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TO: To return to “Lifecycle,” Marco and Polo, two of the digients, want to legally become a corporation like Voyl, another digient. I think fiction is the best vehicle for type of thought experiments I’m engaged in. I have occasionally wondered if I should try writing some kind of speculative nonfiction essay as a way of exploring an idea, but right now I don’t have a clear sense of what that would look like. For me, the scientific idea is usually the initial impetus for a story, but by itself it’s not enough for me to start writing I don’t begin drafting until I know the ending, which means knowing the conclusion of the plot and the protagonist’s arc. You’re asking about whether something similar applies when I’m writing a story. The quoted line is about the effort required to raise a conscious being from infancy to adulthood and whether anyone can do a good job at it without an emotional connection. Ted Chiang: That’s an interesting quote to use as the springboard for that question. Do these principles occur as you’re writing? Do they precede the drafting? There are these specific scientific notions you address in some of your stories: the Novikov self-consistency principle in “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in “Story of Your Life.” These seem like very specific scientific principles you’ve attached flesh and muscle to. The rewards will be purely intellectual, and over the long term, will that be enough?” This is in a story about raising digients, learning AIs that are like conscious Tamogotchis Marco is a human-like digient, and Xenotherians are alien-like.
#Story of your life ted chiang software
Tochi Onyebuchi: In “The Lifecycle of Software Objects,” you write, “Aside from the enormous barrier to entry, raising Xenotherians won’t offer pleasures like the one and Ana just got from watching Marco. Ted Chiang and I corresponded over email about language, about faith, cynicism, and astonishment. No matter the species of a story’s protagonist, no matter the universe that forms the story’s setting, the subject is always us.Įxhalation is his second collection after 2002’s Stories of Your Life and Others, spanning stories published over the course of a decade and a half.
#Story of your life ted chiang free
Here, he tackles time-travel, artificial intelligence, alternate realities, free will, and so much more. In the past, Chiang has written about how first contact with aliens can reshape the very way we communicate, how being able to encounter the beautiful, devastating powers of literal angels can both renew and break us.