/high-culture/ken-liu-short-story/
However, in this case I think the TV adaptation did a better job with the story than the original short.
Nitpick (and overall I agree with tfa): "In Exhalation, thermodynamics appear to work differently". I'd say it works the same, but in a very simplified universe, so it gives you a much better understanding of the concept. Which is again, pretty genius.
Oh and "I think he doesn’t understand the power of this singularity-level technology he just introduced." <- I think he does, but this take would make for a much more boring and less powerful story.
Not addressed in tfa but there is one story where writing is first introduced in a society, and before that they had 2 concepts of truth: "The real truth" and "What all parties find convenient". So powerful, I think we do this more that we think, see also that story about that guy that needs coming to terms with his own memory.
Read Ted Chiang people. Any new book of his is an insta-buy for me. I think Greg Egan is up there with Ted Chiang btw, his stories are much longer but still have this high level of scientific and thoroughly structured imagination.
> Many of his readers, even in their otherwise rave reviews, miss this. Multiple reviewers complain about how the science in his stories are “unrealistic” (e.g. strong Sapir-Whorf is “discredited”). They expected hard science fiction; Chiang was doing something different. Chiang created different universes with internally self-consistent scientific laws, using science fiction and alternative science as a vehicle for exploring philosophical progress and human relationships.
This is being overly kind. "What if religion was actually true?" does not create a universe with internally self-consistent scientific laws; it creates a universe full of impossibility from which you then pick and choose one or two things to focus on, and end up with not science fiction but fantasy.
It's not impossible from a scientific perspective for a planet to be terraformed and seeded with intelligent life by some overly advanced spices (you can say "god-like"). Or to create a simulation with intelligent life in it and to save some resources by starting 6000 years ago from a complex seed state rather than simulating 16 billion years of physics to see the intelligent life emerge or not. That would be rather inconvenient for the PhD studying simulated intelligent life, he'd better just purchase and rearrange some pre-computed data.
The difference between science and religion doesn't lie in disagreement over particular facts or any facts at all, the difference is in the approach. Religion can explain anything but predicts very little (except for sociological phenomena which it predicts rather well). Science is built around making verifiable predictions but doesn't in fact give any answers, only theories that are (mostly) consistent with observable events (so far). They can however agree or disagree over any particular set of facts. Take any religious belief and you can build a scientific world where it is true.
> some overly advanced spices (you can say "god-like")
You really can't. They're very different.
> It's not impossible from a scientific perspective for a planet to be terraformed and seeded with intelligent life by some overly advanced spices (you can say "god-like"). Or to create a simulation with intelligent life in it and to save some resources by starting 6000 years ago from a complex seed state rather than simulating 16 billion years of physics to see the intelligent life emerge or not.
True enough. But such a world would be very different from a world in which the bible was literally true, and a world in which the bible is actually literally true is genuinely scientifically impossible. You would have to redefine an unimaginably large number of things and you would still have a world full of impossible contradictions to the point that nothing could be said.
> Take any religious belief and you can build a scientific world where it is true.
You can't, because the beliefs are fundamentally unscientific and self-contradictory. There is no possible world in which the god that actually religious people believe in exists as they believe in him; there are possible worlds in which an entity with approximately the same gross physical properties exists, but such an entity is nothing like the actual religious god.
> You can't, because the beliefs are fundamentally unscientific and self-contradictory. There is no possible world in which the god that actually religious people believe in exists as they believe in him; there are possible worlds in which an entity with approximately the same gross physical properties exists, but such an entity is nothing like the actual religious god.
Why not? I don't think it's likely and I definitely don't build my life under an assumption that this is true.
However I just can't see how this can be ruled out by scientific means. Our world doesn't have to follow any laws at all, this whole thing can be a bad dream of a sleeping giant.
> However I just can't see how this can be ruled out by scientific means. Our world doesn't have to follow any laws at all, this whole thing can be a bad dream of a sleeping giant.
If you took that hypothesis seriously you'd still be able to apply predictions and laws. Giving up on trying to understand it is what's unscientific.
