When a person makes a choice, they are only capable of experiencing the path they have chosen, but the path they have not chosen continues to exist, because they could also have taken that path and indeed may have, in some other reality. In it, time is described as a labyrinth, eternally branching off into other paths depending on the decisions made by a person. Of all his stories, it is “The Garden of Forking Paths” that has exerted the most influence on sci-fi. In particular, his views on time as embodied in stories like “The Garden of Forking Paths” and “The Secret Miracle” have found use in sci-fi, and to some degree in actual science as well. However, the interesting thing about Borges’ work is that, funnily enough, the concepts that are are the core of his work are more or less the same ones currently used in sci-fi and comics. “The Garden of Forking Paths” is one of the slightly easier ones to get around, but some of his other work can be a bit more complicated. They are easily consumed in the sense that they are all short stories, but the content itself can be difficult to swallow. I say “easily consumed,” though any reader of Borges knows his works are hardly that.

Even better, he – like Japanese author Akutagawa Ryunosuke, whose story “In a Grove” presents some similarties to “The Garden of Forking Paths” – never wrote a novel, and so the entirety of his fictional work is packaged in easily-consumed short stories.

As soon as I found out that there was a three-volume set of his writing out, the first thing I did was purchase the volume collating his fiction work – inasmuch as I think he’s a great essayist and a wonderful poet, it is Borges as fictionist that I love the most. It was through this story, in my Introduction to Fiction class, that I was introduced to the inimitable Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, and it was through this story that I was irrevocably hooked on his fiction. “The Garden of Forking Paths” is, in many ways, a watershed story for me.

The Map of Time by Félix J. Palma