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Disenchantment. "Jack’s delight with his impossible pet is struck down by a neighborhood boy who asks incredulously, “Your Mom makes toys for you from trash?” Although alive the magic tiger may be, its spell on Jack is broken" (Bhaduri).

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In the preface to The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, Ken Liu writes, "Every act of communication is a miracle of translation." After a dazzling description of how neural impulses flow from his brain-mid-thought-to his fingers, and then how a reader's eyes and brain perceive and process what he's just written, Liu continues:

Who can say if the thoughts you have in your mind as you read these words are the same thoughts I had in my mind as I typed them? ... And yet, whatever has been lost in translation in the long journey of my thoughts through the maze of civilization in your mind, I think you do understand me, and you think you do understand me. Our minds managed to touch, if but briefly and imperfectly.

The theme of translation pulses through every story in the collection, which spans science fiction, magical realism, and what Liu has coined "silkpunk," a science fiction-fantasy hybrid inspired by East Asian antiquity. The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories is a rare combination of lavish prose, characters in fascinating, unique situations, and heart-wrenching moments.

Ken Liu was born in Lanzhou, China and immigrated to the United States at the age of 11. This double citizenship seems to have given him the intercultural perspective to play both outsider and insider in his fiction, and to explore circumstances in which people with divergent perspectives clash.

Having translated Chinese science fiction and other literature into English, most notably Cixin Liu's The Three-Body Problem trilogy, Ken Liu is well acquainted with the risk of the intended morphing into the unintended. But humankind doesn't just take this risk when translating words into another language. As Liu's stories show, the actions we take for loved ones can easily morph into something unintended when they're separated from us by the rift of a cultural divide.

In the title story, "The Paper Menagerie"-a work for which Liu won no less than a Hugo, a Nebula, and a World Fantasy Award-Liu shifts between the thoughts of a biracial American boy named Jack, who can't look at his Chinese mother without remembering that his American father purchased her from a catalog, and Jack's mother, who can't find the English words to tell her son how she feels. So she creates a new playmate for Jack: an origami tiger that she brings to life with her breath.

The skin of the tiger was the pattern of the wrapping paper, white background with red candy canes and green Christmas trees.

I reached out to Mom's creation. Its tail twitched, and it pounced playfully at my finger. "Rawrr-sa," it growled, the sound somewhere between a cat and rustling newspapers.

Jack's delight with his impossible pet is struck down by a neighborhood boy who asks incredulously, "Your Mom makes toys for you from trash?" Although alive the magic tiger may be, its spell on Jack is broken. To him, the paper tiger is as inadequate and embarrassing as his mother's English.

Other stories in the collection explore the translation of biological beings into virtual selves, blurring the line between reality and unreality. In "The Simulacrum," a girl discovers her father in bed with three virtual lovers-"simulacra"-created by a camera that uses an approximation of its subject's personality to animate the simulacrum. Though the father destroys his virtual lovers to try and win his daughter back, they become estranged. He avoids the pain by creating a simulacrum of his daughter, back from the days when she was too young to realize his flaws. The daughter correctly observes, "The desire to freeze reality is about avoiding reality."

Some of Liu's stories critique humanity's increasing dependence on machines. In "The Perfect Match" and "The Regular," Liu portrays humankind's dysfunctional relationship with technology in dystopic futures, the results of calamitous advancements in data mining and bionics, respectively.

In "The Perfect Match," a paralegal is dependent on "Tilly," a program on his smartphone like Siri that everyone in his city is helpless without. Tilly is the perfect assistant, digitally fetching forms and taking notes. She even sets the paralegal up on a blind date with a woman with a high "compatibility index," suggesting the restaurant where they should meet and the topics they could discuss. When the paralegal finds the dinner too predictable, he shocks his date by doing the unthinkable: turning Tilly off. His date is so afraid to make decisions without Tilly's guidance that she rejects him.

In "The Regular," private investigator Ruth tracks down a serial killer who preys upon sex workers with cameras implanted in their eyeballs. Ruth is an ex-cop with a biochemical regulator on her spine that keeps her stress hormones in check when she needs to be calm in life-or-death situations. But some officers believe the regulator dampens the instincts cops rely on to interpret potential threats. Ruth discovers that no implant can save her from grief, or from making the ultimate decision when facing a murderer.

