Ted Chiang Interview
First of all, congratulations on adding a Hugo to your Nebula! Hopefully it doesn’t make ‘The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate’ too tough an act to follow - do you have any other stories in the pipeline just now?
I have a short story in Jonathan Strahan’s anthology ECLIPSE TWO, coming out from Nightshade Books in November.
‘The Merchant and The Alchemist’s Gate’ very strongly evokes The Arabian Nights
Obviously the basic structure of the story, a person telling stories to a king and hoping to avoid execution, is modeled on that of The Arabian Nights
The story very compellingly evokes medieval Arab society and life – what other sources did you draw on to achieve that evocation?
I did some reading about medieval Islamic culture, but my story is set in the storyteller’s versions of Baghdad and Cairo rather than the actual historical cities. For example, the wily and adulterous woman is a staple of The Arabian Nights
You’ve talked about the influence of scientist Kip Thorne on the story. What was that influence precisely? Was it more to do with the science of the story, or with the ethical implications of that science?
Many years ago the physicist Kip Thorne was on a book tour in Seattle, and he gave a talk in which he described how you could—in theory—create a time machine without violating Einstein’s general relativity. Here’s the general idea: imagine you have one mouth of a wormhole in a laboratory on Earth, while the other mouth is mounted inside of a spaceship. Have the ship travel at near lightspeed to a location ten light-years away and then come back. To observers on Earth, it will take twenty years for the ship to return, but to astronauts on the ship, the trip will only take a year due to time dilation.
Here’s the cool part: if you’re in the laboratory on Earth looking through the wormhole mouth, you’ll see the spaceship crew experiencing the entire journey within a year. A year after the spaceship left, you’d see the crew disembarking back on Earth and receiving their ticker-tape parade, even though no one outside is going to throw that parade for another nineteen years. And if you then stepped into the laboratory’s wormhole mouth, you’d emerge from the spaceship’s wormhole mouth, and you could talk to the people who, nineteen years in your future, are welcoming back the astronauts. Those people could step through the spaceship’s wormhole mouth to visit your lab, and see their past.
Of course the next question is, can you change the past? Thorne examined a situation where you set up the mouths of a wormhole so that, if you fired a billiard ball into one mouth, the ball would exit out the other mouth a second earlier and knock itself out of the way before it could enter the first mouth. This is essentially a version of the grandfather paradox, but unlike the scenario of a person going back in time with a gun, this one is amenable to mathematical analysis. You can actually set up equations that describe this situation and solve them.
What Thorne found was, basically, that the billiard ball doesn’t knock itself out of the way. The ball exits the wormhole mouth at a slight angle so that it doesn’t hit itself head on; it only gives itself a glancing blow, so that the ball then enters the other wormhole mouth on a slightly different trajectory, which is why it exited at a slight angle. So, no paradoxes; you can’t change the past.
(See Thorne’s bookBlack Holes and Time Warps
I thought this was all fascinating. Here was a version of time travel that actually made sense; it had limitations, but they followed naturally from the basic mechanism. Initially I considered writing a more traditional SF story about this, but any civilization that could realistically be able to manipulate wormholes would be so advanced as to be essentially unrecognizable to us. I could have set it in the near future, but that didn’t seem more plausible to me than setting it in the past; we’re not appreciably closer to real wormhole technology than medieval alchemists. Then it occurred to me that an “Arabian Nights” setting might be interesting, because the recursive nature of time travel fit with the convention of nested stories, and the idea of a fixed timeline seemed to mesh well with Islamic notions of destiny.
The story seems to be both a riposte to and an elaboration on ‘What’s Expected of Us, your short short piece dealing with the discovery of a device that proves, very simply and directly, that there’s no such thing as free will - how do you see the two stories as relating to / interacting with each other?
It’s mostly a coincidence; “What’s Expected of Us” had an entirely different genesis. I was thinking about the old trope that there exists a thought that kills anyone who thinks it. (The Monty Python skit about the joke so funny you die laughing is one example of this trope, which Wikipedia calls the “motif of harmful sensation.") It occurred to me that one form this idea might take is a proof that free will doesn’t exist. It’s been said that it doesn’t matter whether we have free will or not, only that we _believe_ we have free will; without that belief, we wouldn’t get out of bed in the morning. So if there existed a truly convincing argument that free will was an illusion, that would be a pretty close equivalent to the lethal thought; it wouldn’t make your heart stop beating, but it’d sap your will to live.
Of course, even an air-tight proof that free will was an illusion wouldn’t convince most people; we’re all very good at denying unpalatable truths. It’d be more effective if there were a simple demonstration that free will was an illusion, something that anyone could try for themselves. The “Predictor” device in the story is what I came up with.
