The Australian mathematician and science fiction writer Greg Egan also uses this technique; in Permutation City, Diaspora, The Arrows of Time, Dichronauts, etc. etc. he asks "what would the universe look like if this hypothesis were true" or "what would the universe look like if we changed some physical constant" and then builds a world according to those principles.
Ted Chiang is so good! And he does so well for creating universes with completely different laws of nature. It's somehow both the most science fiction thing and kind of not science fiction at all.
You mentioned how a lot of his stories touch on compatibilism, but I think one of his most interesting is about incompatibilism - 'What's Expected of Us', where a device is invented called a "Predictor" that sends a signal backwards in time telling you that you are about to press its button, and sure enough you always push the button at exactly the right moment. This one also does also address the societal level a little more as well.
Saw this via Hacker News. Ted Chiang is one of the greatest science fiction authors alive today, and probably my personal favorite. I hadn't heard of the term compatiblalism before, and now I'm glad that I have. Thanks for writing this.
Thank you for your kind words! If you like accessible introductions to philosophical ideas, you might like the rest of my substack! I'm especially proud of this one:
I think your comment on Chiang's relatively low output being tragic is more of an expression of how much you like his stories rather than a true point of criticism. :) Each author is different in how much lived life they need per story - or how much thinking away from their desk - and for him the ratio is rather high, I suppose.
That is fair! But we also don't know how many unpublished good-enough-for-anybody-else drafts he has laying around in his notebooks or sitting in Microsoft Word.
Kafka (another of my favorite short story writers) burned 90% of his writing in his lifetime, and by all accounts Chiang is if anything even more perfectionist.
Chiang took 4 years to write Stories of Your Life. If he just decided to #shipit after a year, maybe Stories of Your Life would only be 90% as good, but maybe we would've had 6 more Chiang stories by now.
True... I guess it depends on someone's perfectionism, as you said, and also on why they write in the first place. For me, part of the fun of writing is the conversation with readers, so I'm kind of a #shipit writer. I haven't read any interviews with him, you seem to be more familiar with his attitudes, but I suppose his motivations are somewhat different.
Having met many research scientists socially, I've observed that people who do the actual work are far less dogmatic and cocksure about what is and is not "settled" or "debunked" than the fundraising department heads and govt bureaucrats who speak on their behalf. Perhaps that is the sort of intellectual flexibility Chang wishes to encourage in his readers. After all, if you were able to travel back in time and try to explain quantum mechanics or gene therapy to a meeting of the Royal Society in the 19th century, you can guess how that would go.
Sounds right, yeah. Painting with a broad brush, successful science, especially revolutionary insights, often requires people who are very open-minded and at least sometimes disagreeable.
I actually think Chiang deserves more credit. I just wrote a post about the science behind Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom. Chiang is very deliberate about straying from modern science only when needed to easily explore philosophical and psychological questions through plot. It’s fair to assume he’s also intentional about which societal impacts he chooses to explore. If society is accelerating toward utopia or doom (which I agree would be a consequence of the Prism), he’d need a full novel to explore it. And the premise of the Prism is already impossible, so why would we care? To me, and clearly to Chiang, the philosophical and psychological questions of an impossible Prism are STILL interesting because they would ring true if we merely had the knowledge of Many Worlds. Society spiraling toward doom or utopia would not.
The guy's a way worse writer than Chiang (and also not a good artist), but it explores a number of interesting ideas using a very similar starting premise to the Prisms (a brainchip that lets the main character communicate across branches). But he covers a range of scientific and philosophical ideas while Chiang was only tightly focused on a few. The stories also have more plot, rather than being mostly/entirely character-driven.
This is a fantastic analysis that perfectly captures what makes Ted Chiang's a modern master. I agree with your point about him writing "true" science fiction, exploring alternate, internally consistent laws of nature and philosophy.
Your article sparked a comparison for me with another master of philosophical sci-fi, Stanisław Lem. They both build stories around profound scientific or philosophical "what-ifs," but their focus is almost a mirror image.
As you so brilliantly describe, Chiang uses his premises to explore the internal, lived experience of a philosophical idea. How does a single person make peace with determinism? How does a new technology force someone to re-evaluate their own past? His stories are deeply humanistic, turning inward to find a sense of grace or acceptance. The conclusion is often, as you quote, "that is all, but that is enough."