No matter where Liu's stories fall on the ever-shifting continents of genre, his imagination and human insight always make for a gripping, mind-blowing, eye-opening glimpse at past and future worlds, both fascinating and terrifying.

FICTION - SHORT STORIES, SCIENCE FICTION, FANTASY
The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu
Saga Press
Published March 8, 2016
ISBN 9781481442541

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Magic Tigers and the Miracle of Translation in Ken Liu's The Paper Menagerie

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The theme of translation pulses through every story in the collection, which spans science fiction, magical realism, and what Liu has coined "silkpunk," a science fiction-fantasy hybrid inspired by East Asian antiquity. The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories is a rare combination of lavish prose, characters in fascinating, unique situations, and heart-wrenching moments.

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"In folklore, supernatural hybrids and shapeshifters are often considered monstrous. Are Mother and Daughter monsters? Deities? Both?" (Pillsworth)

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Welcome back to the Lovecraft reread, in which two modern Mythos writers get girl cooties all over old Howard's sandbox, from those who inspired him to those who were inspired in turn.

This week, we're reading Jamaica Kincaid's "My Mother," first published in her 1978 collection, At the Bottom of the River. (You can also find it in The Weird.) Spoilers ahead.

Unnamed narrator (Daughter) wishes her Mother dead and immediately after, seeing Mother's pain, regrets it. Daughter begs for forgiveness, weeping so copiously her tears drench the earth. Mother takes pity, clasping Daughter's head so close to her bosom that Daughter suffocates. For an uncountable time, she lies there breathless. When Mother lets her breathe again, Daughter instantly grows bosoms of her own, with a soft place between that can serve as her own comfort-zone. She dams her earlier tears into a thick, black, poisonous pond in which only "unnameable invertebrates" live. She and Mother watch each other carefully across the pond and shower each other only with words and deeds of affection.

Daughter and Mother sit on Mother's bed in a room with boarded-up windows. Mother lights candles, and their shadows loom over them, with a space between as if to make room for someone else. The shadows grow thick or thin, long or short, fall at every angle, as if controlled by daylight. Mother's shadow dances while Daughter's shadow sings. When Mother blows out the candles, Daughter remains on the bed, trying to get a good look at herself.

Mother slathers her skin with a gold-colored oil rendered from the livers of pouch-throated reptiles. Her back grows plates of scales that scatter light; her teeth rearrange themselves into rows that reach back to her long white throat. She sheds her hair and flattens her head so her eyes sit on top, two revolving balls. She divides her feet into "crossroads." At Mother's silent instruction, Daughter follows her example. Now she too travels on a white underbelly, tongue darting and flickering. "Look," Mother says.

Daughter stands by Mother on the seabed, head securely nestled on Mother's shoulder. She sighs occasionally, wanting Mother to believe her frail, but in fact she feels invincible, no longer a child, not yet a woman. Daughter has just shed blackened skin to reveal her new impregnable carapace. Mother and she wordlessly make an arrangement: Daughter will sigh, and Mother will receive her sighs. A long time passes. Daughter hopes Mother will be permanently cemented to the seabed. When Mother reaches out, Daughter steps aside and roars, then gives a self-pitying whine, for she realizes that as big as she's grown, Mother will always be bigger. They go to the Garden of Fruits and eat, then depart leaving in their trail (as ever) small worm colonies.

Unwillingly, Daughter crosses the valley with Mother. She sees a grazing lamb who gives them a "cross and miserable" look. Daughter would be cross and miserable, too, she tells Mother, if she had to live in a climate unsuited to her nature. They enter a dark, cold cave. For years, Daughter eats whatever grows under her feet and grows a lens for seeing in darkness, a coat for warmth. Mother one day jokes that Daughter looks as cross and miserable as if she lived in an unsuitable climate. Daughter builds a house without a floor over a deep hole, decorating it to please Mother. She invites Mother to inspect it, standing outside waiting to hear Mother fall into the hole. But Mother walks on the floorless air, reemerging to say the house is excellent. She vanishes. Daughter fills in the hole and burns down the house.

