1. Plot

2. Background

3. Reception

4. Awards

5. Publication history

6. References

7. Works cited

8. External links

"Story of Your Life" is a science fiction novella by American writer Ted Chiang, first published in Starlight 2 in 1998, and in 2002 in Chiang's collection of short stories, Stories of Your Life and Others. Its major themes are language and determinism.

"Story of Your Life" won the 2000 Nebula Award for Best Novella, as well as the 1999 Theodore Sturgeon Award. It was nominated for the 1999 Hugo Award for Best Novella. The novella has been translated into Italian, French and German.^[1]

A film adaptation of the story by Eric Heisserer, titled Arrival and directed by Denis Villeneuve, was released in 2016. It stars Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, and Forest Whitaker and was nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture; it won the award for Best Sound Editing.^[1][2][3] The film also won the 2017 Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation and the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation.^[4][5]

Plot

"Story of Your Life" is narrated by linguist Dr. Louise Banks the day her daughter is conceived. Addressed to her daughter, the story alternates between recounting the past: the coming of the aliens and the deciphering of their language; and remembering the future: what will happen to her unborn daughter as she grows up, and the daughter's untimely death.

The aliens arrived in spaceships and entered Earth's orbit. 112 devices resembling large semi-circular mirrors appeared at sites across the globe. Dubbed "looking glasses", they were audiovisual links to the aliens in orbit, who were called heptapods for their seven-limbed radially symmetrical appearance. Louise and physicist Dr. Gary Donnelly were recruited by the U.S. Army to communicate with the aliens, and were assigned to one of nine looking glass sites in the US. They made contact with two heptapods they nicknamed Flapper and Raspberry. In an attempt to learn their language, Louise began by associating objects and gestures with sounds the aliens made, which revealed a language with free word order and many levels of center-embedded clauses. She found their writing to be chains of semagrams on a two-dimensional surface in no linear sequence, and semasiographic, having no reference to speech. Louise concluded that, because their speech and writing are unrelated, the heptapods have two languages, which she called Heptapod A (speech) and Heptapod B (writing).

Attempts were also made to establish heptapod terminology in physics. Little progress was made, until a presentation of Fermat's Principle of Least Time was given. Gary explained the principle to Louise, giving the example of the refraction of light, and that light will always take the fastest possible route. Louise reasoned, "[a] ray of light has to know where it will ultimately end up before it can choose the direction to begin moving in."{{sfn|Chiang|2015a|p=101}} She knew the heptapods did not write a sentence one semagram at a time, but drew all the ideograms simultaneously, suggesting they knew what the entire sentence would be beforehand. Louise realized that instead of experiencing events sequentially (causality), heptapods experience all events at once (teleology). This reflected in their language, and explained why Fermat's principle came naturally to them.

Soon, Louise became quite proficient at Heptapod B, and found that when writing in it, trains of thought were directionless, and premises and conclusions interchangeable. She found herself starting to think in Heptapod B and began to see time as heptapods do. Louise saw glimpses of her future and of a daughter she did not yet have. This raised questions about the nature of free will: knowledge of the future would imply no free will, because knowing the future means it cannot be changed. But Louise asked herself, "What if the experience of knowing the future changed a person? What if it evoked a sense of urgency, a sense of obligation to act precisely as she knew she would?"{{sfn|Chiang|2015a|p=106}}

One day, after an information exchange with the heptapods, the aliens announced they were leaving. They shut down the looking glasses and their ships disappeared. It was never established why they left, or why they had come in the first place. The heptapod languages changed Louise's life, and once she knew the future, she never acted contrary to that future. Gary and Louise start spending time together and eventually marry. When Gary asks Louise if she wants a baby, she agrees, knowing that they will divorce, and their daughter will die young.

Background

In the "Story Notes" section of Stories of Your Life and Others, Chiang wrote that inspiration for "Story of Your Life" came from his fascination in the variational principle in physics. When he saw American actor Paul Linke's performance in his play Time Flies When You’re Alive, about his wife's struggle with breast cancer, Chiang realized he could use this principle to show how someone deals with the inevitable.{{sfn|Chiang|2015b|p=223}} Regarding the theme of the story, Chiang said that Kurt Vonnegut summed it up in his introduction in the 25th anniversary edition of his novel Slaughterhouse-Five:

Stephen Hawking ... found it tantalizing that we could not remember the future. But remembering the future is child's play for me now. I know what will become of my helpless, trusting babies because they are grown-ups now. I know how my closest friends will end up because so many of them are retired or dead now ... To Stephen Hawking and all others younger than myself I say, "Be patient. Your future will come to you and lie down at your feet like a dog who knows and likes you no matter what you are."{{sfn|Chiang|2015b|p=223}}

In a 2010 interview Chiang said that "Story of Your Life" addresses the subject of free will. The philosophical debates about whether or not we have free will are all abstract, but knowing the future makes the question very real. Chiang added, "If you know what's going to happen, can you keep it from happening? Even when a story says that you can't, the emotional impact arises from the feeling that you should be able to."^[6]

Chiang spent five years researching and familiarizing himself in the field of linguistics before attempting to write "Story of Your Life."^[7]

Reception

In The New York Review of Books American author James Gleick said that "Story of Your Life" poses the questions: would knowing your future be a gift or a curse, and is free will simply an illusion? Gleick wrote "For us ordinary mortals, the day-to-day experience of a preordained future is almost unimaginable", but Chiang does just that in this story, he "imagine[s] it".^[8] In a review of Chiang's Stories of Your Life and Others in The Guardian, English fantasy author China Miéville described "Story of Your Life" as "tender" with an "astonishingly moving culmination", which he said is "surprising" considering it is achieved using science.^[9]

Writing in Kirkus Reviews Ana Grilo called it a "thought-provoking, beautiful story".^[10] He said that in contrast to the familiar fare of lavish stories involving aliens, "Story of Your Life" is "a breath of fresh air" whose objective "is to not only to learn how to communicate but how to communicate effectively."^[10] In a review in Emertainment Monthly Samantha Schraub said that the story's two narratives, Louise recalling the unraveling of the heptapods' language, and telling her yet-to-be-born daughter what will happen to her, creates "an ambiguity and air of mystery, which make the reader question everything that unfolds".^[11] Schraub called it "an award-worthy science fiction novella that will resonate with readers, and leave them thinking how they would live—or even change—their present, if they knew their future."^[11]

Awards

Publication history

• Source: Internet Speculative Fiction Database^[17]

References

Works cited

• {{cite book |last=Chiang |first=Ted |authorlink=Ted Chiang |title=Stories of Your Life and Others |publisher=Picador |year=2015a |origyear=2002 |edition=e-book |chapter=Story of Your Life |page=76 |isbn=978-1-4472-8198-6 |ref=harv}}
• {{cite book |last=Chiang |first=Ted |title=Stories of Your Life and Others |publisher=Picador |year=2015b |origyear=2002 |edition=e-book |chapter=Story Notes |page=223 |isbn=978-1-4472-8198-6 |ref=harv}}

External links

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