There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your science, technology, and society journal
Trevor Quirk
In our technological society, the confetti must litter the ground before we decide what we’re celebrating. The cartoonish fanfare given to every unrealistic venture or dubious product (the Boring Company, Theranos, Web3, 23andMe, Atrium, the metaverse, ChatGPT — take your pick) suppresses any sober evaluation of them, even when academics, capitalists, and technocrats advertise how the windfalls of science and technology can damage or debase human life. Software engineers reveal their intentions to unleash a digital intelligence that negates human creativity. NFT hawkers insist straightfacedly that commodifying every element of life is the basis of a better economy. The emissaries of neuroscience and genetics casually proclaim that we are wet machines laboring under the illusion of volition. The sunless visionaries of Silicon Valley predict that we will soon abandon material civilization for crude simulations that goad our most anti-social impulses.
These sinister edicts are passively accepted by the public likely because they emerge from abstruse disciplines. It is hard enough to understand the rudiments of a scientific idea or the workings of an ascendant technology, let alone to disaggregate their plausible effects from sensationalism and bulls***. Yet any effort to measure these developments according to our deeper human needs (for agency, meaning, sentiment, and community) proves too cumbersome for our harried analysis. This neglect, in turn, breeds a yearning to see the finer stuff of our nature squared with the instrumental rationality to which we owe our frightening progress.
IT DOESN’T TAKE THOMAS SOWELL LONG TO DISPATCH SOCIAL JUSTICE
The science fiction of author Ted Chiang is an attempt to satisfy this yearning, and the commercial success of his books (unusual for the genre) would seem to attest to the ubiquity of that inarticulate feeling. Born in New York, son to a librarian and professor of mechanical engineering, Chiang was already a decorated speculative writer before the publication of Stories of Your Life (2002), whose titular entry was adapted by screenwriter Eric Heisserer (“I had a very profound emotional reaction to that story”) into the script for the underdog blockbuster Arrival (2016). Chiang was hardly forgotten in the 17 years between Stories of Your Life and his only other collection to date, Exhalation (2019), which secured his renown among the sort of reader who might have chanced upon him in Barack Obama’s “Summer Reading List.”
The durable appeal of Chiang’s fiction originates in his delicate animations of ideas one might find abstracted to death in some middling “Science, Technology and Society” journal. “Liking What You See” narrates the reception of a neural implant capable of inducing “calliagnosia,” the inability to perceive human beauty. An offshoot of neuroscience, the product inspires a university initiative to require its use on campus, leading to national debates over the fairness and value of beauty. In “Dacey’s Patent Automatic Nanny,” a 19th-century English mathematician designs a mechanical wet nurse intended to standardize the “vast range” in “approaches to child-rearing.” Eventually, the inventor’s son entrusts his own child to the nanny, producing an offspring “so wedded to machines that he could not acknowledge another human being.”
The story “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom” conjures a personal device that realizes the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics by allowing users to communicate across parallel branches of reality. The technology, roundly helpful for ventures in fraud, extortion, and piracy, enables “data brokers” to promote “unhealthy behavior in their customers” by selling them useless information concerning the fortunes and follies of their parallel selves. As we see, Chiang’s ultimate subjects bear a family resemblance to the ethical quagmires and externalities that are left beside the moving trains of our high-tech industries, and his narratives are fashioned by scrambling and rotating the vectors of public controversy.
Chiang’s more daring sensitivity is to emotion. The bile of cosmic disenchantment, refined oils of world-weariness, and overheated goo of affection buffer his esoteric summaries and seep between the rollers, pistons, and capacitors of his imagined devices. “The Great Silence” recasts the Fermi paradox (humanity’s failure to locate the intelligent extraterrestrial life that should, in all probability, exist) as the tragic irony of endangered parrots who cannot convince us that they “are exactly what humans are looking for.” “Division by Zero” equates a disquieting mathematical discovery (a “formalism that lets you equate any number with any other number”) with a disquieting realization about marital compatibility. “Omphalos” relates an alternate history in which devout geocentric scientists are spiritually devastated to find a celestial object at the center of creation, displacing Earth and its high stewards from providence.
Chiang’s project of rehumanizing technological life is not only admirable but urgent, given the sizable portions of experience we have already ceded to synthetic enhancement and scientific detachment. And his capacity to reflect the special paranoias, melancholies, and intrusions of the 21st century helps account for why this writer is not only celebrated but cherished, as though he were a grand mirror neuron installed to comfort closeted Luddites in some coastal metropolis. But the catharsis engineered by Chiang’s art occurs largely at this schematic level, removed from the actual sentences that compose what a mesmerized Ezra Klein once deemed “perfect short stories — perfect.”
They are not perfect. Chiang’s writing, in fact, is wildly uneven. While his prose can be understated, vivid, and occasionally inventive (a creature examines its own brain using a “solipsistic periscope”), it also features phrasing so artless it assumes the appeal of early lab meat (I winced at lines like “Ana looked thoughtful” or “She looked studiedly”). Chiang’s dialogue reads as weirdly forensic and is usually redundant, while his carefully orchestrated surprises are too often spoiled by faithless exposition. The quality of his narratives is no more consistent. The same author of ingenious elaborations like “Understand” or “Exhalation” also offers pale imitations of Borges that can only exoticize their bland fare (e.g., The Tower of Babylon and The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate). The Lifecycle of Software Objects, a torturous exercise in its author’s worst instincts, usefully demonstrates how Chiang’s method of resuscitating human experience (i.e., parenting) through technologic novelty (i.e., digital beings in need of parents) does not necessarily compensate for the tedium and maudlin of characters describing every trial and delight of their parenthood.