Mother and Daughter have grown enormously tall, but Mother is three times taller than Daughter. Daughter watches Mother reach far out to sea to caress a striped fish, and glows red with anger. Daughter lives alone on an island with eight full moons. She adorns their faces with Mother's favoring expressions. Eventually she returns to Mother. They live on opposite sides of the black, poisonous pond inhabited by small invertebrates with poisonous lances. Mother treats the invertebrates like relatives they've risen above, while Daughter names and cherishes them. Every day she cries, lonely for Mother's company, but whenever Mother returns home, "incredible and great deeds in her wake," Daughter's anger glows red. Worn out at last, Daughter sinks into the only dreamless sleep of her life.

One day, after many parting caresses, Mother sends Daughter off on a boat. Daughter sobs to see Mother's back turned. She plans to escape from the boat, then realizes it's encased in a green bottle, as if for mantelpiece display. She sleeps until she reaches a new island. There she sees a woman with feet exactly like her own; she recognizes Mother even with a new face. After a period of polite caution, Mother and Daughter walk, and their steps become as one. They talk, and their voices become one voice. They are in complete union. Daughter feels great peace, unable to tell where each leaves off and the other begins.

They walk through Mother's house, where every floor crack holds a significant event, like the crippling accident of a girl who defied her father for a lover. Mother and Daughter find the house beautiful and pass through empty rooms waiting for people and things to fill them. Daughter fits perfectly into Mother. They eat from the same bowl, drink from the same cup, sleep on the same pillow. Walking through the rooms, they merge and separate, over and over; soon they'll enter the final stage of their evolution.

Fishermen come in from the sea with the bountiful catches Mother has provided. Their contentment is a source of Daughter's contentment. She sits in Mother's enormous lap, or on a mat woven of Mother's hair, a hummingbird nesting on her stomach as a sign of fertility. Mother and Daughter live in a bower of imperishable flowers. The sea is silver-blue crisscrossed with darts of light. Warm rain falls on the castor bushes, and a lamb bounds over the pasture. Soft ground welcomes Daughter's feet. This is the way she and Mother have lived for a long time now.

What's Cyclopean: There are unnamable invertebrates in the black, poisonous water.

The Degenerate Dutch: Kincaid's story focuses on much more intimate conflicts than those between groups of humans.

Mythos Making: There's something mythosian in the strange, squamous and slimy animals twining through the sections: the above-mentioned invertebrates, pouch-throated reptiles (whose livers can be rendered for transformative oil), the small colonies of worms trailing in mother and daughter's wake. Not to mention the transformations themselves, to reptile and carapaced monster with rows of teeth...

Libronomicon: No books this week.

Madness Takes Its Toll: More anger than madness this week, eyes glowing red.
Anne's Commentary
You could argue that it's impossible to summarize any literary work so thoroughly as to replace the work itself-reading the Moby-Dick "study guide" doesn't substitute for nibbling at the White Whale himself until you've ingested every morsel from his ivory dome to his ebony flukes. The devilish cetacean is in his details and the details of the fictional world that surrounds him. You could simultaneously argue that the more words in a piece the easier it is to produce a useful summary. By "useful" I mean, a precis that captures the essence of the original while remaining much more concise. General observation: The more words, the less each word needs to matter. Conversely, the fewer words, the more each word needs to matter.

Or I could base my Summary Usefulness (and/or Difficulty) Scale not on word count but on how strongly narrative a piece is, as opposed to how strongly evocative or lyrical. Novels and stories, broadly speaking, are narrative forms. Poems, broadly speaking, are evocative or lyrical forms. However, fiction can be lyrical as hell and poetry downright narrative. Wait, that's my point, isn't it? If it were a Gaboon viper, it would have sunk its fangs in my ankle to the bone. Because I'm wearing flip-flops in the deep jungle, not snake gaiters. My duh. I still love you, Gaboon viper.