Darwin didn't know a lot of things about evolution or biology, and I'm sure he had questions about some of those things. If you could talk to him today you could give him answers to those questions, and the reason for that is that those answers are found in theories and scientific progress in general.
But yes, it doesn't provide "answers" in the mushy religious sense, i.e. "what is it all for?".
Yes, it does. You're just implicitly excluding all the parts where religious texts make empirical claims about reality as unimportant or allegory, because religion has already lost those arguments.Do you think Galileo clashed with the Catholic church over heliocentrism because the church didn't understand what religion should and shouldn't be making claims about?
The point being, a theory only holds "true" until it's superseded by a better theory. Furthermore, multiple conflicting theories can be in use at the same time in the absence of a good unifying theory. In the end science neither says nor cares what is "true", it just looks for theories that are good at predicting stuff.
"Answers" in a common sense are supposed to be "true" and "permanent" or at least that's how I understand the word.
EDIT apparently the comment above got extended, so I'll address some of newer points too.
> You're just implicitly excluding all the parts where religious texts make empirical claims about reality as unimportant or allegory, because religion has already lost those arguments.
No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying all these claims can be as well true in a different (fully consistent and scientific) world. Furthermore, if you assume we live in a simulation then basically anything becomes possible in OUR world too, including Jesus walking on water turned into wine. It's just our simulation overlords had a good sense of humor.
The reason why we don't usually consider simulation theories is not because they're false (this can't be proven), but because they aren't practical and don't predict much. Even if we do live in a simulation, this simulation so far seems to follow some consistent internal "laws" so we can as well study those. Not that it means anything, but helps us to exterminate those who neglect these laws so it's a survivorship bias in action.
> "Answers" in a common sense are supposed to be "true" and "permanent"
I would argue that answers are supposed to be useful for the purpose motivating the question.
Q: What is the price of gas? A1: The number of units of some other good or service demanded by a seller in echange for a given quantity of it. A2: about $4.00/gal
A1 is, I would say, both "true" and "permanent". Assuming it is at least approximately accurate, though, A2 is much more of an answer in most cases the question is asked, even though it is at perhaps only approximately and in any case at best transitorily true.
In that sense yes, I agree that science gives good answers.
The goal of science is to disprove our theories so we can find out if they are true, and hopefully replace them with improved versions.
The goal of religious study is to try to prove that it is not impossible, not that it is a probably reading of what happened. To find some absurd way of reconciling different stories. I have no idea how you can call that an answer.
Well these "answers", whether absurd or not, were good enough for societies to live by them and survive for millennia.
Furthermore, even though you can argue that science can give some answers, it definitely under-delivers on questions like "what is good and evil" or "why you should have kids". Some of those are covered by the "humanism" neoreligion, some of them aren't. This whole experiment is very modern, it's not clear what are long-term survival rates of societies that completely give up on religions in a classical sense. It could turn out that societies that believe in nonsense have an edge over the ones that don't, after all this matches our experience all the way up until the 20th century.
I agree science doesn’t give good answers for good and evil, for me religion gives even worse answers. For example the Bible is clearly in favor of slavery as an institution. Other religions like Buddhism are for me better.
The scary part is that there may not be a good or evil, and the answers we have are just made up stuff.
> Religion can explain anything but predicts very little (except for sociological phenomena which it predicts rather well).
No, it doesn't.
I mean, it does the horoscope thing where it makes predictions vague enough that people can retrospectively fit whatever actually happens into them easily, but that's not actually predicting very well.
Religions are to a big extent codified traditions and many traditions emerged and persisted because they benefited their bearers in one way or another. That's fundamentally different from horoscopes.
> Religions are to a big extent codified traditions and many traditions emerged and persisted because they benefited their bearers in one way or another.
Religions are a lot more than just codified traditions, but yes, some traditions are have benefits. That doesn't mean that the religion as a whole is good at predicting anything, it just means that they occasionally preserve things that are beneficial. But because what is codified is codified without systematic knowledge of what works or how it works, the preservation of benefit is essentially random with weak selective pressure acting in the aggregate of beliefs, and with a very big "past utility is no guarantee of future utility" even on the bits that are useful, because the utility of the tradition may be tied to conditions that are not preserved, while the tradition itself is blindly perserved.
