“The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate”

The collection’s opening story takes place in a Baghdad and Cairo based on the settings of the One Thousand and One Nights stories. The cities themselves are less important than the religious, philosophical, and cultural setting that they impart, since these are directly linked to the story’s thematic concerns of fate, free will, truth, and justice. In Chiang’s story notes, he writes that much time-travel storytelling focuses on either changing events or on the tragedy of being unable to do so. When he decided he wanted to write a fixed-future time-travel story, he chose this setting “because acceptance of fate is one of the basic articles of faith in Islam” (342). In this cultural setting, the characters are not burdened by the assumption that acceptance is always passive or lazy. Instead, within the acceptance of fate there are many different...