I don't think Kincaid's mother transforms into a Gaboon viper-at least not in the text of the story, though I wouldn't put it beyond her morphological fluidity. Actually, I'm not sure I would put anything beyond her fluidity. It takes nine sections-or, say, stanzas-for Kincaid to begin to showcase Mother's adaptability, blending not-necessarily-linear narrative with the lyrical and evocative punch of poetry.

I managed to make the summary of "My Mother" about half as long as the story. That's pretty long for a short take, but to do the imagery and rhythms of "Mother" absolute justice, I'd have to quote its entirety, which would defeat the purpose of summary, and copyright. Read the thing itself, not my prosaic prose version.

I'm not going to geek out zoologically by guessing the animals into which Mother and Daughter evolve. Okay, one guess, that the transformation brought about by pouch-throated reptile oil is-to a chameleon! Chameleons have pouchy-throats and revolving turret eyes and wide toothy grins (well, supercilious frowns.) White throats and bellies, not so much, but darting tongues? The dartiest! Crossroads-feet? Well, their toes have fused into two-digited mittens. Or they could be iguanas? Anoles? Crocodilians even? Alternatively, they could be like Voldemort's Nagini, a magic-bred hybrid combining the coolest traits of several species.

In folklore, supernatural hybrids and shapeshifters are often considered monstrous. Are Mother and Daughter monsters? Deities? Both? Mother's the more goddess-like, ever the greater in dimensions and deeds, ever self-possessed, at turns bountiful and comforting, demanding and domineering, but on the whole a benevolent creator. Daughter can be all sorts of monstrous. She's a monster of spite, wishing Mother dead to her face. Her tears of "regret" form a poisonous black pond hosting invertebrates horrible enough to earn a favorite Lovecraftian adjective: " unnamable." Mother loftily ignores the beasties; Daughter cherishes them.

Speaking of beasties, and ambiguity, what are these worms both characters leave in their wakes, soil-enriching earthworms or destructive parasites?

Daughter wishes Mother immobilized, cemented to the seabed. When that doesn't happen, she tries to murder Mother by precipitating her into a deep, deep hole. So sneakily, too, by luring her into what looks like Mother's dream-house. Daughter is a monster of envy, burning red at Mother's marvelous accomplishments and the adulation they earn. I mean, Mother can't even pet a fish without Daughter resenting her oceanic reach. And Daughter's a monster of self-pity, constantly bursting into tears, sighs and whines.

Yet-Mother can be so smothering, literally. So touchy-feely. So bossy, making Daughter copy her transformations, sojourn long in inhospitable caves, voyage in a boat in a bottle, talk about confining. She laughs at Daughter's complaints and aggressions, yet has so captivated Daughter emotionally that when Daughter escapes to her own island, she adorns her eight moons with Mother's approving expressions.

You know, the usual mother-daughter issues. How are we to interpret the final stage of their shared evolution? At last Daughter and Mother merge, become indistinguishable, which leads to a paradise of abundant fish, muslin skirts, perfectly-acclimated lambs, undying flowers, and warm rain. Mother also has a house full of significant stories.

How significant is it that one of the stories is about a young man's premature death? That another tells of a girl permanently crippled after defying her parent? That the warm rain of paradise falls on castor bushes? The castor plant is the source of ricin, one of the deadliest botanical toxins.

Pretty flowers, though.
Ruthanna's Commentary
At last year's Necronomicon, we kept circling the question of Defining the Weird. Many definitions fell somewhere on the spectrum between two opposing claims. At one end, weird fiction is a subgenre of speculative fiction, that, like many other subgenres, is recognizable by a standard set of tropes. If it has starships, it's space opera; if it has dragons, it's fantasy; if it has tentacles, it's Weird. At the other end of the spectrum, weird fiction cannot depend on familiar tropes because the familiar is, by definition, no longer weird. Instead, one must chase the ever-moving bar of whatever's necessary to achieve a certain effect: disorient the reader, break expectations, and question the cognitive status quo.

