Author of adventure/thriller and horror fiction

STORIES OF YOUR LIFE by Ted Chiang

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stories-of-your-life-by-ted-chiangTed Chiang’s STORIES OF YOUR LIFE is a terrific collection of science fiction stories. The story, “Story of Your Life,” gained Chiang widespread recognition after it was adapted for the big screen with ARRIVAL.

Short stories aren’t usually my thing, but I was thoroughly engaged by this collection. Chiang can take a single scientific fact or simple premise and make a deep and thoughtful story about it. My perception was somewhat colored by something I’d heard about him, which is he apparently takes a year to write a single short story. I went into each story thinking, well, this had better be the best short story ever, because wow, a whole year. As a result, the things I didn’t like stood out as much starker, so I wish I hadn’t heard that about him. The dialogue is average in quality, and many of the stories read like science articles presented as dramatic fiction. No matter, I still greatly enjoyed each story. In many ways, Chiang’s stories read like BLACK MIRROR in print–here’s a single technology or premise, now let’s explore its implications completely. But what I like about BLACK MIRROR more is it fully explores how technology interacts with human nature.

Three of Chiang’s stories come to mind as real standout stories for me. In “Tower of Babylon,” the Biblical tower is imagined as a giant tower soaring into the clouds and touching the vault of Heaven. A miner must travel for days to reach the top so he can help hack into the vault of Heaven. What will he find? It is true that “as above, so below”?

In “Hell is the Absence of God,” Heaven and Hell are very real things and angelic visitations common, which strike like natural disasters. After a man loses his wife during one of these disasters and is taken to Heaven, he has to figure out a way to get to Heaven to join her even though he doesn’t love God. This was by far my favorite story.

And in “Liking What You See: A Documentary,” a collection of people at a college campus express their views about “calli,” a technology that denies people the ability to distinguish beauty in faces, allowing people to interact in a different way. The students must vote on whether to make calli compulsory for all students going to the college. The way the two sides of the issue were presented was compelling, and I found myself agreeing with both sides. More than the rest, this story strikes me as the most feasible and a possible future debate humans will actually have.

Chiang’s a talent to watch, and I’ll be buying his collections in the future, though at the rate of a story a year, it’ll be the year 2026. Check out STORIES OF YOUR LIFE for a collection of thought-provoking science fiction stories.

ARRIVAL (2016)

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I knew I’d probably like ARRIVAL before I even saw it. A movie about a linguist trying to communicate with visiting aliens sounded right up my alley. The film is based on the short story, “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang, which is also very good and provides some additional theory but far fewer dramatic elements.

Louise is a linguist saddened by memories of the loss of her daughter due to a rare incurable disease. When 12 giant spaceships descend to hover over different spots on the earth, an Army colonel assembles a team to make contact and find out what they want. Louise heads the linguist team and Ian, a physicist, heads the science team. The central challenge of the film is how do you communicate with an alien species to determine their intent, particularly when one possible intent is conquest? Even among humans, the wrong word could have huge diplomatic consequences.

The story rolls out in a fairly realistic manner. While the scientists are filled with wonder, the Army guys are always stony faced, as they keep wondering if they’re at war or not. The human population responds with panic buying and a large degree of hysteria, which results in a wave of violence, including possibly violence against the aliens. The events in the movie appear to capture the gamut of what it’d be really be like to encounter an alien civilization. The aliens themselves are terrific. Overall, the lessons of the film are 1) communication is hard, 2) communication is essential to understanding somebody different, 4) misunderstanding can lead to violence, 5) a rational approach to diplomacy gets better results than one based on fear.

The big reveal in the film is also highly interesting. I’ll spoil it starting in the next paragraph, so look away if you haven’t seen the film.

arrival

Apparently, the aliens have come to provide the gift of their language (and with it how they think and perceive reality), which allows humans to experience time in a different way. This is based on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (Linguistic Relativity), which poses that once you start thinking in another language, the language changes your brain and results in a different perception of the world. Louise’s memories of her daughter dying aren’t the past, they’re a possible future after she marries Ian. In the film, the Chinese are about to attack the aliens, but Louise experiences a future conversation with a key Chinese general, who tells her his wife’s dying words so she can give them to him in the past and prevent him from attacking. This is pure deus ex machina, which in the arts is defined as an expected event that saves the hero from what would otherwise be a hopeless situation.

