The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling

by Ted Chiang

In the near future, a journalist observes how the world, his daughter, and he himself are affected by "Remem", a form of lifelogging whose advanced search algorithms effectively grant its users eidetic memory of everything that ever happened to them, and the ability to perfectly and objectively share those memories. In a parallel narrative strand, a Tiv man is one of the first of his people to learn to read and write and discovers that this may not be compatible with oral tradition.

Genres: Science Fiction, Short Stories, Fiction, Philosophy, Read For School, Fantasy

46 pages, Unknown Binding

Published January 1, 2013

About the author

Ted Chiang is an American science fiction writer. His Chinese name is Chiang Feng-nan. He graduated from Brown University with a Computer Science degree. He currently works as a technical writer in the software industry and resides in Bellevue, near Seattle, Washington. He is a graduate of the noted Clarion Writers Workshop (1989) and has been an instructor for it (2012, 2016). Chiang is also a frequent non-fiction contributor to the New Yorker, where he writes on topics related to computing such as artificial intelligence.

Chiang has published 18 short stories, to date, and most of them have won prestigious speculative fiction awards - including multiple Nebula Awards, Locus Awards, Hugo Awards, and British Science Fiction Association Awards, among others. His short story "Story of Your Life" was the basis of the film Arrival (2016). He has never written a novel but is one of the most decorated science fiction writers currently working.

Chiang's first eight stories are collected in "Stories of Your Life, and Others" and the next nine, in "Exhalation: Stories".

Reviews

[Kireth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ted Chiang's best short story yet. A powerful cross-cultural examination of many facets of the human condition. The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling is actually made up of two concurrent stories. The first occurs in the near-future where a journalist is questioning the effects of an additional technology to the "lifelogs" that most people wear - instead of just recording moments from your life, Remem allows individuals to search and automatically locate specific moments from their lengthy video volumes. At first discussing its effects on wider society, his usage of Remem causes the article to be entangled with his personal life, especially his relationship with his daughter. In an almost opposite manner, Jijingi is a young Tiv man with close personal ties who begins learning how to write when European missionaries arrive in his village. As he grows he comes to understand the differences between written details and oral tales, and which is better for his people.

Chiang explores a vast range of themes, smartly using them to unify the two disparate tales as he alternates perspective. The clearest idea being explored is the truth of our memories; as humans we attempt to chop, change and highlight a certain range of moments from our past, sometimes without realising it. Whether they are truthful or not, we are drawn to the notion of storytelling and therefore our personal history tends to fit a narrative structure, making me realise how incredibly vain we can be (even with good intentions). Extrapolating from this, Chiang explores what makes a good story - is it the consistency of the words, intonation of a speaker or a combination of both? And perhaps most importantly, what happens when we sacrifice or prioritise the truth?

The use of different time periods and settings accentuates the fact that these are universal aspects of the human condition. Chiang describes common childhood situation, relationship disputes (especially between married couples, and parents and children), corporations and religious institutions, all the while respecting the African culture depicted. These do not just act as examples for the psychological discussion he puts forward on searchable lifelogging, but are actively explored through the believable characters he has written.

Overall, it is hard to pick between this and Liking What You See: A Documentary as my favourites from Chiang's works. Both explore a collective social issue due highlighted through a new technology in smart and nuanced ways, and with great writing of perspectives to boot. However, I still have three stories left in the Exhalation collection, so this brace may be added to!

Read all my thoughts on Ted Chiang's Two Collections: Stories of Your Life and Exhalation linked here.

[rochi ⋆ · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling by Ted Chiang is told through two points of view: a journalist and Jijingi. Each storyline explores themes of technology, identity, and memory in different settings.

The first story takes place in a near-future world, where the journalist (whose name is never revealed) questions the use of lifelogs, a device that allows people to record their lives and search for specific moments using a system called Remem. He discusses the effects of lifelogging on society, highlighting both its benefits and drawbacks. Although he initially opposes this technology, he eventually decides to try it himself. When he does, he realizes that he has misremembered key events from his past, which leads him to question his memory and sense of identity.

The second story follows Jijingi, a Tiv man who discovers a new technology: writing. He learns it from a European missionary who arrives in his village. Over time, Jijingi begins to understand the differences between oral storytelling and written records, and he considers which form is more valuable for his community.