For purposes of the Reread, I'm ecumenical about definitions-if someone might call it Weird, I'm happy to cover it here, and I'm open to edge cases because they're fun to talk about. We're mapping a large, Dreamland-ish territory, fuzzy boundaries and all. But I have to confess that while I love Cthulhian comfort reads, philosophically I'm drawn to the far end of the spectrum. It's a compelling argument: Lovecraft put his stamp on the weird precisely because his stuff was different. When we covered " Call of Cthulhu" (lo these many years ago, holy crap this is our 6th birthday), we talked about how startling the story would have been if its contents weren't now endlessly quoted and plushified. But in the years since, the world has raised the bar on strangeness and alienation, and so should writers.

"My Mother" proves that less familiar stuff from a few years back (1978, in this case) can still startle and discombobulate even the jaded modern reader. Or, at least, me. For a start, it took me a while to figure out what reading protocols I should be using. How should I fill the gaps in what's said? What sort of implications are reasonable to follow in this world-oh, wait, no, what about this world, and this other one? Eventually I settled on something like Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, a set of prose portraits/poems with continuity of theme but not setting or plot, with some images echoing or repeating throughout. (Where Anne went with full-on poetic reading protocols, but caught a plot through-line of mother-daughter "evolution.")

"My Mother" centers on fraught mother-daughter relationships, a litfic theme turned fractally fantastic. Here are mothers who can stop your breath with embraces but then push you away as you grow to self-aware womanhood, mothers who teach transformations whose power you must hide, benevolent god-mothers, god-mothers who constrain your power just by existing and must be trapped or destroyed like titans. Mythic mothers.

I've noted often that Lovecraft's solo stories are extremely short on actual women. For the most part they're either off-stage, or else secretly not-women. Or-it occurs to me now-they're goddesses. All Lovecraft's deities are terrible, but his goddesses are terrible mothers. Most obviously there's the Goat With a Thousand Young, personification of the fear that Them Over There might outbreed Us Over Here. Yig's a mother too, as is Hydra. But like all Lovecraft's gods, they're meant as Scary Things Worshipped By Other People, so none of them are particularly scary in how they mother, because the intended reader would never identify as one of their children.

Kincaid's mother-goddess-monsters, though, are possessive and possessed. It's a different sort of alienation-one of recognizable relationships rather than Scary Things Other People Do. I don't have a particularly fraught relationship with my own mother, but I've had relationships that alternated suffocating intimacy with sudden rejection, mentorship with competition, too much honesty with things you could never say. And seeing that turned up to 11, transformed into monstrous metaphor, is indeed both impressive and disorienting.

Next week, we cope with the ongoing heat wave by diving into Alyssa Wong's "What My Mother Left Me." You can find it in Ellen Datlow's The Devil and the Deep: Horror Stories of the Sea.

Ruthanna Emrys is the author of the Innsmouth Legacy series, including Winter Tide and . Her short story collection, Imperfect Commentaries, is now available from Lethe Press. You can find some of her fiction, neo-Lovecraftian and otherwise, on Tor.com, most recently "The Word of Flesh and Soul." Ruthanna is online on Twitter and Patreon, and offline in a mysterious manor house with her large, chaotic household-mostly mammalian-outside Washington DC.

Anne M. Pillsworth's short story " The Madonna of the Abattoir" appears on Tor.com. Her young adult Mythos novel, , is available from Tor Teen along with sequel Fathomless. She lives in Edgewood, a Victorian trolley car suburb of Providence, Rhode Island, uncomfortably near Joseph Curwen's underground laboratory.

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Learning to Be Reptilian: Jamaica Kincaid's "My Mother"

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Welcome back to the Lovecraft reread, in which two modern Mythos writers get girl cooties all over old Howard's sandbox, from those who inspired him to those who were inspired in turn. This week, we're reading Jamaica Kincaid's "My Mother," first published in her 1978 collection, At the Bottom of the River.

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You are enrolled in a class with the highest of stakes. The payoff for success is your existence. Or so it seems. This is a classroom conjured up, along with you and all its other pupils, in the imagination of the man in the circular ruins. Like many of Jorge Luis Borges's short stories, "The Circular Ruins" explores the boundary between imagination and reality. How much of what we perceive as reality is the product of imagination? And what kind of reality do the objects of our imagination have? What is the nature of the boundary between imagination and reality?

