by Ted Chiang
“We’ll go South, I think. New York. The park there has a feeding ground.”
The amulet stung Susannah’s neck. Underneath, her heart blood felt like it was pooling.
“What’s different about you is that you can live among them. They smell you’re not right, but they don’t know it for sure. It’s why you never fit in, but they don’t kill you. You don’t fit in with us, either. But we’ll take you.” Meat was all in her teeth. Susannah saw that it wasn’t cow steak. A bloody black habit hung in shreds on the doorknob.
“I always wanted a momma,” Susannah said. “To show me things and to love me.”
Ms. Canis bit the meat in half and threw some in Susannah’s direction. It was hand gristle. “That necklace makes it so you can’t change when you wear it. You mostly-humans need that to get by.”
Susannah nosed the meat. Five half-grown howlers appeared in the doorway. Just pups. They looked like her, only wilder. The smallest nosed up next to her, then pressed its head down by her feet in submission. Susannah didn’t think. She licked the thing’s forehead, then pushed it toward food.
“Go now, pup,” she said, like soul memory.
Now all the howlers were munching—calm and quiet and heading toward satisfied. Susannah bent down. They made a space for her like she belonged inside it. She’d never had family dinner. Never known anybody with thick brows like her. Ugly like her.
But then she smelled the hand meat. It stank of pretend holiness and she knew she couldn’t stomach it. Didn’t want it stuck inside her. Because then she’d grow up one day and be just like Rita. Like Canis. Saying things that don’t mean nothing. Pretending your wants are law.
She imagined her momma, like womb memory. They’d lived together in a cabin and drank snow. She’d hidden inside her Momma’s chest and listened to her death breath even after the rest had gone. Mourned her, like a part of herself had been severed. Susannah’s head and skin resolved into the same thing. She wasn’t conflicted. She knew what she loved, and what she didn’t. The blood was pooling and the amulet burning, but that didn’t mean nothing. She tore it from her neck.
The change happened fast. Ms. Canis growled with wide, shocked eyes. And then she wore no expression at all. Susannah was young. Spry. Half crazy from the year she’d spent without her daddy.
A jugular is an easy thing once you’re set on it.
She used Canis’ dead body as a shield from her sisters. Biting, tearing. Everything white as the pups went mad in their way. It was orphan against orphan.
She didn’t hear the shots that made them drop: one, two, three, four, five. They whined in a desolate way, their bodies changing back to hands and feet and full, pink lips. Even the little one.
And then, in the doorway with his shotgun, stood Daddy. One year missing, scarred-up so bad this time he’d lost his face. But you can smell the people you love, the people who love you.
He picked up the amulet and handed it to her. “This was your mother’s,” he said. Then he looked down at the mess and shook his head. “That’s something we won’t forget.”
She was still changed, on the floor. Feeling shamed that he could see her like this. All animal.
“Come on, Sheila,” he said, holding out his ragged hand.
She got up slow, waiting until she could walk on two legs like she belonged. They went north over the border to the horse farms in Canada. It wasn’t easy, but they made their way like they always had. Like she hoped they always would.
© 2012 Sarah Langan.
Sarah Langan is the author of the novels The Keeper and The Missing, and her most recent novel, Audrey’s Door, won the 2009 Stoker for best novel. Her short fiction has appeared in the magazines Nightmare, Cemetery Dance, Phantom, and Chiaroscuro, and in the anthologies Brave New Worlds, Darkness on the Edge, and Unspeakable Horror. She is currently working on a post-apocalyptic young adult series called Kids and two adult novels: Empty Houses, which was inspired by The Twilight Zone, and My Father’s Ghost, which was inspired by Hamlet. Her work has been translated into ten languages and optioned by the Weinstein Company for film. It has also garnered three Bram Stoker Awards, an American Library Association Award, two Dark Scribe Awards, a New York Times Book Review editor’s pick, and a Publishers Weekly favorite book of the year selection.
Author Spotlight: Ted Chiang
Moshe Siegel
Louise, narrator of your Nebula and Sturgeon Award winning novella, “Story of Your Life,” seems ably prepared for observing alien life-forms by her experience as a mother—a knack for interpreting unpredictable behavior appears as important as her linguistic training, in deciphering heptapod culture. Did you intentionally draw a parallel between alien intelligences and children?
No, that hadn’t occurred to me. When Louise encounters the aliens, she isn’t a mother yet; her ability to interpret their behavior is purely a result of her experience in field linguistics. Instead, I’d say that her background in linguistics inflects her experience as a mother. Children are endlessly fascinating from a linguist’s perspective, not so much because they’re speaking a foreign language, but because they seem to be geniuses at learning our language.
It is difficult not to struggle against the idea of determinism, or at least, difficult to align our human ego into a “predetermined” context. Yet Louise seems willing, even eager, to delve ever-deeper into this long view perspective via the heptapod’s languages—perhaps because she comes to know the entirety of what she stands to gain, and to lose. Does her embrace of the good and bad in life reflect the average human’s reaction to a sudden epiphany of their next 50 years, or does Louise have an uncommon aptitude for omnipresence?
