One thing I've noticed in Ted Chiang's stories, especially in The Merchant and The Alchemist's Gate and "Story of Your Life", is the common theme that a person cannot change their destiny, regardless of what their intentions might be. Individual timelines are not malleable, nor are they subject to the whims and wishes of those they involve. Regardless of how much a person might want to prevent an event from occurring- in both stories, the death of a loved one plays a key role- they are unable to because it is part of the experience that makes them who they are; essentially, what makes them human. It's a neat solution to prevent potential paradoxes. If a timeline were not resistant to change, and a person went back solely to prevent an event and succeeded in doing so, they would have eliminated their original cause for going back, and therefore would not try to prevent that event, which would create a horribly headache-inducing paradox. However, in Chiang's world, everything has been written into the timelines for his characters, including the ways in which they affected events by going back, thus preventing said paradox.
It's an interesting concept to think about. If everything we do is preordained, then do we really have free will? In Chiang's universe, the answer seems to be no. Of course, it's also entirely possible that I've totally overthought this.
I have seen similar time-travel stories in which the death of a loved one cannot be changed. Some of these stories use a concept of multiple "world lines". This means that every event creates another divergent world line in which the event either happened or did not happen. I don't know how this affects the idea of free will, but it it probably my favorite time-travel theory/plot device.
ReplyDeleteI think what Chiang was driving at was slightly more subtle than simply that the people didn't have free will. It seemed more like (most of the time) they didn't try to change what had to be. In Story of Your Life, the female protagonist talked about how she would never try to live in the sequential way while she was thinking in the heptapod-B way. And the character in "Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" who robbed himself did not try to change what he already knew would have to happen.
ReplyDelete