Lem, on the other hand, uses similar premises to explore humanity's external, cognitive limits. In works like Solaris or His Master's Voice, the core idea isn't about finding personal peace, but about the profound, unbridgeable gap between the human mind and a truly alien universe. His characters don't find acceptance; they find the humbling and often terrifying limits of their own understanding. For Lem, the conclusion is often "that is all, and we will never be enough to truly comprehend it."
You also touch on one of Chiang's "blindspots", the societal impact of his technologies. This is precisely where Lem excelled. Works like The Futurological Congress are masterpieces of social satire, exploring how a society would warp and contort itself around a powerful new technology, often with absurd and nightmarish results.
I have a few posts on Lem's essays. In short, while Chiang uses sci-fi to find the human within the philosophical equation, Lem often used it to show how the equation itself dwarfs humanity.
Thanks for the Lem suggestion! I think people have mostly suggested Lem, Borges, and Egan as people to look at for having a similar approach. Less commonly, Gene Wolfe and Calvino.
I really liked Ken Liu’s “The Paper Menagerie”, which I think hits some deeper social commentary and the intertwinement of tech with whole societies. Worth a read, especially if you have any interest in Asian-American diaspora and history.
Thank you! I'm not in principle opposed to reading more about Asian-American diaspora and history but have historically been a little disappointed, unfortunately. :/
I enjoyed it! Obviously relevant to my own interests.
Iirc Chiang himself thought it was a bit childish. I sort of get where he’s coming from on a literary level, but still think it’s a valuable contribution nonetheless.
I’ve recently started reading Ted Chiang based on your recommendation and am loving his work. Just wanted to say thanks for that. Seventy-Two Letters was amazing.
Yes! I quite enjoyed it, especially book 1! I enjoyed the other two as well. Dark Forest theory doesn't make sense in any context other than the very narrow one needed to make a ~conventional science fiction book happen, but I still like the idea/ambition and the attempt!
really? i felt that the alternative science ideas in 3 body problem were better than those in exhalation (e.g. the planetary human computer—humans as bits—stuck with me for a long time). i never read the dark forest, but i did skip to a random section about how zooming in on someone’s brain made them believe a false proposition was true (water is toxic). that also left a big impression on me
Yeah I agree the book had many good ideas, I should probably reread it! The thing I like the most about the book is that it goes in detail, even before the spoilers, about "what if our science is wrong" and answers the question on 3 different levels: natural sciences (what would happen?), the emotions of the relevant scientists, and the reactions of society overall.
If you like 3BP a lot I think you should definitely read the sequels! :P
I will have to check out his work. I am only indirectly familiar with it from having watched Arrival, but it sounds like all his writings are exactly the kind of sci-fi I like the most.
On a sort-of side note, though, what is it about the compatibilism quote that doesn't make sense to you? I found myself nodding along to it - it basically exactly summarizes my views on free will, and I don't think it's rejecting any pretheoretical notion of free will, but rather clarifying what the pretheoretical notion really is, as any philosophical theory does. The only things compatibilists have to reject are the very much theoretical assumption that the existence of free will entails specific unusual things about physics and the causal structure of the universe and theoretical views of free will that treat it as quasi-magical.
Eh it was just a rhetorical flourish contrasting the philosophical jargon definition and my own common-language one.
Please do check out his stories! Story of Your Life's difference with the movie is at once subtle and very important, and his other stories are great as well.
The Merchant and The Alchemist’s Gate! Though I haven’t read The Story of You yet and I loved the movie so I’m thinking that could end up being a close contender :)
Nice post! Been a while since I read Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom but had a thought on your specific criticism. If I remember right the realities diverge when the prism is opened, but you can’t control or influence what happens in the other one other than by communicating through the prism. In theory that provides lotto ticket winning opportunities and such but that doesn’t seem to manifest, whether by omission or just avoiding the situation I don’t know/recall — maybe it could be that they diverged before numbers were picked/event happened and so the prism was useless for its intended purpose.
But trying to conduct RCTs strikes me as implausible, given how much information and planning and convincing would need to be conducted. Seems to me like the interesting follow up to that example would be cases of individuals deciding whether or not to undergo trial and opening up a prism right before, dealing with the consequences of the differential outcomes, again an individual x tech story. Perhaps it’s just because those seem to end up being the most compelling stories to write and care about, but I won’t pretend to have a view into his brain. (I’ve only read what’s in Exhalation!)
I think you might be underestimating how valuable the abilities actually are! And how much companies should be willing to pay to make it work. In brief, most of GDP growth in the long run is driven by technology, and a decent fraction of technological change comes from the types of research that can be parallelized across worlds.