> But because what is codified is codified without systematic knowledge of what works or how it works, the preservation of benefit is essentially random with weak selective pressure acting in the aggregate of beliefs
But you agree this must be much better than random? Evolutionary pressure on species is also rather weak: unfit specimen survive and fit specimen die due to chance all the time. But look where it got us when averaged over long periods of time.
I don't buy the "systematic knowledge of what works or how it works" part. That's what NLP scientists used to say about neural nets while building monstrous systems based on "systematic knowledge of grammar". You definitely don't have to understand "how it works" to be able to make good predictions.
> But you agree this must be much better than random?
Well, no, without a definition of what domain it is supposed to be better in, and what the actual alternative it is being compared to more concretely than "random" (irreligious humans don't behave randomly, and, in fact, even without religion preserve traditions, some of which are useful), and probably some argument to make the case, no, I'm not going to agree with that.
> You definitely don't have to understand "how it works" to be able to make good predictions.
You have to actually make predictions to make predictions, certainly. And religion is manifestly very bad at making predictions where it does make them, and the things you are talking about are very much not predictions, they are memes in the original sense.
I think this is a case of trees and forest. Scifi doesn't require "a universe with internally self-consistent scientific laws." Or, if you want to hold on to that interpretation, there is no scifi. Not even the ones that uphold our current knowledge of physics, since that is known to be incomplete.
Scifi --to me, but to many others as well-- is a thought experiment in prose. Like any work of fiction, it needs to have some consistency, but certainly not total. We can "suspend our disbelief."
The story you refer to is consistent, though. It stays away from details that would break that. It can do that, because (1) realism is not the goal of the story, and (2) a practically omnipotent God is given, which allows every possible scenario.
> Scifi --to me, but to many others as well-- is a thought experiment in prose. Like any work of fiction, it needs to have some consistency, but certainly not total. We can "suspend our disbelief."
Then what, for you, is the distinction between Sci-fi and Fantasy? I think if you draw that line where most people draw it and think through what Chiang is actually doing, he's on the other side of it.
Whatever definition you settle on, it would be more sensible if it didn't disqualify the works that immediately come to mind when we say 'sci-fi' despite them usually exhibiting bad relativity and thermodynamics.
I don't think the distinction is meaningful. The lack of a line is why we ended up with the term speculative fiction.
Greg Egan is someone who also does this, and does it prolifically and for the ~thirty years.
Arrival is my new favorite movie ever
Me too
We're doing a watch party next Monday! In case you and/or ppl you know live in East Bay!
Now I feel bad I won't be able to attend, being on the other side of the country... :(
Well, feel free to send my review to anybody cool living in SF or East Bay, especially people new to the area! Maybe they'd read the review and think they'd vibe well with me :)
For anyone that wants a quick taste of Ted's writing, I heartily recommend having a read of The Great Silence as it's available here: https://electricliterature.com/the-great-silence-by-ted-chia...
The last line always gets me.
I it the same story as I keep sending as a taster for Ted Chiang.
I feel the author of the article shows extraordinary hubris in writing, "his lack of output being tragic for a generational talent".
Hell is the Absence of God is one of my favourite stories of all time. Ted Chiang is truly incredible. The short story anthologies are unbelievable. Every one a banger.
It's really cool that you ask 10 people their favorite chiang story, and chances are, you'd get 11 answers. And he didn't even write that many more than 10 stories!
Really tells you both how talented he is, and how different stories just speak to different people.
> Chiang’s much weaker at the middle level, where we consider how societies and civilizations collectively face novel technologies.
I’m not really sure this matters. The ideas are interesting for their effects on the characters of the story—going in depth on the world building outside of the characters doesn’t really mean anything. For the author’s example: yes, economic experiments and drug experiments would be cheaper, but like… so what? What does that mean for the characters in the story? His stories aren’t an exploration of ideas for their own sake, they’re created with a purpose, and this middle level world building doesn’t move that purpose forward at all.
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