This is about the writing of literature and creativity.
The Distinction Between Imaginary Science and Magic
Ted Chiang received the Humanist Inquiry & Innovation Award at the American Humanist Association’s 83rd Annual Conference, held virtually in September 2024. This award honors those who have advanced human understanding and innovation in ways that uphold humanist values, work that exemplifies the power of inquiry and innovation to promote human dignity, freedom and progress.
Chiang is a renowned science fiction writer. His fiction has won four Hugo, four Nebula, and six Locus Awards, and has been reprinted in Best American Short Stories. His first collection Stories of Your Life and Others has been translated into twenty-one languages, and the title story was the basis for the Oscar-nominated film Arrival. His second collection Exhalation was chosen by The New York Times as one of the 10 Best Books of 2019.
This text is excerpted form Mr. Chiang’s acceptance speech at the Conference.
Some people will say that if you don’t understand how something works, it might as well be magic to you. For example, a lot of people don’t know how their smartphones work, and so for them, smartphones are basically magical devices. I don’t think that this is a useful definition of magic. I don’t want to say that radios are magic to some people, but not magic to others. I don’t think the criterion for whether something is magic should be whether I can find someone who is baffled by it in casual conversation.
According to this position, if a story is set in the future and the characters carry devices adorned with buttons and blinking LEDs, it’s science fiction, and those devices run on imaginary science. But if the same story is set in the past, and the people will carry devices that are adorned with jewels, then it’s a fantasy story, and those devices run on magic. I’m going to return to discussing science fiction versus fantasy a little later on, but for now, I want to address the question of these cosmetic differences.
…Sometimes magic works only for people born with an innate gift. Sometimes magic only works for people who have purified their soul through years of study. Sometimes magic only works for people who have good intentions, or it works differently for different people, depending on whether their intentions are good or bad. Sometimes magic requires intense concentration to be effective, or it requires that you make a sacrifice.
None of these things are true of scientific phenomena. When you pass a magnet through a coil of wire, electric current flows no matter who your parents are or whether your intentions are good or bad. You don’t have to concentrate hard or offer a sacrifice in order for a light bulb to turn on. Electricity does not care.
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