Ted Chiang's Stories and the Role of Science Fiction
Lookism, free will, and memory.
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Ted Chiang is lauded as one of the best living science fiction writers. His work has won four Nebula awards, four Hugo awards, and six Locus awards.
Today, I will be introducing three insightful stories from his short story collections Stories of Your Life and Others (2002) and Exhalation: Stories (2019): Liking What You See: A Documentary, What’s Expected of Us, and The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling.
Liking What You See: A Documentary
The popular perception of science fiction involves aliens, warfare, and spaceships. A brief foray into Chiang’s stories dispels this notion. Liking What You See: A Documentary imagines calliagnosia, a treatment which blinds someone to beauty, through anecdotes from children with calli, pro-calli activism leaders, doctors, calli-only private school directors, and others. In just under 13,000 words, Chiang explores the ethical and societal implications of calliagnosia from all angles.
Though calliagnosia does not exist in real life, the parallels are evident. Chiang focuses on the effect of media on our psychology:
"We become dissatisfied with the way ordinary people look because they can’t compare to supermodels.”
He explores the disruptive effect of technology on real life interactions:
"The more time any of us spend with gorgeous digital apparitions around, the more our relationships with real human beings are going to suffer.
And he addresses how cultural and societal norms lag behind technological developments:
"Beauty isn't the problem; it's how some people are misusing it… [Calli] lets you guard against that. I don't know, maybe this wasn't a problem back in my parents' day. But it's something we have to deal with now."
Calli represents filters, editing, generative artificial intelligence, and other technological tools used to simulate an engaging simulacrum of reality:
Our environment will become saturated with this supernormal stimuli, and it'll affect our interaction with real people…. When every speaker on a broadcast has the presence of a Winston Churchill or a Martin Luther King … we'll become dissatisfied with the people we interact with in real life.
What’s Expected of Us
What’s Expected of Us is an exploration of determinism, the philosophical belief that events are uncontrollable and predetermined. Chiang introduces the Predictor, a device which always lights up a moment before it is touched.
This practical demonstration that we lack free will plunges much of the population into akinetic mutism, a disorder characterized by a constant state of inaction.
“People used to speculate about a thought that destroys the thinker…. It turns out that the disabling thought is one that we’ve all encountered: the idea that free will doesn’t exist.”
What’s Expected of Us reads like a public service announcement, encouraging the reader to to “pretend that you have free will” because “civilization now depends on self-deception.”
However, there exists a distinct undertone of futility throughout the message. As free will does not exist, this PSA will have no impact on the future of society.
The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling
This short story was the standout among the two collections. It explores subjectivity, the distortion caused by technology in communication, and the difference between what’s precise and what’s right.
Chiang uses two distinct storylines to develop his themes. In one, Remem, a Black Mirror-esque retinal recorder takes the place of one’s natural memory. In the other, the focus is on an ancient tribe, functioning mainly with oral communication. Despite the storylines contrasting in setting, they parallel each other in structure and theme.
In the ancient tribe storyline, Europeans believe written communication trumps oral communication. When an event is documented on paper, conflicting narratives vanish. Truth may change as one’s memory falters.
However, the tribespeople believe there exists a distinction between right and precise:
"The assessment report of the Europeans... was exact and precise, but that wasn't enough to settle the question. The choice of which clan to join had to be right for the community.”
This plotline parallels the discourse between pro-Remem and anti-Remem parties. With a life log, there exists an objective, recorded truth. On the other hand, these recordings may diminish the efficacy of natural memory. Additionally, people may unconsciously distort narratives for a reason - for instance, as a self preservation mechanism.
The life log is reminiscent of video recordings and photos, already prevalent. By the end of the story, Chiang builds up a fantastic pro-Remem case, but he acknowledges that individual memories may be better off as private and subjective:
"Literacy encourages a culture to place more value on documentation and less on subjective experience.... Written records are vulnerable to every kind of error, and their interpretation is subject to change, but at least the words on the page remain fixed, and there is real merit in that. When it comes to our individual memories... I'm threatened by the prospect of removing subjectivity from our recall of events."
"We regarded our episodic memories as such an integral part of our identities that we were reluctant to externalize them, to relegate them to books on a shelf or files on a computer."
Chiang also indicates the gradual introduction of technology as a “succession of software gadgets that… delivered utility and convenience” which were easy to accept at the time.
I will leave you with this quote:
“We don't normally think of it as such, but writing is a technology, which means that a literate person is someone whose thought processes are technologically mediated."
After all, through the process of writing, we have subjected our thoughts to a filtering process, losing integral parts of what might be considered “right” and distorting a real event to an “objective” truth.
Science fiction, as with other genre fiction, does not receive the attention it deserves. I implore you all to check out the three previously discussed stories from Chiang. If you find them interesting, read the other stories in his collections for more interesting premises. Liking What You See: A Documentary explores lookism and appearance-altering technology, What’s Expected of Us focuses on free will and the destructive power of thought, and The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling inspects technologically mediated communication and the finicky nature of memory. To those not typically interested in science, Chiang’s work serves as great material for further exploration.
Written by Chloe Xu
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