THENEWYORKER,M AY13, 2019 63
TNY—2019_05_13—PAGE 63—133SC.—LIVE ART—R34298—PLEASE USE VIRTUAL PROOF. 4 C
BOOKS
REMEMBERING THE FUTURE
Hard problems in Ted Chiang’s new story collection.BYJOYCE CAROL OAT E S
ILLUSTRATION BY R. KIKUO JOHNSON
W
hen Henry James remarked, in
his preface to “The Portrait of a
Lady,” that “the house of fiction has ...
not one window, but a million,” he could
not have anticipated the genre of fiction
to which we have given the inexact term
“science fiction.” Still less could he have
anticipated the sort of literary-human-
ist science fiction associated with Ted
Chiang, whose début collection, “Sto-
ries of Your Life and Others” (2002),
garnered multiple awards in the sci-
ence-fiction community, and contained
the beautifully elegiac novella “Story of
Your Life,” which reëxamined the phe-
nomena of time and memory in terms
of language. (The novella was the basis
for the Academy Award-nominated film
“Arrival.”) Other stories in the collec-tion reinterpreted the Biblical Tower of
Babel, imagined an industrial era pow-
ered by Kabbalistic golems, and revis-
ited the oldest of theological arguments
regarding the nature of God. Like such
eclectic predecessors as Philip K. Dick,
James Tiptree, Jr., Jorge Luis Borges, Ur-
sula K. Le Guin, Margaret Atwood, Ha-
ruki Murakami, China Miéville, and
Kazuo Ishiguro, Chiang has explored
conventional tropes of science fiction in
highly unconventional ways.
In his new collection, “Exhalation”
(Knopf ), his second, Chiang again pre-
sents elaborate thought experiments in
narrative modes that initially seem fa-
miliar. Contemporary issues relating to
bioethics, virtual reality, free will and
determinism, time travel, and the usesof robotic forms of A.I. are addressed
in plain, forthright prose. If Chiang’s
stories can strike us as riddles, con-
cerned with asking rather than with an-
swering difficult questions, there is lit-
tle ambiguity about his language. When
an entire story is metaphorical, focussed
on a single surreal image, it’s helpful
that individual sentences possess the
windowpane transparency that George
Orwell advocated as a prose ideal.
The new collection starts with “The
Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,”
a quirkily original exploration of time
travel set in a mythical, ancient Bagh-
dad and told as if it were a tale out of
“The Arabian Nights.” Here, Chiang
imagines time travel as a “gate” through
which one steps into another dimen-
sion to confront a past or future self
without having the ability to affect any-
thing in that dimension. A series of
linked tales-within-the-tale show that
the goal of the time traveller must be
insight, not intervention. “Past and fu-
ture are the same, and we cannot change
either, only know them more fully,” our
narrator explains. “My journey to the
past had changed nothing, but what I
had learned had changed everything....
Nothing erases the past. There is re-
pentance, there is atonement, and there
is forgiveness. That is all, but that is
enough.” In an appendix to the collec-
tion, headed “Story Notes,” Chiang says
that “The Merchant and the Alche-
mist’s Gate” was inspired by the phys-
icist Kip Thorne, who speculated that
one might be able to create a time ma-
chine that obeyed Einstein’s theory of
relativity. The setting in a Muslim civ-
ilization had seemed appropriate to
Chiang “because acceptance of fate is
one of the basic articles of faith in Islam.”
That interplay between cutting-edge
theory and age-old tradition is a regu-
lar feature of Chiang’s imagination.
An ingenious turn-of-the-twenti-
eth-century automaton is the subject
of “Dacey’s Patent Automatic Nanny,”
which purports to be an excerpt from
the catalogue of a museum exhibit ti-
tled “Little Defective Adults—Atti-
tudes Toward Children from 1700 to
1950.” The Automatic Nanny, devised
by a proponent of “rational child-rear-
ing,” proves all too successful in mod-
elling an ideal parent: a child in its care
subsequently languishes under humanCritics Oates Books 05_13_19.L [Print]_9507992.indd 63 5/2/19 3:05 PM