"I thought your story started from that moment. Human memory is also strange to say, and the way it works is different from what I think. We are so limited by time, by cause and effect. ”
This passage is the beginning of the movie "Arrival". The film is based on the science fiction novel The Story of Your Life by Ted Ginger. Many people are interested in this movie, starting from different ideas and deep-sea chant-like soundtracks.
Ted Ginger is a science fiction writer. To be precise, it is a Chinese science fiction writer who dreams of becoming a physicist, but graduated from a computer major and finally became famous for writing.
In the more than 30 years since his debut, he has published 17 stories, which are not long, but he has won almost all the trophies of science fiction awards, including the Nebula Award, the Hugo Award, and the Campbell Award.
"Breathing" and "The Story of Your Life" brought by Yilin Press today are two of Ted Jiang's novel collections, including all 17 of his stories.
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Extraordinary writing path, alternative science fiction language
Ted Ginger's path to writing has not been smooth. For a long time, he received rejection letters and almost gave up. The turning point came after he insisted on attending a horn writing class, and his debut film , Tower of Babylon , won the Nebula Award. From then on, Ted Ginger began his path of writing with honors.
Is the Horn Writing Class really as magical as the legend goes? Perhaps in this "science fiction Whampoa", he found a language that could express himself well.
The Sapir-Wolfe hypothesis holds that all higher-level thinking depends on language, which determines human behavior and habits of thought. Ted Ginger spent more than 4 years studying linguistics.
In the novel The Story of Your Life, he depicts an alien race with a nonlinear language, the "Barrel of Seven Limbs." Human language is linear, and we have to write one word and then write another. The order between words, and time-related. Non-linear language means that the content expressed by their written carriers is not constrained by time: the moment the text appears, the content is fully expressed.
Because of time, we can distinguish between cause and effect. Humans are a causal race, and our physical edifice is built on a causal system. Physics explores the causes of phenomena based on phenomena. Because of the cause, there is the effect. Between cause and effect, there is the law.
In junior high school physics we learned about the refraction of light. Light enters the water from the air, and refraction occurs because the refractive index of air and water is different. If you think in a different direction, according to Fermat's law of least time, the actual route chosen by a beam of light is always the shortest one. Whether we can think that light abandons its original direction of progress from air into the water and chooses refraction, it is because only the path of refraction will make light spend the shortest time on the journey.
If refraction is the active choice of light, then will the future me actively choose the present me? If the "barrel of seven limbs" is thinking and looking at the universe in a non-linear way, then with the development of their technology, they may have the ability to be independent of the law of cause and effect, independent of time.
The past, the present and the future happen at the same time, which is the text of the "seven-limbed barrel" and the "gift" left to mankind by the "seven-limbed barrel" that came to the earth.
In the novel, non-linearity also runs through the beginning and end of the narrative. The heroine's love, marriage and daughter, as well as the process of learning the language of the "barrel of seven limbs", are interspersed in fragments of the narrative. A section is like a piece of the puzzle, giving a little clue, and when the reader picks up enough clues, the picture is ready to come out.
If you've looked through your life, do you want to make a change? If you can't change, what kind of mood will you use to meet the fate? If the future is destined to be a tragedy, will you stick with it?
The heroine has truly learned the language of the "seven-limbed barrel", and she can inevitably see the future like the "seven-limbed barrel". In the future, there are marriages that are doomed to failure, there are daughters who are doomed to die early, and of course, there is a heartbreaking herself. But life will go on, at least I still look forward to your birth, just as I never lost you.
At the end of the novel, the beginning and the end are aligned, the past and the future are unified, and the story comes to the beginning and the end.
Ted Ginger is adept at capturing inspiration and then crafting them into stories. His sci-fi entry point is exquisite, the line is grass snake gray line, and when reading, it is almost necessary to concentrate on capturing the meaning behind the words. It is not easy to read his works, but when you read them, the joy and shock are also unparalleled.
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The poetic aesthetic of the Oriental style, the warmth under the humanistic care
Ted Jiang's language is plain, the text is natural, you look at the past as a whole, the winding path is quiet, a bit of The aesthetic meaning of a Chinese garden. Even when the characters show their hearts, they are euphemistic and faint. Emotion and reason coexist in the text.
At the same time, it is as if the all-knowing and all-powerful God, the archangels emitting holy light, alien creatures, giant embryos, digital bodies... They may all appear unobtrusively in Ted Ginger's pen.
Science fiction is a coat of clothing, with which we can look at the wider sea of stars. But there are some motifs that people will continue to pursue. Like love, like faith, like equality, like morality.
Hell is where God is not there tells the story of an atheist who becomes a theist. The wife died under the impact of the holy light brought by the angel, the soul went to heaven, and the husband wanted to be reunited with his wife, so he began to pursue the miracle path.
In Babylon, through the clouds, the moon and the sun, the miner Hilalum, who tried to chisel through the cellars of heaven, returned to the earth through the heavenly dome with the effort of life. The world was still the same as before, but for him, it was completely different.
The Life Cycle of the Software Body describes how people create artificial life "digital bodies" in the virtual world. For artificial intelligence products, should we strictly follow the rules and steps as we produce, iterate, use, and deactivate software, or be as patient and tolerant as parents teach children to walk, regardless of the cost?
His works are close to life, full of humanistic care, and the subject matter and words are not defined within the framework, including the exploration of the individual spiritual world and the examination of human civilization as a whole. This warmth and friendliness is also reflected in the afterwords outside of each of his novels: it records the origins of his inspiration, and some of it has opinions.
These make his work very readable, of course, the first time you may not be able to fully understand. If you happen to love science fiction writing, you can also draw some nourishment from it.
The Story of Your Life is a collection of eight of Ted Ginger's early works: the original novel "The Story of Your Life" in the film "Advent", the debut "Tower of Babylon" and "Understanding", "Divide by Zero", "Seventy-two Letters", "The Evolution of Human Science", "Hell is Where God Is Not There", and "Pleasing to the Eye: A Documentary of the Proposal for aesthetic interference mirrors".
Breath contains nine works, "The Door of the Merchant and the Alchemist", "Breath", "The Road Ahead", "The Life Cycle of the Software Body", "Darcy's New Automatic Machine Nanny", "Double Truth", "The Great Silence", "Navel", and "Anxiety is the Vertigo Caused by Freedom", which is a new collection of Ted Ginger's works.
Both novels are 32 open in size, with a tactile paper cover paperback, a black and silver cover, and a simple and generous typography. The pages are made of 70g Yueyang light paper, which is light and soft, providing a good reading experience, and is recommended to all readers who love science fiction and brain-burning.