Abstract

In “Story of Your Life” and “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom,” Ted Chiang explores questions that would be at home in contemporary scholarship on free will, agency, and moral responsibility. In “Story of Your Life,” Chiang asks whether knowledge of the future is compatible with free will. And the prism technology in “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom” prompts questions of whether we are responsible for out-of-character actions. If such actions were genuine anomalies, would we be less responsible for them? In these stories, however, these questions are entangled with questions more at home in the existentialist tradition. Put in conversation with Friedrich Nietzsche and Soren Kierkegaard, Chiang’s stories present a compelling picture of existential responsibility and what it means to live a rich human existence, in particular, what it means to affirm our lives (Nietzsche) and to become selves (Kierkegaard).