This type of flash forward story doesn’t make sense to me. Basically it says:

1. You’re about to drown in a river
2. Afterwards, you tell somebody to be at the river with a life preserver to throw you
3. You don’t drown in the river

In reality, causation would mean:

1. You’re about to drown in a river
2. You drown
3. The end

If I have it right, the theory in the story is based on the idea that time runs in both directions, so reverse causation is possible. It doesn’t make sense to me, but okay. This article voices my objections better than I can. Still, the film gets an A for ideas.

In my view, Robert J. Sawyer does a better job with the theory in FLASHFORWARD. In this novel, a CERN experiment results in everybody in the world experiencing a short period of their lives twenty years in the future. They then have to determine whether what they experience is predestined, and if they can change it, how can they change it. It’s a great story.

Similarly, after the events in ARRIVAL, Louise publishes a guide to how to speak the alien language (which helps her in the present determine how to speak the alien language, argh). Knowing the alien language presumably allows everybody to know their potential futures and change them. I’m not sure how that would be a gift. The result would be chaos. We are all interconnected, and constant decisions by everybody to optimize their futures would result in knowing your future timeline becoming meaningless, as it would be constantly changing. In the film, Louise knows her daughter will die but must decide whether to have her anyway, which she does. But if Ian had the same ability, he might decide not to marry Louise and have the baby. In the short story, another problem surfaces. Her daughter dies rock climbing and not from an incurable disease, meaning Louise could have prevented it from happening but doesn’t.

In the end, ARRIVAL is a great film on par with thinking films like CONTACT. The communication side was fascinating, but the mental time travel turned out to be deus ex machina for me.

Stanford Marshmallow Experiment

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The Stanford Marshmallow Experiment was a series of experiments exploring delayed gratification in the 1960s and early 1970s.

The first study was conducted by Walter Mischel and Ebbe Ebbesen in 1960. In this study, children (aged four through six) were taken into a room empty of distractions. A treat of their choice, such as a marshmallow, was placed on a plate. They were told they could eat the treat right away but if they waited 15 minutes, they would get a second treat.

More than 600 children took part. A minority ate the treat right away while the rest tried to delay gratification. One-third made it all the way and won the second treat.

The experiment is fascinating in that it explores the concept of a present you and a future you. You say, on Tuesday, I’m going to exercise. Then Tuesday rolls around and you’d rather sit and play computer games, so that’s what you do. You say, I’ll exercise next Tuesday for sure, and you feel good about it. Then next Tuesday comes…

What’s interesting is researchers followed up on the children in 1990. On average, the children who delayed gratification showed better SAT scores. Another follow-up study involved brain scans of the children in middle-age, which showed their brains are structured differently.

Can’t wait to try this on my kids …

Here’s a video of Silvia Helena Barcellos describing why we tend to want instant gratification:

Have Advanced Alien Civilizations Ever Existed?

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Ten years ago, the discovery of a planet outside our solar system was considered historic. With advances in technology and space exploration, astronomers have now confirmed the existence of more than 3,000 planets in the universe. Astronomers now know that every star likely has at least one planet orbiting it.

The big question is are there any advanced alien civilizations out there we might talk to? Drake’s equation (1961) included a number of factors–number of stars, fraction that have planets, planets per star orbiting at a distance suitable for water and therefore life, fraction of planets where life likely started, fraction of life-bearing planets on which civilization could emerge, and average life of such a civilization.

Four of these factors remain unknowns, but one thing for sure, the fraction of stars that have planets is now considered close to 100%, and about 20-25% of those planets are in right place for life to evolve over our galaxy’s 13-billion-year life.

In a remarkable editorial written for THE NEW YORK TIMES, Professor Adam Frank ignores the question of whether there’s an advanced civilization out there that could be contacted today. Instead, using Drake’s equation, he asks the question of whether human civilization was the likely the first (or last) in our galaxy. The answer is logically, “no.”

Consider that even if 1 in 10 billion planets (a pessimistic probability) have conditions allowing the rise of an advanced civilization, a trillion civilizations would still appear over the course of our galaxy’s history.

Frank writes, “Given what we now know about the number and orbital positions of the galaxy’s planets, the degree of pessimism required to doubt the existence, at some point in time, of an advanced extraterrestrial civilization borders on the irrational.”

Unfortunately, confirming the existence of such a civilization could take a long, long time.

Want to see a real alien planet? Click here.