Imagine if a pharma company is considering whether to do drug trials that cost $2 billion, have a 25% chance of working, and will give them 4 billion in profits if they do work.
In our world, those trials are not profitable. $4 billion *0.25 - $2 billion = -1 billion in net losses.
But in prism-multiverse, a pharma company can just split itself into 64 copies, each fork does one trial, and they can share the results afterwards. The pharma company in every universe will make 64* $4 billion * 0.25 - $2 billion = $62 billion in profits, minus the costs of the prisms (which seem to be trivial). That's an insane rate of return! And the costs are just one drug trial from one company! Multiply that across society and crazy things will happen.
Other considerations include multiverse-wide crime and police stings, innovations in war and peace, and multiverse-wide news (Epstein files released in one branch seems like important info for other branches).
Point taken on risk-reward! I still imagine somewhat of a coordination problem involving timescales (not using prisms apart from sharing information at designated timepoints for updates), regulation (does one US FDA trust the output of another reality’s trial? what unknown differences are in the cohort that can’t be shared due to potential loss of coordination or just unknown factors when conducting all in one setting?), and maybe verifiability for similar reasons. Agree on the world changing effect of this and many other technologies, just think implementation may be a harder task than it seems. In the story we saw therapeutic use cases both good and bad much earlier than a tangible GDP increase (reminiscent of AI?) and so while those latter uses are definitely on the table I don’t think we could accurately call the broad social implications unconsidered.
"does one US FDA trust the output of another reality’s trial" It doesn't actually matter all that much; if you know which trials are duds you can just repeat all the successful trials, which is still a lot cheaper than having many failed trials.
The Australian mathematician and science fiction writer Greg Egan also uses this technique; in Permutation City, Diaspora, The Arrows of Time, Dichronauts, etc. etc. he asks "what would the universe look like if this hypothesis were true" or "what would the universe look like if we changed some physical constant" and then builds a world according to those principles.
Egan is probably my favorite science fiction writer for both short stories and novels
Ted Chiang is so good! And he does so well for creating universes with completely different laws of nature. It's somehow both the most science fiction thing and kind of not science fiction at all.
You mentioned how a lot of his stories touch on compatibilism, but I think one of his most interesting is about incompatibilism - 'What's Expected of Us', where a device is invented called a "Predictor" that sends a signal backwards in time telling you that you are about to press its button, and sure enough you always push the button at exactly the right moment. This one also does also address the societal level a little more as well.
I think I'll need to do a reread.
Saw this via Hacker News. Ted Chiang is one of the greatest science fiction authors alive today, and probably my personal favorite. I hadn't heard of the term compatiblalism before, and now I'm glad that I have. Thanks for writing this.
Thank you for your kind words! If you like accessible introductions to philosophical ideas, you might like the rest of my substack! I'm especially proud of this one:
https://linch.substack.com/p/the-precocious-babys-guide-to-anthropics
I think your comment on Chiang's relatively low output being tragic is more of an expression of how much you like his stories rather than a true point of criticism. :) Each author is different in how much lived life they need per story - or how much thinking away from their desk - and for him the ratio is rather high, I suppose.
That is fair! But we also don't know how many unpublished good-enough-for-anybody-else drafts he has laying around in his notebooks or sitting in Microsoft Word.
Kafka (another of my favorite short story writers) burned 90% of his writing in his lifetime, and by all accounts Chiang is if anything even more perfectionist.
Chiang took 4 years to write Stories of Your Life. If he just decided to #shipit after a year, maybe Stories of Your Life would only be 90% as good, but maybe we would've had 6 more Chiang stories by now.
True... I guess it depends on someone's perfectionism, as you said, and also on why they write in the first place. For me, part of the fun of writing is the conversation with readers, so I'm kind of a #shipit writer. I haven't read any interviews with him, you seem to be more familiar with his attitudes, but I suppose his motivations are somewhat different.
Having met many research scientists socially, I've observed that people who do the actual work are far less dogmatic and cocksure about what is and is not "settled" or "debunked" than the fundraising department heads and govt bureaucrats who speak on their behalf. Perhaps that is the sort of intellectual flexibility Chang wishes to encourage in his readers. After all, if you were able to travel back in time and try to explain quantum mechanics or gene therapy to a meeting of the Royal Society in the 19th century, you can guess how that would go.
Sounds right, yeah. Painting with a broad brush, successful science, especially revolutionary insights, often requires people who are very open-minded and at least sometimes disagreeable.
