The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate - Ted Chiang

Highlights/notes in:

Summary

A merchant from Baghdad recounts his story to the caliph.
He tells of an amazing door. One where, if you walk from right to left, you walk forward 20 years, and 20 years backwards in the other direction.
He tells us of 2 tales (before his own):
- The first, of Hassan, a man who ends up with great riches from his travel to the future
- The second, of Ajib, a man who steals from his future self, uses the money lavishly, and then ends up repenting due to his wife getting kidnapped and he decides to save the rest of his life
What purpose this story serve?
- A fable for the importance of being a good person: not looking at the future or the past with greed, but rather with curiosity and prudence.
- As a logically consistent time travel tale.

This was a great take on time travel. Instead of the usual, very logically inconsistent notion of traveling back in time actually changing the present, this finally presents it in a (seemingly) logically consistent manner.
- Asks the question of: if time travel were to actually exist, how would it actually work? Rather th
  - In this way, I'm impressed with how interesting of a story he can come up with, even when explicitly working with a notion of time travel where nothing can change. And on the surface it seems you can't have an "and nothing was ever the same" type ending. But you can! It just comes in what the present person learns.
  - Also, you can still have suspense by release of information.
The story is very thought provoking, giving me ample opportunities to try and figure things out myself (give the readers the pleasure of figuring things out themselves)
Makes things highly complex and oftentimes surprising, yet simple enough to understand:
- I especially liked how he let Rania (Hassan's wife) also get involved, without Hassan's knowledge!

“like the holes that worms bore into wood”

What is done well, technically:
- One observation is that the characters really aren't that deep. Upon further inspection, none of the characters seem real. And yet, that's okay. Because here, the point of the characters isn't to be human. It's to fulfill a particular role in conveying a particular moral.

Maybe it was a little too predictable, that the Caliph was going to be from when he visits his past

The main sort of inconsistency that this story has yet to explain is out of all the consistent futures, which one is chosen?
- After all, death is always a consistent future.
- [?] How can this be remedied?
I would have liked to see Bashaarat play more of a role! In the story as is, he plays the role of just a wise messenger. But I feel as if there was opportunity here to do something really cool with his story line:
- After all, he created the wormhole. He's a crazy smart man! What

Why was this set in the Arab world?
- Effects:
  - Gives a religious/mystical vibe to it all. (After all, that's how we've always explained away things that science isn't yet ready for. In this case)
  - Has some reasons for the plot:
    - E.g. why Ajib didn't go to the police when his wife was kidnapped

For my idea of what if every day you can live 3 different lives and then choose which one to continue: the paradox that arises from playing a game is resolved by never letting the game happen
- Or... by having it be so that for one of the players, they won't choose the move that wins them the game, because in the same day after they win the game, they end up dying a horrific death or something else bad happens.