Previous class notes include three annotated bibliography entries I drafted as models for you. The class notes for October 29 feature the entry for my starting-point source, Ted Chiang’s novella The Lifecycle of Software Objects; and Tuesday’s class notes present drafts of my entries for two peer-reviewed articles. Today’s class notes includes drafts of my fourth and fifth entries: a student interview and a magazine profile.
Sample Annotated Bibliography Entry–Student Interview
Bowry, Skylar. Interview. Conducted by Jane Lucas. 6 Nov. 2026.
Skylar Bowry details first encountering Ted Chiang’s novella The Lifecycle of Software Objects as required reading in English 1103: Academic Research and Writing, a class in which the reading assignments differ significantly from those of her high school English courses. Although she had never read Chiang’s fiction before and wasn’t a fan of sci-fi, she notes, it “kept my attention and pulled me in, so I actually enjoyed it. It made me like that type of fiction.”
Bowry’s observations provide a first-person account of an undergraduate’s initial experience with Chiang’s fiction. Her recollections of high school English reveal that her classes focused on short works of nonfiction, mostly news articles. That emphasis reflects a shift in the secondary education English curriculum prompted by the release of the Common Core Standards in 2010, which stipulate that 70% of high school seniors’ reading should be nonfiction and only 30% should be literature.
Skylar Bowry is a freshman criminal justice major at High Point University, where she is enrolled in English 1103, section eight.
Sample Annotated Bibliography Entry–Magazine Profile
Rothman, Joshua. “Ted Chiang’s Soulful Science Fiction.” The New Yorker, 5 January 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/ted-chiangs-soulful-science-fiction#rid=ef4a73c9-f9bc-4cd3-a7ab-4c215f3113a8&q=ted+chiang%27s+soulful+science+fiction.
Joshua Rothman’s New Yorker profile of Ted Chiang combines his reflections on the author’s first collection, Stories of Your Life and Others (2002), and his novella, The Lifecycle of Software Objects (2010), which was published alone by Subterranean Press before it was included in the collection Exhalation: Stories (2019). To his observations on those works, Rothman adds excerpts from a series of interviews conducted with Chiang in late 2016 to coincide with the film release of Arrival, the adaptation of his story “The Story of Your Life.” Regarding The Lifecycle of Software Objects, Rothman notes Chiang’s assertion that the novella “grew . . . out of his intellectual skepticism about how artificial life is imagined in science fiction” (par. 10).
“Ted Chiang’s Soulful Science Fiction” offers Rothman’s insights into the quality of Chiang’s writing that sets him apart from his contemporaries. Rothman observes, “Chiang has been described as a writer of ‘humanist’ sci-fi; many readers feel that his stories are unusually moving and wonder, given their matter-of-fact tone, where their emotional power comes from” (par. 6). Rothman does not pinpoint the source of their emotional power, but the response he elicits from Chiang provides a sense of it: “‘[W]hat makes any human being a good, reliable worker? . . . . A hundred thousand hours of good parenting, of unpaid emotional labor. That’s the kind of investment on which the business world places no value; it’s an investment made by people who do it out of love’” (par. 10). The vital role of parenting at the heart of Chiang’s statement is also a key factor in both Sunyoung Ahn’s and Stina Attebery’s studies of his novella, and the humanism Rothberg notes is central to Ahn’s analysis.
Joshua Rothman is a staff writer for The New Yorker. He is the author of the magazine’s weekly column “Open Questions” and has taught at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
Bonus Assignment
The assignment that follows invites you to join the discussion forum conversation in Chapter Eight of Ted Chiang’s The Lifecycle of Software Objects (151-52), which I have reproduced verbatim in the comment section of today’s post. Since the forum is restricted to people who are caregivers or parents for the Neuroblast digients, your response should present the point of view of a person in that role.
Directions
- Reread the comments posted by Helen Costas, Maria Zheng, Derek Brooks, and Ana Alvarado.
- Compose a comment of one complete sentence or more that responds to one or more of the caregiver/parent comments previously posted. Address Helen, Maria, Derek, and/or Ana by first name.
- Keep in mind that since the forum is restricted to people who are caregivers or parents for the Neuroblast digients, the response should present the point of view of a person in that role. Also, be mindful that the adult nature of the subject matter does not warrant off-color or obscene language. Any comments deemed inappropriate will not be approved and the students who submitted them will not receive credit for the assignment
- Submit your comment: Click the title of the post, then scroll down to the bottom. There you will see the image of an airmail envelope with a box for your comment. Type your comment in the box and click Comment. Post your reply by 5:00 p.m. tomorrow, Friday, November 13. I will make the comments visible after the deadline.
If you are not comfortable joining the conversation, do not submit a comment. You will have at least one additional bonus assignment before the end of the semester.
Next Up
Wordplay Day! To prepare for class, revisit the Merriam-Webster Scrabble Word Finder page, and review your journal notes and the blog posts devoted to Scrabble tips.
From: Helen Costas
I don’t like the idea of anyone having sex with my digient, but then I remember that parents never want to think about their kids having sex either.
From: Maria Zheng
That’s a false analogy. Parents can’t stop their children from becoming sexual, but we can. There’s no intrinsic need for digients to emulate that aspect of human development. Don’t go overboard with the anthropomorphic projection.
From: Derek Brooks
What’s intrinsic? There was no need for digients to have charming personalities or cute avatars, but there was still a good reason for it: they made people more likely to spend time with them, and that was good for the digients.
I’m not saying we should accept Binary Desire’s offer. But I think what we should ask ourselves is, If we make the digients sexual, would that encourage other people to love them in a way that’s good for the digients?
From: Ana Alvarado
Derek raises a good question. But even if the answer is yes, that doesn’t mean that we should accept Binary Desire’s offer.
If a person is looking for a masturbatory fantasy, he can use ordinary software to get it. He shouldn’t buy a mail-order bride and slap a dozen InstantRapport patches on her, but that’s essentially what Binary Desire wants to give its customers. Is that the kind of life we want our digients to have? We could dose them with so much virtual endorphin that they’d be happy living in a closet in Data Earth, but we care about them too much to do that. I don’t think we should treat them with less respect.
I admit the idea of sex with a digient bothered me initially, but I guess I’m not opposed to the idea in principle. It’s not something I can imagine doing myself, but I don’t have a problem if other people want to, so long as it’s not exploitative. If there’s some degree of give-and-take, then maybe it could be like Derek said: good for the digients as well as the humans. But if the human is free to customize the digient’s reward map, or keep rolling it back until he finds a perfectly tweaked instantiation, then where’s the give-and-take? Binary Desire is telling its customers that they don’t have to accommodate their digients’ preferences in any way. It doesn’t matter whether it involves sex or not; that’s not a real relationship.