Ted Ginger
Ted Ginger, who was born in 1967, is now 55 years old.
From the publication of his first science fiction novel, Babylon Tower, in 1990, he entered the 22nd year of his writing career. He has never written a long story, and his existing works add up to only 17 short stories, some of which are longer, such as "The Story of Your Life" and "The Life Cycle of the Software Body", which are also regarded as novellas. Relative to his current age and qualifications, he is a low-prolific writer, he does not rely on writing for a living, his job is technical writing. He has won four Nebula Awards and four Hugo Awards, and that's just some of the awards he's won. In 2003, he rejected a Hugo Award nomination for one of his novels on the grounds that it didn't reach the heights he wanted.
On the Internet, in addition to these, there are also some of his experiences before becoming a writer. His parents were Chinese immigrants, and he was born in New York and studied computers at university. He has always been a science fiction enthusiast and has been contributing to magazines since high school. In 1989, he attended a writing workshop, and the following year, a magazine called The Mystery published his debut novel, the aforementioned Tower of Babylon.
In the only information, it can be imagined that Ted Ginger is probably low-key and calm, just like his constant image in the public eye, half-frame glasses, a ponytail, and a somewhat serious expression. He cherishes every writing inspiration that comes, has high demands, and only shoots when he is ready. His most well-known work is probably "The Story of Your Life", which was adapted into a film by Hollywood director Villeneuve in 2016 called "Arrival", which tells a linguist who foresees his future in the process of learning alien languages.
The novel was written in 1998 and won the Nebula Award for Best Novella that year. At the beginning of the novel, a woman named Louise tells her daughter the story of what she will experience, she will marry, give birth to a daughter, and after the daughter's death, she and her husband will start a new life. Later, the story cuts back to the present, and a soldier and physicist walk into Louise's office and ask her to decipher an alien recording. The novel is written in this way, one line is Louise's confession to her daughter, telling the fragments of their time together, and the other line is Louise going to communicate with the aliens and learn the language of the aliens. The two lines form a complete closed loop, and the story of her daughter's life is exactly what Louise foresaw when she learned the language, and the physicist later became her husband.
Stills from the movie "Arrival"
Ted Ginger doesn't seem to love the big, cool, overwhelming and futuristic sci-fi elements that appear before the reader's eyes. The alien in "The Story of Your Life" is called the "Seven-Limbed Barrel", and the shape is close to a slender octopus, like an ancient creature that has not yet been discovered by humans. There is a row of eyes around his head, able to see in all directions. They communicated with Louise through silicon "sight glasses" and used their limbs to write ink-like circular symbols on the mirrors, which were their writings, similar to variants of ancient Chinese calligraphy.
Habit of looking forward, when writing from left to right, from top to bottom, we live in linear thinking, time is always forward, after today there is tomorrow, things have causes and effects. Borrowing the round visual text of the seven-limbed barrel and the eyes that can see in all directions, Ted Ginger wants to shape a different kind of thinking perception from humans, they don't have to think about what to write first and then write what to write, circular words can express everything they want to say at the same time, just as they open their eyes, see the front and see the back and left, the past, the present and the future appear in their minds at the same time. As Louise gradually mastered the language, her way of thinking changed: "At a glance, the past and the future burst into the same time, and my consciousness became the ashes of half a century, and time has not yet become ashes." Fifty years of all sorts of things unfolded at a glance, and the rest of my life was in it. And, your whole life. In order to make the reader better understand the change of language on a person's thinking, Ted Jiang gives a realistic example in the novel, a person whose parents are deaf has been using sign language since he was a child, and when he thinks, the inner language is a changing gesture.
Ted Ginger used to append a postscript to each novel to share the inspiration for writing novels. The Story of Your Life is based on his love of the variational principle in physics, plus a play he once saw about the protagonist's wife battling breast cancer and the experience of having a child with a friend next to him. This is a theory, science fiction and reality superimposed novel, it is difficult to say the proportion of science fiction components in the novel, stripping away the seven limbs barrel, the mirror, round text these few science fiction elements, the novel really wants to tell seems to be not much different from how a woman fights cancer. Science fiction here is more like a lead," a hand that breaks the balance of the "balance of reality", a hand that allows Louise to see the pain of the early death of her daughter and separation from her husband for the rest of her life, and the same loving part of the pain, if she wants to avoid this pain because of fear, is there enough courage to give up love? Is there a life worth living outside of such a life?
In Ted Ginger's novel, the free will of a man who foresaw fate and tried to resist loses weight, and Louise understands that she must throw herself into such a fate without hesitation, "the only way to go in the future." I went along, full of joy, perhaps with pain." In the end, her life is a shadow of everyone's real life. Parents know that the child will leave one day, the child knows that one day the parents will die, many things have been written at the end of the disappearance when they arrive, and all we can do is look at the torch of future faith in our hands, and walk towards the end in the process of repeatedly clenching and loosening.
The Story of Your Life is Ted Ginger's most recognized novel, and probably the most representative of his novels. While some science fiction writers ambitiously imagine how the advanced and prophetic art of "science fiction" will bring about earth-shaking changes to human civilization, Ted Ginger focuses on small but concrete things, a pair of artificial lungs made of aluminum (Breathe, 2008); a machine nanny (Darcy's New Automatic Machine Nanny, 2011); and an aesthetic jammer with a beauty function (Pleasing to the Eye: A Documentary of the Aesthetic Jamming Mirror Proposal, 2019). Sometimes he deliberately goes back in time, reconstructing a passage about mythology (Babylon Tower, 1990), or fictionalizing how humans relied on names to drive machines before and after the inception of thermodynamics in the 19th century (Seventy-Two Letters, 2000).