I read this short story for one of my university subjects. The author alternates between the two perspectives in a very clear way. The themes he explores are thought-provoking and leave the reader reflecting on them. Overall, I found it to be a very interesting and reflective story.

[J · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very Black Mirror

[Katherine (Kat) · Rating 4 out of 5]

4/5 Stars

[Grace · Rating 5 out of 5]

Surprisingly moving piece set up as an article about a new piece of technology that will allow you to pull up video from your "lifelogs" as a sort of automatic digital memory. The author starts as against this new tech until he realizes he'd misremembered key events from his past. The change in opinion and the relationship with his daughter added a lovely emotional component, and this was as thought-provoking as ever. Its entwined with a story in an African village where a Westerner brings the concept of writing to an entirely oral-based tribe. Each of the two story threads were incredibly vivid, and the way they played off of and reinforced so many various themes was seriously impressive.

[Yeomyung Yoon · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite of Ted Chiang's so far.

[Parth Vargiya · Rating 3 out of 5]

Narration takes its time to tell ideas. Which dulled the experience for me, but still a very good read.

[Johannes Lilover · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beside the decent point he makes the book reads in a rather unique way as well. It's so nondescriptive and to the point that it is hard to even call it fiction. An essay with a few plot twists and two parallel time frames?

Also why was it written in such simple language? Cool.

[Habiii · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think it's a beautiful destiny that I chose this as a research material, truly changed my way of looking at language and communication as well as made me question my actions, I guess we as humans will never truly know who is right or wrong nor what's really the right thing 2 do..

[McKenna Melander · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this story, especially the juxtaposition between the two narratives. It gave me a lot to think about.

[Sadhna Bokhiria · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning. This was extraordinary. I would rate this as one of his best stories. When I finished the last word, I was left speechless.

[Shreyas · Rating 3 out of 5]

'The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling' by Ted Chiang.

People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we’ve lived; they’re the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments. Which is why, even when we’ve experienced the same events as other individuals, we never constructed identical narratives: the criteria used for selecting moments were different for each of us, and a reflection of our personalities. Each of us noticed the details that caught our attention and remembered what was important to us, and the narratives we built shaped our personalities in turn.

Rating: 3.25/5.




Review:
The deeper I get into Ted Chiang's short stories in the 'Exhalation' anthology, the less impressed I get with the content. It might be a purely subjective opinion, but I do believe that the best of Ted Chiang's short stories were compiled at the start of this collection.

'The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling' is an insightful piece that works solely because of its premise. Ted Chiang alternates between two different narratives from two different time periods. By taking a real historical concern for the effects of technological progress on the human mind, the author proficiently extrapolated it to apply the same concept to a not-so-impossible technology in the near future. Ted Chiang does draw an interesting parallel between the integration of writing in a historical society that leans more on oral narration, and the integration of the Remem technology into the futuristic society that grants access to every precise memory to the user right from birth.

The alternating perspectives take some time to get to the point which makes the narrative drag to some extent. Furthermore, the narrator does end up getting too preachy towards the end which made the story hard to digest. The concepts explored in this short story were great nonetheless. It was cleanly written with some sharp observations, but it felt far too bland to be relished as a story. It does, however, give the reader a lot to think about, so I'm sure I might end up enjoying this short story more when I return to it a few years later.

[prantika · Rating 4 out of 5]

short stories i read for class count for reading challenge omg...

some thoughts i had in our class discussion today:
obviously this book is about two different types of truths and it's interesting how the two were portrayed in the past vs in the future. i thought the passages on the future were more interesting vs the past and how we might(???) be going down that path. for ex i remember reading this piece about how people couldn't remember concerts they go to (ex. eras tour) so really all the memories they have from that night would be video recordings. wouldn't it be crazy if that was every memory? also wouldn't it be so freaky if you could remember everything from the second you were born? my friends and i joke a lot about not gaining a consciousness until we were like 4-6 years old. imagine not having that that would be crazy.

[Varnavas Flourentzou · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.7

[Todd McPherson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read for school, very short. Kinda okay.

[Luci · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars

[Matija · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.3

[Cay-lamity · Rating 5 out of 5]

"How can paper tell a story?"
"It is an art that we Europeans know. When a man speaks, we make marks on the paper. When another man looks at the paper later, he sees the marks and knows what sounds the first man made. In that way the second man can hear what the first man said."
Jijingi remembered something his father had told him about old Gbegba, who was the most skilled in bushcraft. "Where you or I would see nothing but some disturbed grass, he can see that a leopard had killed a cane rat at that spot and carried it off," his father said. Gbegba was able to look at the ground and know what had happened even though he had not been present. This art of the Europeans must be similar: those who were skilled in interpreting the marks could hear a story even if they hadn’t been there when it was told.
"Tell me the story that the paper tells," he said.