If a device for seeing the future actually existed, I don’t know that people would fall into akinetic mutism the way they do in the story, but I think something very odd would have to happen. Consider: suppose you see that you’re going to fall and break your arm later in one hour. There’s no way you can avoid it, because we’re assuming that the future is fixed. What goes through your mind as you walk toward the scene of the accident? One might argue that seeing your future means accidents like that won’t happen to you anymore, but what if everyone has access to this device? Is it possible that nothing unpleasant will ever happen to anyone ever again?
Finding meaning within a limited or pre-determined universe seems to be a recurrent theme of your writing, whether here or in stories like ‘Story of Your Life’ or ‘Tower of Babylon’ - what is it about that that keeps on pulling you back?
I’m surprised that you think of “Tower of Babylon” as a story about finding meaning within a limited universe. The protagonist of that story achieves the equivalent of circumnavigating the globe, and I wouldn’t think that most sailors who’ve done that would say the experience demonstrated to them how limited the universe was.
The most significant similarity between “Tower of Babylon” and “Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” to my mind, is that their protagonists both use religious faith to find meaning in what happens to them. In both stories, the universe could be seen as purely mechanistic, but neither protagonist interprets it that way; they look for and find evidence for their faith.
By contrast, the protagonist of “Story of Your Life” has to find meaning in a purely secular way, so in that sense it’s not clear to me that these three stories have anything in common, beyond the fact that most fiction is about making sense of our lives.
Many of your stories use fantasy props in an SFnal way - how do you see the two genres as interacting?
It may be true that I’ve used fantasy props in a science-fictional way, but in general it’s not something I set out to do deliberately. The instance in which I was most conscious of blending genres was in “Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” which actually does the reverse of what you describe: it uses a science-fiction prop in a fantasy way. The inspiration, as I’ve mentioned, was speculative science, but in every other respect the story fits the conventions of fantasy. For example, the frame story is a variation on the “old magic shop” trope. There is absolutely no extrapolation of the implications of introducing a time machine into medieval Baghdad would be; it’s assumed that the time machine will never become widely available, just as the relics or potions sold in mysterious magic shops never become widely available. In that respect, “Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” is probably the most atypical story I’ve written.
Extrapolating the implications of a speculative premise certainly isn’t exclusive to science fiction, but it’s more commonly associated with it. I think this has to do with the fact that science fiction is largely restricted to naturalism as its narrative mode, while fantasy is free to use modes like expressionism, or surrealism. As a literary movement, naturalism is said to have arisen in the wake of scientific discoveries like Darwin’s theory of evolution; Zola apparently described it as a way to write novels using the scientific method. While I wouldn’t go that far, I do think that science fiction is a product of the scientific age in a way that fantasy is not, and that the most useful way to characterize science fiction is not through adherence to known scientific fact, but through adherence to the scientific worldview.
You’ve talked before about the hiatus between your first three published stories in the early 90s and ‘Story of Your Life’ in 1998, triggered in part by dealing with just how impressively well those first stories did (a Nebula Award for ‘Tower of Babylon’ in 1990, and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in ‘92). There seems to have been an almost as large space between your late 90s / early 00s writing and your current fiction - I wondered why that was?
The process of publishing my short story collection was a very painful experience for me; I was hurt by someone I thought I could trust, and it made me bitter about the business of publishing. I gave up writing altogether for a number of years, and looked for different ways to apply my creative energy. At one point I wound up staying in a house with two guys I barely knew, collaborating with them on a screenplay for a low-budget horror movie. Nothing ever came of it, but I have no regrets about the experience; my expectations were set appropriately, so I wasn’t disappointed.
Eventually I decided to write fiction again, but it’s been a gradual process. I’m still trying to balance my attachment to and detachment from the field.
Writing for film can be very different from writing prose fiction; did you learn anything in particular from shifting into a different medium? And did working in the (as I’d interpret it) new-to-you horror genre throw any particular new light on your understanding of science fiction and fantasy?
I learned almost nothing about either writing for film or writing horror; for me the most educational thing about the experience was just hanging out with a guy who had driven in an international road rally and a guy who had directed episodes of a reality series for MTV. Although I suppose I did come away with a sense of just how often, when given the choice between something that makes sense and something that looks good, people who write for film will choose the latter. This is something I’d known intellectually, but it was interesting to see it in practice, extending to even the most mundane scenes. I realize this isn’t true for all films, but after my experience I became more conscious of how pervasive this tendency is, even in good films.
Ted Chiang was born in Port Jefferson, New York and graduated from Brown University with a degree in Computer Science. He attended the Clarion Writers’ Workshop in 1989. He currently works as a technical writer in the software industry and resides in Bellevue, Washington. His short fiction has received the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, and Locus awards, and can be found in the collection Stories of Your Life and Others
Al Robertson is a writer and musician who lives in London. He graduated from St Andrews University with a degree in English Literature and Art History, and has since worked in marketing, feature film development and cabaret management. He’s published fiction in The Third Alternative and Midnight Street, and online at Infinity Plus and Anthology Builder, with upcoming stories in Postscripts, Black Static and Interzone. He’s also an occasional performer of his own poetry, and a freeform drone bassist.
