Ted Chiang's Time-Travel Narratives: Predetermination, Predictability, and Free Will

Ted Chiang's sf narratives—"thought experiments," in his words—are written in a variety of genres and cover a variety of ideas, including considerations of temporal issues such as time travel. Here I examine three of these time-travel thought experiments: "Story of Your Life" (1998), "What's Expected of Us" (2005), and "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" (2007). As I argue, Chiang implicitly predicates each narrative on the block universe theory of the universe, whereby past, present, and future all coexist simultaneously; and he structures the narratives so as to reinforce this temporal fixedness. Concurrently, however, each narrative highlights key ideas relating to free will, such as knowledge, predictability, and agency, thus exploring what a meaningful definition of free will might be that is compatible with determinism.