In short, something too trendy and avant-garde is too far from Ted Ginger's sci-fi world. You could say he's conservative, but it's this conservatism that makes the reality we live in a reality that doesn't have to be too laborious, and it's just one small step to keep up with his world, and it's this small step—or Ted Ginger just that— that's enough to make us experience a strong emotional resonance in the matter of knowing ourselves and the world.
In 2013, Ted Ginger wrote "The Two-Sided Truth," a short story similar in theme and structure to "The Story of Your Life," which continues to explore the impact of language on humanity. One line in the novel is a journalist's self-description, and in the more than thirty years of technological development, his wife left home, his daughter grew up, worked in the art museum, and she no longer had the ability to write, but instead a retinal projector that could convert her inner thoughts into words. At the same time, the birth of a search tool called "Huiyi" that can record life in all directions has caused reporters to worry: Will it replace a person's natural memory?
In another line, thirteen-year-old Gigingi, who lived in an indigenous tribe without writing and communicating only by oral communication, met the European missionary Mosby and saw written writing for the first time. At Mosby's invitation, Girkinki began to learn writing.
Long before he wrote The Story of Your Life, Ted Ginger learned a lot of linguistics, and when he conceived The Two-Sided Truth, he read the media scholar Walter Weng's "Spoken and Written Culture", which talked about how some tribes used oral stories to change the real racial history in order to make history better adapt to the status quo. This is also the confusion that Ji jinji faced after learning to write, the genealogy dictated by the patriarch is not consistent with the genealogy recorded by the British, and Jijinji, who has become accustomed to thinking in words, believes in black and white, while in the eyes of the patriarch, the existing genealogy is more conducive to the development of the tribe, and it does not matter what is written on the paper.
What Ji jinji experienced also happened to journalists investigating "will reminisce". Reporters often think of his grandmother, who was busy on the sewing machine as a child, laughing and watching him play with toys, and this unrecorded moment made him feel charming. Natural memory has a modification of the past, and if he looks back at this scene through "hui recall", will he find that it is just ordinary? "The lens cannot capture the emotional dimension of an event", which accumulates over time, and "remembering" destroys the process and pushes it over again.
More importantly, the reporter felt that natural memory had helped him repair his relationship with his daughter and dilute the rift after his wife left. Once checking the "huiyi", the reporter found that the truth was not what he had always thought - he took the initiative to forgive his daughter, but the daughter made concessions. Once again, Ted Ginger puts the story's anchor back into the intimate human emotions, while leading us to understand the birth of a new tool in a more objective way. Through iterative updates from spoken language to words, we are accustomed to and skilled in using "facts" to deal with the relationship with reality, "remembering" – this kind of digital memory does not necessarily lead the status quo to extremes, provided that we know how to use it. Ted Ginger gives a good reference: The key to [digital memory] is not to prove you right, but to admit that you are wrong.
Ted Ginger's longest novel to date is 2010's "The Life Cycle of Software Bodies," about a small group of people who spent twenty years raising an artificial intelligence called "digital bodies." Unlike the artificial intelligence in other science fiction works, the digital body is born without free limbs and supercomputer-like brains, naturally lacks emotional ability, he is closer to a baby without a body, and needs the caregiver to invest time and energy to raise, and the twenty years in the story also happen to be the approximate time for a person to change from a baby to an adult.
This story is reminiscent of the QQ pet that swept the Internet in the early 21st century, players need to feed the pet, take it to play, let it go to school, work, and at a certain level, pets can get married and have children. In the novel, Anna, who leaves the zoo, and her new colleague Drake join the development of the digital body, each of which has a digital body. The virtual world is constantly updated, efficiency becomes the mainstream, the digital body is no longer optimistic, the virtual space he lives in slowly disappears, anna and Drake try their best to let the digital body grow. Outside of the story, QQ Pet stopped operating in 2018.
Virtuality becoming another reality is nothing new today. In the novel, the zoo declines, the avatar becomes the object of a generation of people, there is no real and perceptible contact, human emotions seem to lose their support point, and most people can't spend twenty years like Anna and Derek to raise a virtual object that is not real enough.
This story shows once again that Ted Ginger is a pragmatic science fiction writer who raises the real problem that everyone knows but is reluctant to talk about, can everyone take care of a child and grow up? Can you have a dog or a cat? Maintaining a parent-child, marriage or romantic relationship with your heart? The virtual world has no moral and obligatory constraints, digital bodies can be "hung" at any time, the real world is not like this, maintaining a relationship, paying long-term emotions is often much more difficult, and the cost of abandonment is even greater. Only in the real world does most people have the opportunity to be Anna or Derek in the story.
Reading Ted Ginger feels like this, standing a small step ahead of reality and re-understanding everything. He is not a writer who hastily writes for some unavoidable sense of urgency, and his words, as simple and clean as stick figures, are properly integrated with the silent world he depicts. If you look closely, you'll find some uniform holes that allow reality to flow out.