Themes and Aims of My Science Fiction

Expectation-Lowering Preface (Feel Free to Skip)

You probably won't like my science fiction stories.

Here's how I think of it. You could play me the best mariachi music in the world, and I won't enjoy it. Mariachi isn't my thing; I just don't get it. Similarly, Mozart's operas are great cultural achievements that move some people to ecstasy and tears, but I can't keep my seat through a whole performance of The Magic Flute. Even in genres I enjoy, some of the best performers don't interest me. Green Day inspired many of the alt-rock bands I like, and they are probably in some objective or intersubjective sense better than the bands I prefer, but... meh.

Tolkien, Le Guin, and Asimov were great science fiction and fantasy writers with broad appeal. Still, only a minority of readers -- indeed probably only a minority even among those who like the genre -- will actually enjoy Lord of the Rings, Left Hand of Darkness, or Asimov's robot stories.

I want to set low expectations. You're reading this, presumably, because you like my substack or my work in academic philosophy. Odds are, you won't like my fiction. My repeated experience is: I describe the concept behind one of my stories. The listener says, whoa, that sounds really cool, I'll check it out! but the story doesn't yield the pleasure they anticipate.

Maybe I'm a bad writer. But I prefer to think I'm good enough for the right readership, and it's mariachi music. You might find the concepts of some of my stories intriguing. I'm a philosopher: Concept is the first thing I go for, the sine qua non. But the story itself won't delight you unless it has the right prose style, the right pacing, a narrator and characters you relate to, plot styles you like, the right balance of action versus exposition, the right balance between easy familiarity and hard-to-digest strangeness, and many other factors of taste that legitimately vary. What's the chance that everything aligns? My guess: 10%.

Still, for any particular story, maybe you're in that 10%. You might even belong to the 5% who will enjoy most of my stories. I hope so! On that chance, I thought I'd compile a list, describing their guiding ideas and my aims in writing them. All are available online.

[image: “Let Everyone Sparkle” with illustration from Psyche / Aeon Ideas]

The Stories

Starting in 2011, I began sporadically sharing short pieces of conceptual fiction on my blog. I don't think that was entirely successful, partly because I was a novice fiction writer and partly because that's not what people went there for. But one story prompted a reply by prominent SF writer R. Scott Bakker, who added an alternative ending. We decided to revise the story together and seek publication. Astonishingly, the science journal Nature accepted it.

* In that story, Reinstalling Eden (Nature, 503 (2013), 562), I wanted to imagine a utilitarian ethicist (that is, someone who thinks that our moral duty is to maximize the world's pleasure) who discovered he could create a multitude of happy entities on his computer and who then followed through on the consequences of that -- specifically, advocating the creation of such entities as a major global priority and then sacrificing his life for them. Bakker imagined a second narrator inheriting the computer after the first narrator's death, who chose to give the entities knowledge of their condition, setting them free to interact with humanity. (Themes: utilitarian ethics, living in a computer simulation.)

Through the mid-2010s, I continued to write short conceptual pieces, no longer placing them on my blog. Most of them have never been published, though there are still a few I like.

* My next published piece, Out of the Jar (F&SF, 128 (2015), 118-128), was my first "full-length" (~4000 word) story. I wanted to imagine a philosophy professor who discovers that his world is a simulation run by a sadistic adolescent "God". I thought the professor should try to convince God to have mercy on his creations, and then -- when that failed -- install himself as the new God. (Themes: living in a simulation, the problem of evil, the duties of gods to their creations)

* "Momentary Sage" (The Dark, 8 (2015), 38-43) explores teenage self-harm and suicide -- imaginatively reconfigured in the form of a self-destructive faerie infant. The infant is born cleverly arguing for a quasi-Buddhist perspective according to which past and future are unreal and the self is an illusion. Given these philosophical commitments, the infant would rather kill himself than suffer a moment's displeasure. His parents' desperate attempts to keep him in the world can only briefly postpone the inevitable. I chose to frame it as a sequel to Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, from the perspective of a bitter Demetrius. (Themes: suicide, the self, obligations to the future, parenthood)

* "The Tyrant's Headache" (Sci Phi Journal, 3 (2015), 78-83) will probably only appeal to readers who know David Lewis's classic article "Mad Pain and Martian Pain". This story is an extended thought-experimental objection to Lewis's view, according to which your experienced mental states constitutively depend in part on the normal causal role of those mental states in the population to which you belong. I imagine a tyrant who, heeding Lewis's advice, absurdly attempts to cure his headache by doing everything but changing his current brain state. (Themes: functionalism in philosophy of mind; see also Chapter 2 of Weirdness of the World)

* "The Dauphin's Metaphysics" (Unlikely Story, 12 (2015); audio at PodCastle 475 (2017)) portrays a psychologically realistic, low-technology case of "mind transfer" from one body to another. On some theories of personal identity, what makes you you are your memories, your personality, your values, and other features of your psychology. Suppose, then, that a dying prince arranges for a newborn infant to be raised to think of himself as a continuation of the prince, with accurate memories of the prince's life and the same values and personality. If done perfectly enough, would that be a continuation of the prince in a new body? The realistic, low-tech nature of the case makes it, I think, more challenging to say "yes" than with high-tech "upload" fantasies. The narrator is a socially isolated academic superstar who had earlier "become a new person" in a much more ordinary way. (Themes: personal identity, sexism, inequalities of power)

