The story begins with a couple lying in bed, and the language of aliens. It begins in a tower in the plains of Shinar. It begins with a boy running in the woods, which clear suddenly—he nearly falls from the edge of a cliff. It begins with a sentient ocean, encircling a planet, communicating via hallucination. It begins with a man whose dreams become reality.
It begins here,
Let’s climb to the end of the universe, with a short close read of “The Aleph,” by Jorge Luis Borges, and some Ted Chiang thrown in there, too.
This is Collected Fictions.
On creating speculative settings:
Leave behind the iceberg metaphor, which is nearly useless when it comes to the reader’s experience of the story’s world. It doesn’t help much as far as how to tell about the world, or how to make the world seem real—it only advises against “info-dumping.”
Stories are told sequentially, carried on the currents of language. (Assuming, of course, that you are not fluent in Heptapod B.) Each sentence is a discovery. The writer lures the reader to keep reading, to keep finding out what is behind the laboratory door, or through the woods. As they read, the world is revealed in bits and pieces, because it is in the way.
All that we (the readers) know about the world is ordered by the hierarchy of attention: things that are most immediate to the characters are described immediately.
The point of view is also an imperfect instrument for knowing: “perception is provisional, it gropes, considers, hypothesizes” (Mark Doty). This action of the eye seeing and of the words describing is continuous: the POV is never solved, nor is the world completely seen, total, decided.
What is in front of our characters both obscures and frames the view. The foreground is an obstacle, and yet is also the point: it is the first layer of the world.
To create a sense of reality, we evoke depth. There is 1). the world the characters walk through, 2). the world always unfolding in the distance, and 3). the world hinted at beyond the horizon.
(One reason for speculative fiction’s love of the threshold: Narnia’s wardrobe crystallizes this transition from one layer to the next, intensifying the feeling of heading deeper into the world. The wardrobe is a symbol, but first it is literal.)
So now let’s return to Borges. Notice how what is important requires “proportional space” as in “actual inches” on the page (Annie Dillard). This long paragraph describes the Aleph (in a list within a single sentence divided by semi-colons) which represents that third category, the world hinted at beyond the picture’s horizon:
In the second edition of English Romantic Writers, David Perkins defines the sublime as “the reality of a supersensuous or noumenal realm of being...expressed only by suggestion,” and as “that state of mind arising in contact...with the transcendent and infinite” and “objects of overwhelming vastness or power.” This is my preferred framework for understanding speculative fiction’s capacity to—and search for—awe. It joins escapism with wonderment and the spirituality of magic or religion with their shadows: the uncanny, estrangement, nihilism.
Speculative fiction allows the reader to discover a strange world again and again. As a genre it often seeks out the limits of our knowledge, and by the same token fears that the individual will be lost in that search, our morality swallowed whole by the world, and ourselves proven insignificant.
Ted Chiang draws a theoretical boundary between fantasy and science fiction as between a universe that cares about us as individuals and a universe that is neutral, mechanistic. You can read more about his distinctions here. I like his framework, but for the sublime, I think it’s more a matter of angle than of kind. And as Chiang himself points out, when it comes to the sense of discovery, the territories overlap.
“I think that when scientists discover something new about the universe, I imagine that what they feel is almost identical to what deeply religious people feel when they feel like they are in the presence of God.” -Ted Chiang interview with Ezra Klein in the New York Times
The sublime offers the greatest distance from the locus of the POV: it is what can only be glimpsed, a final mystery even still. It offers the black-point in the image, the source of contrast. It is, ultimately, the universe resisting the POV. The world seems more real because it will not allow itself to be wholly known.
I am a child again; the realization that there is a limit to what we can know or explore makes the world seem that much more explorable—it is still strange, still beyond, still big. With writers like Borges and Chiang, this epiphany is the crux of the story. The narrative dramatizes the idea of the sublime; we live through the experience of pushing for the unknown, only to be, at the last moment, thrown back.