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Scientists and Their Discoveries: A Postcolonial Reading of Ted Chiang’s Science Fiction
ABSTRACT “What is the role of human scientists in an age when the frontiers of scientific inquiry have moved beyond the comprehension of humans?” asks Ted Chiang in “The Evolution of Human Science” (239). Chiang’s question highlights the centrality of science and the significant position of scientists not only in a time of crisis, anxiety, and insecurity, but in an age of scientific advance at a pace that already threatens to exceed the human scale and human sense-making capacities. Scientific discovery as the last ‘uncharted frontier’ is historically grounded in the colonial, Eurocentric fantasy of advancement, progress, development, and imperial appropriation. Through a postcolonial lens, we analyze Ted Chiang’s short stories “Exhalation” (2008) and “Story of Your Life” (1998), tracing how Chiang uses the image of a “solipsistic periscope” to detach speculative imagination from colonial frameworks by emphasizing the centrality of subjectivity in scientific inquiry, while also challenging traditional views of discovery as a linear progression.
KEYWORDS postcolonial science fiction, postcolonial theory, science and decolonization, short fiction, Ted Chiang