"If your marriage is solid, Remem isn’t going to hurt it. But if you’re the type of person who’s constantly trying to prove that you’re right and your spouse is wrong, then your marriage is going to be in trouble whether you use Remem or not."
I conceded that she may have had a point in this particular case. But, I asked her, didn’t she think Remem created greater opportunities for those types of arguments to arise, even in solid marriages, by making it easier for people to keep score?
"Not at all," she said. "Remem didn’t give them a scorekeeping mentality; they developed that on their own. Another couple could just as easily use Remem to realize that they’ve both misremembered things, and become more forgiving when that sort of mistake happens. I predict the latter scenario will be the more common one with our customers as a whole."



Moseby explained to Jijingi how each sound a person spoke could be indicated with different marks on the paper. The marks were arranged in rows like plants in a field; you looked at the marks as if you were walking down a row, made the sound each mark indicated, and you would find yourself speaking what the original person had said. Moseby showed him how to make each of the different marks on a sheet of paper, using a tiny wooden rod that had a core of soot.



"Very good. But you need to leave spaces when you write."
"I have." Jijingi pointed at the gap between each row.
"No, that is not what I mean. Do you see the spaces within each line?" He pointed at his own paper.
Jijingi understood. "Your marks are clumped together, while mine are arranged evenly."
"These are not just clumps of marks. They are… I do not know what you call them." He picked up a thin sheaf of paper from his table and flipped through it. "I do not see it here. Where I come from, we call them ‘words.’ When we write, we leave spaces between the words."
"But what are words?"
"How can I explain it?" He thought a moment. "If you speak slowly, you pause very briefly after each word. That’s why we leave a space in those places when we write. Like this: How. Many. Years. Old. Are. You?" He wrote on his paper as he spoke, leaving a space every time he paused: Anyom a ou kuma a me?
"But you speak slowly because you’re a foreigner. I’m Tiv, so I don’t pause when I speak. Shouldn’t my writing be the same?"
"It does not matter how fast you speak. Words are the same whether you speak quickly or slowly."
"Then why did you say you pause after each word?"
"That is the easiest way to find them. Try saying this very slowly." He pointed at what he’d just written.
Jijingi spoke very slowly, the way a man might when trying to hide his drunkenness. "Why is there no space in between an and yom?"
"Anyom is one word. You do not pause in the middle of it."
"But I wouldn’t pause after anyom either."
Moseby sighed. "I will think more about how to explain what I mean. For now, just leave spaces in the places where I leave spaces."
What a strange art writing was. When sowing a field, it was best to have the seed yams spaced evenly; Jijingi’s father would have beaten him if he’d clumped the yams the way the Moseby clumped his marks on paper. But he had resolved to learn this art as best he could, and if that meant clumping his marks, he would do so.
It was only many lessons later that Jijingi finally understood where he should leave spaces, and what Moseby meant when he said "word." You could not find the places where words began and ended by listening. The sounds a person made while speaking were as smooth and unbroken as the hide of a goat’s leg, but the words were like the bones underneath the meat, and the space between them was the joint where you’d cut if you wanted to separate it into pieces. By leaving spaces when he wrote, Moseby was making visible the bones in what he said.



Whetstone expects that, as people become accustomed to their product, queries will take the place of ordinary acts of recall, and Remem will be integrated into their very thought processes. Once that happens, we will become cognitive cyborgs, effectively incapable of misremembering anything; digital video stored on error-corrected silicon will take over the role once filled by our fallible temporal lobes.
What might it be like to have a perfect memory? Arguably the individual with the best memory ever documented was Solomon Shereshevskii, who lived in Russia during the first half of the twentieth century. The psychologists who tested him found that he could hear a series of words or numbers once and remember it months or even years later. With no knowledge of Italian, Shereshevskii was able to quote stanzas of The Divine Comedy that had been read to him fifteen years earlier.
But having a perfect memory wasn’t the blessing one might imagine it to be. Reading a passage of text evoked so many images in Shereshevskii’s mind that he often couldn’t focus on what it actually said, and his awareness of innumerable specific examples made it difficult for him to understand abstract concepts. At times, he tried to deliberately forget things. He wrote down numbers he no longer wanted to remember on slips of paper and then burnt them, a kind of slash-and-burn approach to clearing out the undergrowth of his mind, but to no avail.
When I raised the possibility that a perfect memory might be a handicap to Whetstone’s spokesperson, Erica Meyers, she had a ready reply. "This is no different from the concerns people used to have about retinal projectors," she said. "They worried that seeing updates constantly would be distracting or overwhelming, but we’ve all adapted to them."



