Since at least the 1818 publication of Frankenstein, our imaginative little human selves have been dreading the moment when our inventions finally get the best of us. In pop culture, stories of technological advancement—and ensuing catastrophe—have endured precisely for their ability to tickle our brains right in that sweet spot where wonder bleeds into horror. Back in the day, we had Mary Shelley and H.G. Wells, Fahrenheit 451 and A Space Odyssey. These days, you can’t make it through civilian-level small talk about our tech-despoiled lives without referencing Black Mirror, The Truman Show, or robot Arnold Schwarzenegger at least once.
Ted Chiang, author of the most prestigious science fiction of our time (that’s four Hugo awards, four Nebula awards, and one feature film adaptation spread across a measly, by sci-fi standards, oeuvre of a dozen and a half short stories over three decades) understands this human impulse. In Chiang’s fiction, characters across all kinds of universes grapple with the limits of our kind as they claw toward transcendence via automatons and alien languages. In fiction and in life, we humans like to think we can see it coming.
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