Well, I haven’t conducted a survey of people who suddenly gained foreknowledge of their futures, so I don’t know how the average human would react. My goal was to make Louise’s reaction seem plausible to readers, but I don’t claim that it’s necessarily how most people would feel in her situation. I agree that people in general are resistant to knowing too much about their future, and the story can be read as a kind of argument for compatibility between free will and determinism.
Do you think human memory can be considered a form of teleological perspective? If we know the consequences of past actions, and can reflect on the events and choices which led to those consequences (feeling pleasure or regret accordingly with each recollection) all the way back to our childhood, does it qualify as (re)living all those moments in unison? Or, does the lack of future knowledge forever limit humanity to a sequential perspective?
A teleological perspective isn’t necessarily the same thing as perceiving everything simultaneously, but I think you’re asking about the latter. I don’t think having memory of the past is the same as experiencing all of one’s past simultaneously; I feel like I know what the former is like, but not the latter. In fact, in the story, Louise explicitly makes a distinction between the times that she has memories of the future and the moments during which she experiences her whole life simultaneously.
In “Story of Your Life,” the military’s method of dealing with the heptapods is to restrict as much knowledge as possible, for future exploitation and barter. This elicited many an eye-roll from the academics (mostly Gary) involved in humanity’s first contact with an alien species. In a “real world” scenario, would it be more reasonable to meet an observing alien intelligence with civilian curiosity and willing information exchange, or a show of stoic military prudence?
In terms of real-world scenarios, I doubt aliens would ever visit humans on Earth; I think it’s more likely that we’d discover interstellar signals of artificial origin. But hypothetically, if aliens were to visit us, I’m sure our military would go on high alert, but I can’t imagine it would make much difference. Any civilization with the capability to send a ship across interstellar space in a reasonable amount of time would be able to squash us like a bug, so we might as well be friendly.
In other interviews, you’ve discussed the Clarion Writer�
��s Workshop as being a formative step in your life as a writer. This past summer, you were an instructor at Clarion. How does it feel to have come full circle?
I really enjoyed teaching, but I don’t feel like I’ve come full circle. I’m not as experienced as my instructors were when I was a student, but more significantly, I don’t think my students were in the same position that I was. Nowadays it’s possible to write SF in a college creative-writing class, something that was unheard of when I went to college. Similarly, the internet has made it much easier for people to discover the SF community. So I doubt I made the same impression on my students as my instructors made on me. Perhaps this is just a variation of the “you can’t step in the same river twice” idea.
I hope it satisfies any latent hetapodian perspective you may possess to be asked: Do you have any upcoming projects you’d like to tell us about?
As noted above, most people feel it’s better not to know too much about what lies ahead. In that spirit, I won’t say a lot about what I’m working on, except that it’s a novelette about memory and the written word.
Moshe Siegel works as a slusher, proofreader, and interviewer at Lightspeed, interns at the pleasure of a Random House-published author, freelance edits hither and yon, and is a Publisher’s Assistant at Codhill Press. His overladen bookshelf and smug ereader glare at each other across his home office in upstate New York, and he isn’t quite sure what to think about it all. Follow tweets of varying relevance @moshesiegel.
Author Spotlight: Ken Liu
Caleb Jordan Schulz
In your story, “The Perfect Match,” Sai needs Tilly the AI to make decisions for him. Tilly can find him the perfect date, can suggest the best place to go for dessert, can organize his daily tasks from beginning to end, effectively removing his decision-making from the equation. This matching of the perfect product for the perfect consumer reflects a growing trend in our daily lives. Is this evolution of algorithms making decisions for us something to embrace or something to be concerned about?
First, thanks for having me again, Lightspeed!
I suppose the answer to your question depends on one’s perspective. The Age of Big Data is upon us, and the externalization of our inner life and the outsourcing of our mental processes to technology are long-term trends. Do these trends free us to be more creative, more caring, more human? Or do they make us more dependent, more isolated, less human? Different temperaments and vantage points will lead us to give different answers.
I’m not so concerned about AIs doing our thinking for us—that’s a matter of technological advancement, which in itself is morally neutral. I’m far more concerned about the power these trends towards ubiquitous computing—especially the constant collection and accumulation of data about each of us—give to particular companies and individuals. This is especially so when the collection of data occurs within frameworks that appear voluntary. Those who are in possession of such data have the potential to know our innermost secrets, to shape our thinking, and to generally wield far more power over us than the totalitarian regimes in traditional dystopias.
Ultimately, I am not afraid of machines and databases, but those who hold the keys to the databases.
Human reliance on machines has been accelerating at an astonishing rate. With even more machine-man integration in the future, with nanobots, artificial organs, smart tissue, etc., do you believe this progression is inevitable?
I wouldn’t call any projected technological trend “inevitable.” The history of technology is full of examples where paths once imagined to be inevitable turned out to be the roads not taken.
But our growing dependence on technology and integration with technology do appear to be broad, accelerating trends that have been true at least since we began using stone tools.