But even if Remem wasn’t constantly crowding your field of vision with unwanted imagery of the past, I wondered if there weren’t issues raised simply by having that imagery be perfect.
"Forgive and forget" goes the expression, and for our idealized magnanimous selves, that was all you needed. But for our actual selves the relationship between those two actions wasn’t so straightforward. In most cases we had to forget a little bit before we could forgive; when we no longer experienced the pain as fresh, the insult was easier to forgive, which in turn made it less memorable, and so on. It was this psychological feedback loop that made initially infuriating offences seem pardonable in the mirror of hindsight.

What I feared was that Remem would make it impossible for this feedback loop to get rolling. By fixing every detail of an insult in indelible video, it could prevent the softening that’s needed for forgiveness to begin. I thought back to what Erica Meyers said about Remem’s inability to hurt solid marriages. Implicit in that assertion was a claim about what qualified as a solid marriage. If someone’s marriage was built on—as ironic as it might sound—a cornerstone of forgetfulness, what right did Whetstone have to shatter that?



Would those years of repair have been possible with Remem? Even if each of us could have refrained from throwing the other’s bad behavior in their faces, the opportunity to privately rewatch video of our arguments seems like it could be pernicious. Vivid reminders of the way she and I yelled at each other in the past might have kept our anger fresh, and prevented us from rebuilding our relationship.





The paper version of the story was curiously disappointing. Jijingi remembered that when he had first learned about writing, he’d imagined it would enable him to see a storytelling performance as vividly as if he were there. But writing didn’t do that. When Kokwa told the story, he didn’t merely use words; he used the sound of his voice, the movement of his hands, the light in his eyes. He told you the story with his whole body, and you understood it the same way. None of that was captured on paper; only the bare words could be written down. And reading just the words gave you only a hint of the experience of listening to Kokwa himself, as if one were licking the pot in which okra had been cooked instead of eating the okra itself.




One day, when Moseby had been eloquent, Jijingi complimented him. "I know you think highly of all your sermons, but today’s sermon was a good one."
"Thank you," said Moseby, smiling. After a moment, he asked, "Why do you say I think highly of all my sermons?"
"Because you expect that people will want to read them many years from now."
"I don’t expect that. What makes you think that?"
"You write them all down before you even deliver them. Before even one person has heard a sermon, you have written it down for future generations."
Moseby laughed. "No, that is not why I write them down."
"Why, then?" He knew it wasn’t for people far away to read them, because sometimes messengers came to the village to deliver paper to Moseby, and he never sent his sermons back with them.
"I write the words down so I do not forget what I want to say when I give the sermon."
"How could you forget what you want to say? You and I are speaking right now, and neither of us needs paper to do so."
"A sermon is different from conversation." Moseby paused to consider. "I want to be sure I give my sermons as well as possible. I won’t forget what I want to say, but I might forget the best way to say it. If I write it down, I don’t have to worry. But writing the words down does more than help me remember. It helps me think."
"How does writing help you think?"
"That is a good question," he said. "It is strange, isn’t it? I do not know how to explain it, but writing helps me decide what I want to say. Where I come from, there’s a very old proverb: verba volant, scripta manent. In Tiv you would say, ‘spoken words fly away, written words remain.’ Does that make sense?"
"Yes," Jijingi said, just to be polite; it made no sense at all. The missionary wasn’t old enough to be senile, but his memory must be terrible and he didn’t want to admit it.