The man in the circular ruins is preoccupied with one great task: "He wanted to dream a man; he wanted to dream him in minute entirety and impose him on reality." What an audacious task! There would seem to be an immense ontological gulf between these two categories. Reality is the realm where things exist independent of our imagination. Objects in the real world actually have mass and extension in space. The tree falls in the forest whether anyone is there to hear it or not. But imagination is a realm fully dependent on the mind. Our dreams don't actually exist. How can these dreams possibly pass from the imagination into reality?

But maybe the divide isn't as sharp as it seems. The tree falling in the forest is the classic, overused and parodied example of the dependence of certain phenomena on a perceiving subject. Does it make a sound without anyone there to hear it? There are vibrations in the surrounding air but these noumena would not become the phenomena of sound to any person because sound is an experience, a quale of a conscious subject. What we perceive as the real world is composed of such qualia and that's our only way of perceiving it. In other words we only experience reality through our imagination.

From the other side, artifacts like tools, art, music, and literature begin as dreams in the imagination. Through a creative process we give these objects physical form in the real world. A sculpture takes form in stone, a musical composition takes form in thermal energy, a painting takes form in the arrangement of pigments on a canvas. Even then these physical objects require the imagination of the perceiving subject to be understood as more than just objects occupying space, to be perceived as art and artifacts. The dreams of imagination and objects of the physical world overlap.

An eccentric but intriguing idea thrown around among the cognoscenti these days is the possibility that our universe is actually a simulation created by intelligent life in some "higher" universe. What would that make us? Does that mean we don't live in the "real" world? Borges explores a similar concern in "The Circular Ruins" but in a less technological guise. His version of a simulation is the dream. If you are a subject in someone else's dream what kind of existence do you really have? One way to collapse the problem is to say that to be the kind of being who can even ask such a question, to be anxious about the nature of your own existence, is to exist in the most significant sense already. Once you are a self-aware entity who can worry about your own existence you simply do exist, in the most meaningful sense. What more could be added to that to make your existence real?

This Borgesian idealism is explored in many of his other works, most explicitly in "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", in which Borges refers to the idealist thought of George Berkeley. A classic problem of modern philosophy is what could be called either the hard problem of consciousness or the hard problem of matter, depending on how you approach it. How does our seemingly non-physical consciousness interact with the physical world? The more popular route is to reduce or eliminate consciousness to the material so that there is no more troublesome dualism. The seemingly non-physical aspects of consciousness are illusory, epiphenomena, useful fictions, etc. Another route, taken up be Berkeley is to dispense with the notion of matter instead, to see mind as primary and view matter as the useful fiction. In "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" Borges imagines a world in which people take Berkeley's idea seriously, in a kind of reductio ad absurdum, to the point that they speak in a language lacking nouns.

Among the entities in the dreams of the man in the circular ruins there seems to be a spectrum of autonomy. Some of his dreamed up entities do no more than parrot his instruction while others challenge him and demonstrate capacity for independent thought. He sees this as a key criterion for assessing their worthiness to be instantiated in reality. "He could expect nothing from those pupils who accepted his doctrine passively, but that he could expect something from those who occasionally dared to oppose him." Borges makes the intriguing statement that the more autonomous of his dreamed entities " preexistían "; they "pre-existed to a slightly greater degree". In other words the self-aware ideas in this idealism have some kind of independent existence that the man in the circular ruins apprehends in his imagination. The more autonomous of his dreams are not fully his own creation but existed in some ideal form prior to his dreaming of them.

Where did these ideas come from before he imagined them? One answer available in Borges's universe is that they existed in "The Library of Babel", another of Borges's short stories and probably his most famous. One way to think of the Library of Babel is as a reified, physical instantiation of platonic forms as texts in a library. The library is filled with books of every possible combination of characters. In Borges's library the books are limited to a certain set and number of characters. But it's possible to throw out that constraint and imagine a library of infinite possibility where every possible combination of characters is produced in some book somewhere in the library. This would mean that anything you could possibly dream would simply be a reflection of some book somewhere in the Library of Babel. Everything pre-exists there. But crucially, most of the books are absolute nonsense. Hidden among the nonsense there are books with intelligible, meaningful text. But the share of meaningful text in the Library of Babel is infinitesimal.