At the 2012 Olympic Games, much was made of the tens of thousands of CCTV cameras that were used by the UK government to monitor its citizens and visitors. (There are 12,000 cameras in the London Underground alone.) Recently, Mayor Bloomberg announced that a new system called the Domain Awareness System was monitoring the streets of Manhattan with upwards of 3,000 cameras. Do you feel this type of surveillance is healthy?
Many of us are alarmed by instances of surveillance by governments. But there seems to be a conceptual block where intrusive surveillance and tracking, done in the name of private, commercial exchange, are typically seen as benign.
But data is data, and having data gives one power. As for whether such concentration of power in a government or a company is a good thing, I think there is no simple answer.
With the ever-increasing sharing of our lives with others through social media, and corporations prying more and more information from us, do you see a day where privacy is a thing of the past?
I view privacy as one aspect of the general problem of information control: who, what, how much? (Censorship, free speech, copyright, etc., are all aspects of the same problem.)
There’s some information about each of us we consider “private” and believe that only the individual should control such information—though what is considered “private” differs from person to person, society to society.
Technology’s role in this, as usual, is to act as a force multiplier. Information that used to be hard to get is now easy to get. Information that used to be scattered in many places can now be aggregated in one place. When information can move faster and more cheaply, it becomes harder and harder to maintain control over it.
At the same time, technology also makes it easy to encrypt secrets, or to hide them in the open by making it easy to lie and spread false information to make searching for the secrets harder.
So, I don’t know if privacy will disappear. Perhaps it’s more likely that our expectation of privacy will change to suit this new environment.
Your story is a cautionary tale, but like Sai, most people are so firmly entrenched in technology that they have a hard time pulling away. Do you see any reversal of this dependence, or is this just a runaway train now?
As I indicated above, I think our growing dependence on technology is part of an ancient trend that has been going on for many, many generations. That we have not reversed this trend so far seems to me to suggest that it cannot be reversed, but I also know that the past is no map to the future.
Being dependent on technology may be either a good thing or a bad thing. I expect that many of us would find Tilly a valuable part of our lives. But Tilly is going to be created by people. And people, when given a chance, always want to shape the world to be more like their vision, and we do not all agree on a vision of the world that we all want.
Finally, do you have any new projects you’d like to announce?
I’m working on a few short stories that I’m really excited about, and there’s also the epic fantasy novel that my wife and I have been working on for a while now. I’m hoping that we’ll finally be done soon. The end is in sight.
Caleb Jordan Schulz is a writer, illustrator, and nomad, currently finding himself in Buenos Aires, Argentina. His fiction can be found in Subversion, Scape, Crossed Genres Year Two anthology, Ray Gun Revival, and Innsmouth Free Press. In between his work for Lightspeed Magazine, he’s a freelance editor, and blogs occasionally at: theright2write.blogspot.com.
Author Spotlight: Yoon Ha Lee
Caleb Jordan Schulz
In your story, “Swanwatch,” Swan and the other elites live in close proximity to a black hole as they work on creating their masterworks. This juxtaposition between the creation of art and the destructive qualities of a black hole highlights the true power that artistic expression holds. How do you see this artistic expression unfolding in the centuries to come?
I’m afraid I try to avoid making this kind of prediction in the first place! I remember reading SF back in middle and high school that speculated about the future of art. Nothing I read in those stories (I recall one had an olfactory symphony, for instance) would have prepared me for slash fanvids or World of Warcr
aft machinima sagas or custom My Little Ponies done up as everything from Marilyn Monroe to Johnny Depp, all of which are very nifty. I don’t think my imagination is good enough to anticipate what form human (or other?) creativity will take in the future.
The edge of a black hole is quite a location for an artist’s colony. What was your inspiration for this choice?
I thought of it more as a prison than an artist’s colony. Or a prison that also happened to be an artist’s colony. Mostly, though, it was the idea of a black hole as a fermata—the suspended note/silence/image—that did it for me.
Your language in the story speaks to familiarity with music—from the perfect naming of the Fermata to the Concert of Worlds to Swan’s compositions. Did this all stem from research or do you have a background in music?
A little of both? I took seven years of piano lessons, five of viola, and three summers of classical guitar, and I’ve dabbled with soprano recorder, harmonica (diatonic and chromatic), ocarina, and pennywhistle. I am not a musician, but I compose as a hobby, mostly for piano or small orchestra or electronica using MIDI. My high school senior project was a small suite that the school orchestra performed. I remember doing up the score with Finale, but there was a bug in that version that corrupted the entire score if you attempted to extract parts, so I had to recopy everything by hand for the orchestra! These days I like to read the occasional issue of Computer Music, and I mess around with Reaper (a DAW, or Digital Audio Workstation) and Vienna Special Edition; before that I was using Logic Pro 8.
Dragon, Phoenix, Tiger, Tortoise, and Swan. How did you decide on just five exiles, or Initiates of the Fermata, and not more?
Efficiency issues (read: laziness), especially in a short story. I wanted enough characters for some variety but not so many that they were hard to remember, and notice that Tortoise never even makes an appearance.
You create a powerful image of the swanships diving into the heart of the black hole to battle the silence at the end of time. What do you believe happens to all that matter that enters a black hole?