Jijingi pointed at the paper he held. "This paper is the story you told last year, and there were many differences." He picked one he remembered. "Last time you said, ‘the Uyengi captured the women and children and carried them off as slaves.’ This time you said, ‘they made slaves of the women, but they did not stop there: they even made slaves of the children.’"
"That’s the same."
"It is the same story, but you’ve changed the way you tell it."
"No," said Kokwa, "I told it just as I told it before."
Jijingi didn’t want to try to explain what words were. Instead he said, "If you told it as you did before, you would say ‘the Uyengi captured the women and children and carried them off as slaves’ every time."
For a moment Kokwa stared at him, and then he laughed. "Is this what you think is important, now that you’ve learned the art of writing?"
Even though Kokwa was telling the same story, he might arrange the words differently each time he told it; he was skilled enough as a storyteller that the arrangement of words didn’t matter. It was different for Moseby, who never acted anything out when he gave his sermons; for him, the words were what was important. Jijingi realized that Moseby wrote down his sermons not because his memory was terrible, but because he was looking for a specific arrangement of words. Once he found the one he wanted, he could hold on to it for as long as he needed.




As he practiced his writing, Jijingi came to understand what Moseby had meant; writing was not just a way to record what someone said; it could help you decide what you would say before you said it. And words were not just the pieces of speaking; they were the pieces of thinking. When you wrote them down, you could grasp your thoughts like bricks in your hands and push them into different arrangements. Writing let you look at your thoughts in a way you couldn’t if you were just talking, and having seen them, you could improve them, make them stronger and more elaborate.




Psychologists make a distinction between semantic memory—knowledge of general facts—and episodic memory—recollection of personal experiences. We’ve been using technological supplements for semantic memory ever since the invention of writing: first books, then search engines. By contrast, we’ve historically resisted such aids when it comes to episodic memory; few people have ever kept as many diaries or photo albums as they did ordinary books. The obvious reason is convenience; if we wanted a book on the birds of North America, we could consult one that an ornithologist has written, but if we wanted a daily diary, we had to write it for ourselves. But I also wonder if another reason is that, subconsciously, we regarded our episodic memories as such an integral part of our identities that we were reluctant to externalize them, to relegate them to books on a shelf or files on a computer.

how will it change a person’s conception of herself when she’s only seen her past through the unblinking eye of a video camera? Just as there’s a feedback loop in softening harsh memories, there’s also one at work in the romanticization of childhood memories, and disrupting that process will have consequences.





Another of my earliest memories is of playing on the living room rug, pushing toy cars around, while my grandmother worked at her sewing machine; she would occasionally turn and smile warmly at me. There are no photos of that moment, so I know the recollection is mine and mine alone. It is a lovely, idyllic memory. Would I want to be presented with actual footage of that afternoon? No; absolutely not.

Regarding the role of truth in autobiography, the critic Roy Pascal wrote, "On the one side are the truths of fact, on the other the truth of the writer’s feeling, and where the two coincide cannot be decided by any outside authority in advance." Our memories are private autobiographies, and that afternoon with my grandmother features prominently in mine because of the feelings associated with it. What if video footage revealed that my grandmother’s smile was in fact perfunctory, that she was actually frustrated because her sewing wasn’t going well? What’s important to me about that memory is the happiness I associated with it, and I wouldn’t want that jeopardized.
It seemed to me that continuous video of my entire childhood would be full of facts but devoid of feeling, simply because cameras couldn’t capture the emotional dimension of events. As far as the camera was concerned, that afternoon with my grandmother would be indistinguishable from a hundred others. And if I’d grown up with access to all the video footage, there’d have been no way for me to assign more emotional weight to any particular day, no nucleus around which nostalgia could accrete.






And what will the consequences be when people can claim to remember their infancy? I could readily imagine a situation where, if you ask a young person what her earliest memory is, she will simply look baffled; after all, she has video dating back to the day of her birth. The inability to remember the first few years of one’s life—what psychologists call childhood amnesia—might soon be a thing of the past. No more would parents tell their children anecdotes beginning with the words "You don’t remember this because you were just a toddler when it happened." It’ll be as if childhood amnesia is a characteristic of humanity’s childhood, and in ouroboric fashion, our youth will vanish from our memories.
Part of me wanted to stop this, to protect children’s ability to see the beginning of their lives filtered through gauze, to keep those origin stories from being replaced by cold, desaturated video. But maybe they will feel just as warmly about their lossless digital memories as I do of my imperfect, organic memories.
People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we’ve lived; they’re the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments. Which is why, even when we’ve experienced the same events as other individuals, we never constructed identical narratives: the criteria used for selecting moments were different for each of us, and a reflection of our personalities. Each of us noticed the details that caught our attention and remembered what was important to us, and the narratives we built shaped our personalities in turn.





Europeans often believe paper over people.




