Sean asks why I chose seventy-two as the number of letters that would animate an automaton. I borrowed elements from various Jewish myths in writing that story, and it's sometimes stated in Judaism that God's name has seventy-two letters.
As Amanda mentions, there's a famous Jewish myth about a clay statue brought to life through a magic ritual. In one version of the story, this is done by writing the Hebrew word for "truth" on the statue's head. In another version, it's done by writing the secret name of God on a piece of paper and inserting it into the statue. In Judaism, God has many names, ranging in length from four letters (the Tetragrammaton) to 216. I chosen the 72-lettered one because it seemed like a good length for the imaginary science of nomenclature that I invented for my story. Seventy-two letters is enough for 10
96 different combinations of letters, which is a quadrillion times as many as the number of subatomic particles in the universe. That would be enough for contain names for any imaginable kind of automaton, while still making it a difficult task to find one.
Meredith and Liz ask about the language of the heptapods. I talked a bit about this in
this interview. Part of my motivation was a desire to have a language that was really
alien. Personally, I'm a little tired of alien languages that can be written using our alphabet and punctuation. No one is sure if dolphins and whales are really talking, but if they are, the sounds they're using certainly can't be represented with our alphabet. I don't see why it'd be any easier with any alien species we encounter.
Graham asks about good and evil in "Understand." I don't see the narrator of the story as being evil; he doesn't intend anyone harm. I think the worst that can be said about him is that he's self-absorbed. It's just that, given his abilities, self absorption looks like a greater failing than self absoprtion does in ordinary people. Most people pursue their own self interests, but usually this isn't a problem because it's in their interest to cooperate with others; the narrator doesn't happen to be in that situation. It's also debatable whether Reynolds, his opponent, really is good. His plan is to essentially become a benevolent tyrant, and some people wouldn't like that idea, no matter how smart he is.
Katie asks about discrimination based on body type in "Liking What You See". This is similar to the question of racial discrimination. I don't think it's plausible that a specific neural circuit controls our ability to recognize a person's weight or skin color, so to make us truly blind to those characteristics, you'd need a very severe neural deficit, one that would interfere with our ability to function normally. As a character says in the story, calliagnosia by itself wouldn't eliminate all forms of appearance-based discrimination; it would just be a useful tool in creating a culture that doesn't value appearances.