But the more interesting imperfections in Chiang’s fiction derive from its strategies for communicating arcane theories, counterintuitive technologies, and deviant principles. Chiang’s most overt technique involves unfurling the fictive universe alongside our own, so that all his strange phenomena register against a warbled image of reality. The structural impulse manifests literally in one of Chiang’s religious stories, Hell Is the Absence of God, where humans who know the Abrahamic God exists can observe a fireless, mundane hell when the ground becomes transparent, revealing an eternal realm that is more recognizable than an Earthly plane subjected to calamitous “Angelic visitations,” a la Hideaki Anno.
This parallelism allows Chiang to trade in the marvel of an alternative universe while leveraging the familiarity of our own. The effect sands the edges of Chiang’s technical explanations, since there is usually an implied analog of a subject or situation in the reader’s life, and it orients the reader by coordinating the social outcomes of science and technology in the speculative world with those unfolding in reality. A good case study, “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling,” invites us to compare a neural technology for cataloging human memory to that ancient preservative technology of writing — and, by extension, the supplementary tools we have developed since (e.g., typing, spell check, voice to text). The reader is also reassured to see commonplaces like “making information more accessible is an intrinsic good” amid public debate about a “memory search tool” because it already harbors a cache of associations with our actual experience, particularly on the internet. By dutifully straddling two universes, Chiang’s stories are presented to the reader already halfway interpreted.
When executed properly, Chiang’s parallelism makes wondrous anomalies, such as the reinvention of modern genetics within Seventy-Two Letters, a personal favorite. Yet it also gravitates toward a stifling narrative archetype. “Fables aren’t usually what I write,” Chiang insists in the notes of Exhalation — a baffling declaration for a writer who basically specializes in the cautionary tale. Many of Chiang’s stories are self-described warnings. The text of “Exhalation” is revealed as a message-in-a-bottle from a failing species to whichever sentient “explorers” have received it: “Does the same fate that befell me await you?” Similarly, the story “What’s Expected of Us” is a communique from humanity’s future — “This is a warning. Please read carefully” — about the psychosocial catastrophe incited by a personal device that shows its user does not possess free will. Other stories seek to caution readers through ironic foreshadowing so blatant it sounds like a three-chord sting: “Rational child-rearing will lead to rational children,” or “No matter how sophisticated technology became, our daughter’s skills would always rest on the bedrock of traditional literacy.” These expectations are (surprise!) violated.
For Chiang, the fable serves as a static crane that transfers material between technical and human precincts across a reliable arc. While this arrangement provides function, shape, and velocity to his stories, it also profoundly restricts their twin ambitions. Where another sci-fi author (say, the unworldly Greg Egan) might credibly advance one of Chiang’s conceits so thoroughly as to reclothe our universe in its imperishable strangeness, Chiang must always keep a semblance of ordinary reality within reach. Conversely, if Chiang wishes to examine the human ramifications of an idea, discovery, or technology, his genre also obliges him to explain the icy technicalities that vitiate these warmer considerations.
Nor does it help that Chiang often confuses explanation for representation of subjective life. For years Chiang financed his writing by working as a technical writer in the software industry. The sky-high abstraction required by that work often compliments the technical syntheses of his stories, as the heightened view allows Chiang to spot strange resonances between otherwise unrelated fields. Yet Chiang’s attempts at interiority are often conducted from this atmospheric vantage, from where his characters are often diagrammed to the point of sterility. Humans who learn they have no agency fall into a state of “akinetic mutism, a kind of waking coma. …The ability to move remains, but the motivation is gone.” A recovering “addict” is unnerved to learn she will soon be wealthy, since “a giant windfall could trigger a relapse just as easily as a traumatic event.” Chiang appears dimly aware of this shortcoming, as he is attracted to mediums and settings where it would be appropriate for people to dispassionately analyze and explain themselves, such as public communications, documentaries, and therapy sessions. Even in these settings, Chiang’s characterizations remain mere indices of experience, terminologies dreaming dully of people.
The popularity of Chiang’s science fiction tracks with a subtle alienation experienced by those who have lived in arrested reception of technological revolution, oscillating between baseless jubilation and apocalyptic hysteria. For decades, rent-seeking firms, popular media, and high-tech corporations have seeded public consciousness with dehumanizing notions that happen to facilitate technologies designed for mass consumption. We are more likely to remain on social media if we believe our “social fabric” is woven from nothing more than discrete threads of expression, to be gobsmacked by AI’s cognitive approximations if we believe the human mind to be a computer, or to shrug at destructive turns in the economy if we forget the people behind its administrative machinery. The failure of popular technology to accommodate our humanity behooves us to deny or whittle the fullness of our social and private lives. That’s what it feels like, anyway, to witness the most advanced sectors of the economy scrambling to convince adults that they really are insipid children, suited to the dismal toys made for them. This is the self-alienation that Chiang soothes by reminding us that our subjective universe is still accessible, at least in outline. But Chiang’s peculiar ambitions have landed him in an artistic habitat far away from science fiction, an older wilderness where the competition is impossibly fierce. For giving form to the infinite palette of human sentiment and quivering yarn of our social bonds will always be the kingdom of ordinary literature.
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Trevor Quirk is a writer living in Asheville, North Carolina. His writing has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Point, and Texas Monthly, among other publications. He is working on a novel and a book about nihilism in American culture.