Stories of Your Life and Others

Story of Your Life
This story grew out of my interest in the variational principles of
physics. I've found these principles fascinating ever since I first learned of
them, but I didn't know how to use them in a story until I saw a
performance of Time Flies When You're Alive, Paul Linke's one-man show
about his wife's battle with breast cancer. It occurred to me then that I might
be able to use variational principles to tell a story about a person's response
to the inevitable. A few years later, that notion combined with a friend's
remark about her newborn baby to form the nucleus of this story.
For those interested in physics, I should note that the story's discussion
of Fermat's Principle of Least Time omits all mention of its quantum-
mechanical underpinnings. The QM formulation is interesting in its own
way, but I preferred the metaphoric possibilities of the classical version.
As for this story's theme, probably the most concise summation of it
that I've seen appears in Kurt Vonnegut's introduction to the 25th
anniversary edition of Slaughterhouse-Five: "Stephen Hawking… found it
tantalizing that we could not remember the future. But remembering the
future is child's play for me now. I know what will become of my helpless,
trusting babies because they are grown-ups now. I know how my closest
friends will end up because so many of them are retired or dead now… To
Stephen Hawking and all others younger than myself I say, 'Be patient.
Your future will come to you and lie down at your feet like a dog who
knows and loves you no matter what you are.' "

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Seventy-Two Letters
This story came about when I noticed a connection between two ideas
I'd previously thought were unrelated. The first one was the golem.
In what's probably the best known story of the golem, Rabbi Loew of
Prague brings a clay statue to life to act as a defender of the Jews,
protecting them from persecution. It turns out this story is a modern
invention, dating back only to 1909. Stories in which the golem is used as a
servant to perform chores— with varying degrees of success— originated
in the 1500s, but they still aren't the oldest references to the golem. In
stories dating back to the second century, rabbis would animate golems not
to accomplish anything practical, but rather to demonstrate mastery of the
art of permutating letters; they sought to know God better by performing
acts of creation.
The whole theme of the creative power of language has been discussed
elsewhere, by people smarter than me. What I found particularly interesting
about golems was the fact that they're traditionally unable to speak. Since
the golem is created through language, this limitation is also a limitation on
reproduction. If a golem were able to use language, it would be capable of
self-replication, rather like a Von Neumann machine.
The other idea I'd been thinking about was preformation, the theory
that organisms exist fully formed in the germ cells of their parents. It's easy
for people now to dismiss it as ridiculous, but at the time, preformation
made a lot of sense. It was an attempt to solve the problem of how living
organisms are able to replicate themselves, which is the same problem that
later inspired Von Neumann machines. When I recognized that, it seemed
that I was interested in these two ideas for the same reason, and I knew I
had to write about them.

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