* In "Fish Dance" (Clarkesworld, 118 (2016); audio) I wanted to explore the boundaries of a meaningful afterlife or personality upload, by imagining a highly imperfect upload into an intensely pleasurable "afterlife". Suppose a small portion of you continues to exist for millions of years, with a few imperfect memories, ceaselessly repeating an ecstatic, joyful, erotic dance with a superficial duplicate of the person you once intensely loved? Would that be almost unimaginably good, or would it be a monstrous parody? I also thought it would be interesting for the protagonist to be -- contrary to virtually all writing advice -- almost completely passive throughout the story. He's an amputated head on life support, hallucinating half the time, and his only real action is to signal with his eyes at the crucial moment. (Themes: personal identity, afterlife, parenthood and marriage)

* In "The Library of Babel", Jorge Luis Borges searches for meaning in a universe composed of a vast library containing every possible book with every possible combination of letters, randomly arranged. In "THE TURING MACHINES OF BABEL" (Apex, 98 (2017); or here), I create a similar infinite library of texts -- except that the texts prove to be instructions for infinitely many randomly constituted computer programs, including the programs that constitute your mind as the story's reader and mine as author. I assume for the sake of the story that computational functionalism is true, and human minds are essentially just organic computers. (Themes: functionalism and computationalism about the mind, randomness and meaning)

* In "Little /^^^\&-" (Clarkesworld, 132 (2017); audio), a planet-sized group intelligence falls in love with Earth, which she sees as an immature, partly-formed group intelligence of broadly her kind. Little /^^^\&- herself is small compared to a galactic government that plans to sacrifice the whole galaxy for a still greater good, vast beyond even the government's comprehension. This is probably my weirdest, most difficult, least approachable story -- only for readers who don't mind puzzling together a complicated story with pieces near the beginning that only make sense retrospectively by the end. (Themes: group minds, how much we should sacrifice for larger things we can't understand)

In contrast, "Gaze of Robot, Gaze of Bird" (Clarkesworld, 151 (2019); audio) is probably my least dense, most approachable story, liked by the highest percentage of readers. I wanted to write a story in which the protagonist is a non-conscious machine -- a machine the reader can't help but incorrectly imagine as having desires and a point of view. This “point of view” character is a terraforming robot that spends 200 million years recreating the species that designed it and is finally rewarded with consciousness. (Themes: consciousness, what constitutes the survival of a species)

My 2019 book A Theory of Jerks and Other Philosophical Misadventures (MIT Press) is mostly a collection of lightly-to-moderately revised blog posts and op-eds, but it also contains four brief conceptual fictions.

In "A Two-Seater Homunculus" I discover that my neighbor's brain was replaced by a brother-and-sister homunculus pair, though no one seemed to notice.

“My Daughter's Rented Eyes" imagines submitting to corporate advertising and copyright protection agreements on what you can see, for improved overall functionality.

"Penelope's Guide to Defeating Time, Space, and Causation": Waiting for Odysseus' return, Penelope proves that the world contains infinitely many duplicates of everyone living out every possible future and concludes that death is impossible.

"How to Accidentally Become a Zombie Robot": If you test-drive life as a robot and seem to remember its having felt great, how confident should you be that those memories are real?

Penultimate manuscript versions of the stories are available here. (Themes: personal identity, technology ethics and corporate power, consciousness, computational functionalism)

"Passion of the Sun Probe" (AcademFic, 1 (2020), 7-11; audio at Reductio (2021), S0E11) concerns the ethics of designing conscious robots with self-sacrificial goals -- in this case a Sun probe who chooses (predictably, given its programming) to "freely" sacrifice itself on an ecstatic three-day scientific suicide mission to the Sun. (Themes: robot rights, technology ethics, freedom, what gives a life meaning; a short version of the case appears in Schwitzgebel & Garza 2020)

"Let Everyone Sparkle" (Aeon Ideas / Psyche, Apr 12, 2022): This story was accepted for publication in the New York Times' series of "Op-Eds from the Future" that ran from 2019 to 2020. Sadly, the series folded before the story could be printed. Aeon (later Psyche) graciously picked it up. Four decades in the future, a man raises a celebratory toast to the psychotechnology that prevents anyone from ever involuntarily experiencing negative emotions. Although the man argues that this technology is plainly good, the reader, I hope, doesn't feel as sure. (Themes: mood enhancement, the value of negative emotion, corporate power)

In "Larva Pupa Imago" (Clarkesworld, 197, (2023); audio) I had two main aims: to imagine the experience of an intelligent insect who eagerly dies for sex and to imagine minds that can merge and overlap. The story follows a cognitively enhanced butterfly from hatchling run to final mating journey, in a posthuman world where thoughts can be transferred by sharing cognitive fluids. Inspired in part by James Tiptree Jr's "Love Is the Plan the Plan is Death". (Themes: merging minds, personal identity, instinct and value)

For a decade, I've wanted to set a story in an assisted living facility. So many people end their lives there, but those lives are so invisible in the media! "How to Remember Perfectly" (Clarkesworld, 216 (2024)) is a love story between octogenarians. The science fiction "novum" is a device that allows them to control their moods and radically refashion their memories. How much does it matter if your memories are real? How much does it matter that your mood is responsive only to the good and bad things actually happening around you? (Themes: death, mood enhancement, memory, the value of truth)

One of these days, I'll discuss in more depth why I sometimes prefer to express my philosophical ideas as fiction, but this post is already overlong.