Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “The Garden of Forking Paths” is enjoying a revival. As our society grapples with deeper issues of surveillance, control and the fragility of reality itself, readers can’t get enough of its predictions. In 1941, Borges would publish his inspiring short story. It’s centered around a character called Ts’ui Pên, who attempts the grand project of writing a novel of which one of the characters is the author, with each character exploring a labyrinth of potentialities. It’s accurate to say this work laid ground for contemporary speculative fiction. It suggests radical ideas that are still being worked out in the field of quantum physics.
In “The Garden of Forking Paths,” Ts’ui Pên’s novel represents “an enormous guessing game, or parable, in which the subject is time.” This concept Li touches on is very similar to the multiverse theory, first introduced by Hugh Everett in 1957. The multiverse explanation claims that no matter what the outcome of an event, that outcome occurs in its own parallel universe. Bryce DeWitt made this concept widespread in the 1970s with his “many worlds interpretation” of quantum mechanics. Borges imagines a multiverse of alternative realities, where each possible outcome is realized. His profound meditation on the nature of time and being has echoing ramifications on compelling storytelling to this day.
Borges’s work stands as a successor to earlier dystopian novels such as Yevgeny Zamyatin’s “We,” Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” and George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four.” Dystopian fiction illustrates powerful narratives of surveillance and societal control. They reflect the warnings found in Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian classic “The Handmaid’s Tale,” which depicts the oppressive effects of totalitarian rule. The reverberations of Borges’s genius are indeed audible and visible on these pages, and they testify to the lasting power of his literary imagination.
The recent boom in technology has ushered in exciting and challenging new layers to these very themes. William Gibson’s 1984 novel “Neuromancer” imagined a virtual reality landscape known as the Matrix, which has evolved into modern discussions surrounding the metaverse. In 2021, Mark Zuckerberg rebranded Facebook’s parent company as Meta, announcing plans to develop a metaverse that promises immersive digital experiences. This project has a lot of resonance with concepts that Neal Stephenson put out in his 1992 novel “Snow Crash.” In the novel, he imagines something even more immersive than virtual reality—an augmented reality world that completely mixes the digital and physical.
Borges’s challenging narrative form challenges readers to reflect and consider the profound ramifications of choice and life itself. It reinforces the more personal concept that in a multiverse, every choice has sent you down one path or another. This hope is an idea that dovetails nicely with Philip K. Dick’s conception of “kipple.” He popularized this term in his 1968 novel, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” Kipple is the accumulation of unwanted, useless cultural detritus in our lives. More than an AI problem, it underscores society’s broader crisis of dealing with the tsunami of cough medicine come-ons.
“Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers.” – Philip K Dick
Consider first kipple’s law of kipple, “It drives out nonkipple,” a reminder that the incidental can displace the important. This critique of contemporary society resonates strongly with Borges’s meditation on time and freedom of choice. It emphasizes how the abundance of choice and noise often drowns out our clear thinking.
As technology rapidly advances, so does the counter-narrative world built by these colossal wordsmiths. Their works serve as cautionary tales, illustrating potential futures shaped by surveillance and control while simultaneously offering insights into the nature of reality itself. Octavia E. Butler expressed this feeling best when she said that questions and themes like these have grown “so old hat in science fiction.”
Modern readers grapple with all of these conflicts as they tread water in a more complicated world than ever before. This convergence of literature and technology is a profound invitation for society to reckon with where we are headed. As Borges wrote about a “growing, dizzying web of divergent, convergent, and parallel times,” one cannot help but consider how these ideas resonate today amid rapid technological advancements.