I actually think Chiang deserves more credit. I just wrote a post about the science behind Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom. Chiang is very deliberate about straying from modern science only when needed to easily explore philosophical and psychological questions through plot. It’s fair to assume he’s also intentional about which societal impacts he chooses to explore. If society is accelerating toward utopia or doom (which I agree would be a consequence of the Prism), he’d need a full novel to explore it. And the premise of the Prism is already impossible, so why would we care? To me, and clearly to Chiang, the philosophical and psychological questions of an impossible Prism are STILL interesting because they would ring true if we merely had the knowledge of Many Worlds. Society spiraling toward doom or utopia would not.
(My post if curious https://open.substack.com/pub/casesinpoint/p/quantum-fiction-classic-mistakes?r=9w7dm&utm_medium=ios)
Thanks for sharing the article! I misunderstood where your comment was so I responded to your restack.
One thing you may or may not enjoy is Transdimensional Brainchip, a web graphic novel. https://brainchip.thecomicseries.com/
The guy's a way worse writer than Chiang (and also not a good artist), but it explores a number of interesting ideas using a very similar starting premise to the Prisms (a brainchip that lets the main character communicate across branches). But he covers a range of scientific and philosophical ideas while Chiang was only tightly focused on a few. The stories also have more plot, rather than being mostly/entirely character-driven.
This is a fantastic analysis that perfectly captures what makes Ted Chiang's a modern master. I agree with your point about him writing "true" science fiction, exploring alternate, internally consistent laws of nature and philosophy.
Your article sparked a comparison for me with another master of philosophical sci-fi, Stanisław Lem. They both build stories around profound scientific or philosophical "what-ifs," but their focus is almost a mirror image.
As you so brilliantly describe, Chiang uses his premises to explore the internal, lived experience of a philosophical idea. How does a single person make peace with determinism? How does a new technology force someone to re-evaluate their own past? His stories are deeply humanistic, turning inward to find a sense of grace or acceptance. The conclusion is often, as you quote, "that is all, but that is enough."
Lem, on the other hand, uses similar premises to explore humanity's external, cognitive limits. In works like Solaris or His Master's Voice, the core idea isn't about finding personal peace, but about the profound, unbridgeable gap between the human mind and a truly alien universe. His characters don't find acceptance; they find the humbling and often terrifying limits of their own understanding. For Lem, the conclusion is often "that is all, and we will never be enough to truly comprehend it."
You also touch on one of Chiang's "blindspots", the societal impact of his technologies. This is precisely where Lem excelled. Works like The Futurological Congress are masterpieces of social satire, exploring how a society would warp and contort itself around a powerful new technology, often with absurd and nightmarish results.
I have a few posts on Lem's essays. In short, while Chiang uses sci-fi to find the human within the philosophical equation, Lem often used it to show how the equation itself dwarfs humanity.
Thanks for the Lem suggestion! I think people have mostly suggested Lem, Borges, and Egan as people to look at for having a similar approach. Less commonly, Gene Wolfe and Calvino.
I really liked Ken Liu’s “The Paper Menagerie”, which I think hits some deeper social commentary and the intertwinement of tech with whole societies. Worth a read, especially if you have any interest in Asian-American diaspora and history.
Thank you! I'm not in principle opposed to reading more about Asian-American diaspora and history but have historically been a little disappointed, unfortunately. :/
Love Chiang’s work! Great article!
I’m glad you like it!
What do you think of his short story Understand?
I enjoyed it! Obviously relevant to my own interests.
Iirc Chiang himself thought it was a bit childish. I sort of get where he’s coming from on a literary level, but still think it’s a valuable contribution nonetheless.
I’ve recently started reading Ted Chiang based on your recommendation and am loving his work. Just wanted to say thanks for that. Seventy-Two Letters was amazing.
have you read the 3 body problem by cixin liu? it does “true” science fiction in a similar way
Yes! I quite enjoyed it, especially book 1! I enjoyed the other two as well. Dark Forest theory doesn't make sense in any context other than the very narrow one needed to make a ~conventional science fiction book happen, but I still like the idea/ambition and the attempt!
really? i felt that the alternative science ideas in 3 body problem were better than those in exhalation (e.g. the planetary human computer—humans as bits—stuck with me for a long time). i never read the dark forest, but i did skip to a random section about how zooming in on someone’s brain made them believe a false proposition was true (water is toxic). that also left a big impression on me
Yeah I agree the book had many good ideas, I should probably reread it! The thing I like the most about the book is that it goes in detail, even before the spoilers, about "what if our science is wrong" and answers the question on 3 different levels: natural sciences (what would happen?), the emotions of the relevant scientists, and the reactions of society overall.