"But that doesn’t mean he was lying." Then Jijingi remembered something about the European language, and understood Moseby’s confusion. "Our language has two words for what in your language is called ‘true.’ There is what’s right, mimi, and what’s precise, vough. In a dispute the principals say what they consider right; they speak mimi. The witnesses, however, are sworn to say precisely what happened; they speak vough. When Sabe has heard what happened can he decide what action is mimi for everyone. But it’s not lying if the principals don’t speak vough, as long as they speak mimi."





"You’re the reason she left. You can leave too, for all I care. I sure as hell would be better off without you."
The words were just as I remembered them, but it wasn’t Nicole saying them.
It was me.
My first thought was that it must be a fake, that Nicole had edited the video to put her words into my mouth. She must have noticed my request for access to her lifelog footage, and concocted this to teach me a lesson. Or perhaps it was a film she had created to show her friends, to reinforce the stories she told about me. But why was she still so angry at me, that she would do such a thing? Hadn’t we gotten past this?

My recollection of that argument was as clear as any memory I had, but that wasn’t the only reason I found the video hard to believe; it was also my knowledge that—whatever my faults or imperfections—I was never the kind of father who could say such a thing to his child.
Yet here was digital video proving that I had been exactly that kind of father. And while I wasn’t that man anymore, I couldn’t deny that

[Isaac Lambert · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't want a lifelog. can I get a feelinglog

[Vadim Trifonov · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting inquiry into what role our ability to forget plays in our lives. With the advent of technology that captures everything in verbatim, we might be overlooking some of the benefits of not remembering. There might a be a good evolutionary reason for that.

[Storm · Rating 5 out of 5]

Collected in Exhalation, this Hugo nominated short story is a thought provoking examination of the truth behind what is fact versus feelings, and how facts can change when "recorded" depending on a person's perception and interpretation. The framing device used here is two separate stories in different time periods that entwine at the end with one message.

The first is the near future. A journalist contemplates how "Remem", a form of lifelogging whose advanced search algorithms effectively grant its users eidetic memory of everything that ever happened to them, and the ability to perfectly and objectively share those memories affects the world. The law has vastly changed since it can now determine the truth of what happens, and a ton of human arguments are rendered moot. I can't even tell you how many relationships or marriages would be ruined by one-upmanship granted by the use of such technology and ensuing


The other narrative is set in the past. A Tiv man learns how to read and write from a missionary, who says recording facts is good as this enables one to hand down a record of what happened in the past, plus it's useful when spreading their religion. Pretty soon he realizes writing with its "Dry Facts" is incompatible with oral tradition where interpretation is part of the storyteller's craft.

This is a slow, but wonderful big picture thinking themed story. Consider these concepts:-

1. History is written by the winners, who can control the narrative. It may be true, it might not be true, it really depends how the writer felt at that time.


2. The writer's interpretation changes what is written. Religious texts like the Bible have NUMEROUS versions. Are they faithful to the original despite being a "written" record? How much interpretation is added in because the writers were historically male? Would many religions be as sexist if women had been the ones writing the texts instead?


Heirarchy wise, it is clear. For Facts, a visual memory record provided by re-mem is THE ultimate truth, greater than written accounts, and even more so than oral tradition.

Feelings though, are a completely different, subjective thing. At the end of the day, is the ability to record and remember everything a good thing? Because frankly it's not easy, considering there will be people who struggle with the truth.

[Ayibatari Ogounga · Rating 3 out of 5]

I want to point out there were a few written languages in africa (like nsibidi n is now called Nigeria), anyway an interesting story.

[Ximena Martinez Rosas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Que cuento tan espectacular de verdad, nunca nos imaginamos lo importante que es definir palabra hasta que nos lo proponemos. Bueno, creo que genuinamente el paralelismo de ambas historias habla de lo que tomamos por verdad y lo subjetiva que debe de ser. Amé con todo el corazón el cuento ♥️

[Daniel T · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best short stories I've read.