The autonomous entities dreamed up by the man in the circular ruins, who are able to oppose him, would seem to have a special kind of character that enables them to act independently. They are among the infinite number though infinitesimal portion of books in the Library of Babel with sufficient complexity and coherent structure to endow them with consciousness and self-awareness. What then does it take to impose these entities onto reality? If they pre-existed and already have some kind of independent capacity for thought and anxiety over their own existence what more could be added to make them real? What is it that breathes fire into them to make them living souls?

Steven Hawking asked a similar question of the mathematical structure of the universe. "What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a Universe for them to describe?" Max Tegmark posits something analogous to the Library of Babel in abstract space, an infinite library of "mathematical structures" of every possible form, one of which is our own universe. What breathes fire into a mathematical structure and endows it with physical existence are "self-aware substructures" inside the mathematical structure that perceive elements of the structure as physical reality. In other words, the presence of self-aware entities creates what they perceive as physical reality. Nothing more is required than this condition of self-awareness.

The man in the circular ruins labors countless hours to dream a man in the most minute detail. To endow this man with physical existence he must make special supplication to the deities of the ruins. But what is it that the deities can do to make the man more real than he already is? There seems to be one crucial step. Before supplicating the deities "He dreamed an entire man - a young man, but who did not sit up or talk, who was unable to open his eyes. Night after night, the man dreamt him asleep." After he makes his request to the deities "In the dream of the man that dreamed, the dreamed one awoke." This awakening is the crucial step. There's no clothing in earth or matter. It's simply the awakening of self-awareness. At that point the dreamed one is imposed on reality.

The deities eventually require that the dreamed one be sent off to another temple to repeat the same task as the man in the circular ruins, to create a man of his own. But the man worries that the dreamed one will discover that he is a dream. To all other men the dreamed one appears as a man like any other. Only fire knows his true nature and only fire can reveal it: fire will not consume him. The story concludes when fires approach the circular ruins and the man, having completed his life's work, submits himself to the flames but then discovers that they do not consume him and that he is himself someone else's dream. What does this mean for his existence? Is he any less real because someone else is dreaming him? What if the one who is dreaming him is also someone else's dream and so on, as Borges implies?

What seems crucial in this story is that the capacity for imagination is its own reality. To be the kind of thing that can imagine and be self-aware is already to exist and nothing more is required to breathe life into it. Speculations about our universe as a simulation include the idea that we are several layers below "base reality". That our simulators are part of a simulation whose simulators are also part of a simulation and so on up to base reality. But what would distinguish this base reality from any other simulated reality? In what sense would entities in that base reality exist that we do not? What is it that makes their physical reality more real than ours? Certainly there would be a difference of some kind but it wouldn't seem to be a difference in the nature of our self-awareness. That would seem to be the same in all levels of reality.

It may just be that we are the dreamers, dreaming ourselves into existence. If the idea of the conscious self is a useful fiction it is certainly quite useful indeed. Perceptions are undoubtedly occurring and it's much easier for these perceptions to have some single, stable reference point to give them continuous and coherent structure.

The problem of course is that this is viciously circular. How can an entity dream itself into existence as unified prior to its unification? Some form of pre-existence seems to be necessary, on some kind of stable substrate from the outside. If the universe is a simulation the information content of our self-aware substructures subsists in this simulation. In traditional Christianity, supplemented by Neoplatonic thought, we subsist as ideas in the mind of God. And in Borges's universe these same ideas subsist as books on the shelves of the Library of Babel. In the end the differences between these metaphors are perhaps less significant than their similarities. Among the books stacked in the shelves of the Library of Babel some infinitesimal but infinite number will have the complexity and coherence to dream and dream of themselves as living souls.

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Imagination and Reality in Borges's "The Circular Ruins"

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You are enrolled in a class with the highest of stakes. The payoff for success is your existence. Or so it seems. This is a classroom conjured up, along with you and all its other pupils, in the imagination of the man in the circular ruins.