If you like 3BP a lot I think you should definitely read the sequels! :P
I will have to check out his work. I am only indirectly familiar with it from having watched Arrival, but it sounds like all his writings are exactly the kind of sci-fi I like the most.
On a sort-of side note, though, what is it about the compatibilism quote that doesn't make sense to you? I found myself nodding along to it - it basically exactly summarizes my views on free will, and I don't think it's rejecting any pretheoretical notion of free will, but rather clarifying what the pretheoretical notion really is, as any philosophical theory does. The only things compatibilists have to reject are the very much theoretical assumption that the existence of free will entails specific unusual things about physics and the causal structure of the universe and theoretical views of free will that treat it as quasi-magical.
Eh it was just a rhetorical flourish contrasting the philosophical jargon definition and my own common-language one.
Please do check out his stories! Story of Your Life's difference with the movie is at once subtle and very important, and his other stories are great as well.
Are there still spots available for the movie screening? Would love to come if so!
re: compatibilism, my favourite little quote from Story of Your Life:
“Well if you already know how the story goes, why do you need me to read it to you?”
“Cause I wanna hear it!”
Love Ted Chiang and loved reading this article. Well done :)
Thank you for your kind words! Do you have favorite story, or a top 3?
The Merchant and The Alchemist’s Gate! Though I haven’t read The Story of You yet and I loved the movie so I’m thinking that could end up being a close contender :)
Yeah that's my fave too! Definitely read the Story of Your Life And Others collection as well!
Nice post! Been a while since I read Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom but had a thought on your specific criticism. If I remember right the realities diverge when the prism is opened, but you can’t control or influence what happens in the other one other than by communicating through the prism. In theory that provides lotto ticket winning opportunities and such but that doesn’t seem to manifest, whether by omission or just avoiding the situation I don’t know/recall — maybe it could be that they diverged before numbers were picked/event happened and so the prism was useless for its intended purpose.
But trying to conduct RCTs strikes me as implausible, given how much information and planning and convincing would need to be conducted. Seems to me like the interesting follow up to that example would be cases of individuals deciding whether or not to undergo trial and opening up a prism right before, dealing with the consequences of the differential outcomes, again an individual x tech story. Perhaps it’s just because those seem to end up being the most compelling stories to write and care about, but I won’t pretend to have a view into his brain. (I’ve only read what’s in Exhalation!)
I think you might be underestimating how valuable the abilities actually are! And how much companies should be willing to pay to make it work. In brief, most of GDP growth in the long run is driven by technology, and a decent fraction of technological change comes from the types of research that can be parallelized across worlds.
Imagine if a pharma company is considering whether to do drug trials that cost $2 billion, have a 25% chance of working, and will give them 4 billion in profits if they do work.
In our world, those trials are not profitable. $4 billion *0.25 - $2 billion = -1 billion in net losses.
But in prism-multiverse, a pharma company can just split itself into 64 copies, each fork does one trial, and they can share the results afterwards. The pharma company in every universe will make 64* $4 billion * 0.25 - $2 billion = $62 billion in profits, minus the costs of the prisms (which seem to be trivial). That's an insane rate of return! And the costs are just one drug trial from one company! Multiply that across society and crazy things will happen.
Other considerations include multiverse-wide crime and police stings, innovations in war and peace, and multiverse-wide news (Epstein files released in one branch seems like important info for other branches).
Point taken on risk-reward! I still imagine somewhat of a coordination problem involving timescales (not using prisms apart from sharing information at designated timepoints for updates), regulation (does one US FDA trust the output of another reality’s trial? what unknown differences are in the cohort that can’t be shared due to potential loss of coordination or just unknown factors when conducting all in one setting?), and maybe verifiability for similar reasons. Agree on the world changing effect of this and many other technologies, just think implementation may be a harder task than it seems. In the story we saw therapeutic use cases both good and bad much earlier than a tangible GDP increase (reminiscent of AI?) and so while those latter uses are definitely on the table I don’t think we could accurately call the broad social implications unconsidered.
"does one US FDA trust the output of another reality’s trial" It doesn't actually matter all that much; if you know which trials are duds you can just repeat all the successful trials, which is still a lot cheaper than having many failed trials.