[Rick N. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This story made me reflect on my own experiences of remembering my past and how different people have very different recollections of the same events and situations. I recently talked to my brother about how he remembers the way our mother treated us, and his memory seemed to be very twisted and unfair toward her. I thought that he had a very negative attitude toward her and was even fabricating certain aspects of events. I have lots of other memories that corroborate my memories of her and refute his. I have also talked with other siblings who share my perspectives and disagree with his. But this story does raise questions about what are the true empirical facts about our shared history. I'm sure this happens often between individuals as well as societies. For just one example, British historians today portray the American Revolution quite differently from the way U.S. history books and U.S. historians portray it. This story raises many epistemological questions relating to whether beliefs are justified, how evidence and reason can be used to help determine truth, and what is real vs. a figment of our imagination. I doubt that a tool like Remem would be able to resolve disputes between any two parties. People will just argue that the algorithm is flawed or is biased toward their adversary.

[Luke · Rating 5 out of 5]

A lovely, insightful piece of humanist sci-fi. Being only my second piece by Chiang he seems to have a knack for drawing emotionally resonant stories from his sci-fi premises. Stories that are grounded in character and surface questions about the human experience.

I love this piece for it's premise. Taking a real actual and historical concern for the affects of technological advancements on the human mind and extrapolating forward to a not impossible future. How would having digitally augmented eyes and memory change the way we live?

But even more interesting is the philosophical questions this piece flirts with. Reminiscent of Susan Sontag's work on photography and objective reality. What is the difference between truth "vough" and Truth "mimi". Even if objective truth were achievable would it be desirable?

The split narrative structure smartly draws parallels between the integration of Remem into the present society, and the integration of writing into the historical Tivland. Helping perhaps to provide perspective to the experience of changing how one thinks when given over to technology in a more understandable setting.

Cleanly written, and sharply observed. This is a great short story that I will undoubtedly return to.

[Chris Branch · Rating 3 out of 5]

A well-constructed pair of intertwining stories that are related only in theme - that of the effect of new memory enhancement technology on what is considered true. I read the story online before listening to the Very Bad Wizards podcast episode in which it’s discussed (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast...). I’ve never been a great fan of short stories so I find it hard to give one more than three stars, but this one was certainly nicely written and thought provoking, and worth reading if you’re going to listen to the podcast since it contains spoilers for the story. I largely agree with the hosts’ concluding interpretation of the story, which is that the two aspects of the title are both valid, and it takes wisdom to decide which applies in a given situation. I do think, however, that in spite of valid arguments to the contrary, both in this story and elsewhere, the truth of fact should take precedence over the truth of feeling in most situations.

[Teddy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this for my English honors class :)

So, I think this is a pretty good short story. Similar to the likes of Feed by M.T. Anderson, and even 1984, it explores what happens when the dominant control in society is no longer humans. In this case, it's in a technology called the "Remem," a technology that allows you to have prefect memory. As long as you've recorded it, (which is done with personal cameras, generally always on), one can "recall" any memory they want.

The way this is explored, it makes you wonder whether "perfect" memory is actually a good thing. I won't spoil the arguments used but in some ways, a perfect memory makes everyone black and white, no room for imagination or error. Memories degrade over time, and this could be beneficial when there are painful memories. Having a perfect memory would not allow that emotional wound to heal, and thus be very bad for you.

Obviously I'm just rambling, but if that sounds interesting you should read the story. It's only like 10k words or something and you can easily read it in 30 minutes.

Pretty good :)

[Angela Blount · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thoughtful, if somewhat drawn out. This presents a narrative within a narrative--both of which explore the concepts of faulty human memory, the effects of personal bias on recollection, and the differences between absolute accuracy and felt accuracy.

And... talk about an unreliable narrator!

I had a bit of struggle with the main narrator's insistence on the blanket inaccuracy of recall. He spends a great deal of time using tech to track down and witness an incident, only to discover the horrible thing he thought was said TO him was actually said BY him.
(While this may explain the delusions of many of my middle and high school bullies who remember their treatment of myself and others VERY differently than I do, I'd argue this extreme self-victimizing inaccuracy is far more prevalent in certain types of people and mental health disorders. NOT a generalization that should be a blanket statement about the entire population.)

[Zayne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extremely underrated short film of Ted Chiang. Initially I read this way back in High School back in 2015 and it changed how I thought about my writing and how to think about other authors writing. It also made me feel small and my stories smaller compared to this. I know it is not Chiang's seen-to-be best, but I personally love it the most. It just speaks to me on some overwhelming level.
Some of Ted's simplest stories are still extremely advanced to some. And for good reason. This while I thought brilliant, some thought as overreaching and far too outlandish. I disagree with that, simply for the fact it is not Ted's attempt at trying to combine different aspects of fictional technology but to simply show that these technologies could be dangerous all the same if made real.