Anti-spoiler militants, lay down your arms: According to the premise of the short story I’m about to present, it’s impossible for me to spoil the plot, because you will already know the ending by the time you’ve begun reading the first sentence.
…At least that’s if you’re fluent in Heptapod B, the written language of an alien species that is wired to see the world in an entirely different way from humans.* Simply speaking, these aliens already know everything that happens in the future as well as the past and present because their “mode of awareness” is simultaneous (as encapsulated in the structure of their written language) rather than sequential, like ours; they “act to create the future.”
“Story of Your Life,” published in 1998 by an occasional but acclaimed science-fiction writer, Ted Chiang, is in some ways the inverse of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, at least on a superficial plot level. Aliens (of a species that humans come to call the “heptapods“) visit Earth — not physically, but via technologically advanced visual screens — and when asked for a motive, they claim that all they want to do is to “observe.” Naturally, the government finds this extremely suspicious, so they hire Dr. Louise Banks, a linguist, to learn their language and to find out what they really want, as well as to potentially gain new scientific knowledge for humankind.
From this portrayal of the narrative set-up, you can probably predict the conflicts and intellectual questions that will arise and be explored over the course of the story: for example, the seeming incompatibility of these two fundamentally different cultural conceptions of the world. In addition, you might have imagined that Chiang would touch upon some pretty hefty questions about free will and determinism.*** (If you did indeed anticipate these, then congratulations — you’re now one step closer to identifying with the heptapod worldview.)
There’s another narrative thread interwoven in the plot, however: that of Louise’s daughter, who is mentioned only in second person throughout (she’s the “you” referred to in the title “Story of Your Life”). At first the brief slice-of-life anecdotes seem only tangentially related to the main storyline: they’re presented in an anachronistic sequence, and we learn early on that the daughter died at age 25 from a mountain-climbing accident. The two stories gradually gain a “figurative” relationship with one another (i.e., an observation that Louise makes in one anecdote, such as the fact that her daughter as an infant seems to live only in the present, serves to illustrate a more abstract idea introduced in the heptapod-storyline: here, the irrelevance of a temporal sequence in the heptapod worldview), but they don’t converge fully until the very end, when we learn that the events of the daughter-storyline (which, from a chronological viewpoint, begins three years after the heptapods have left Earth) could only have happened because of the way things turned out in the heptapod-storyline — and that somehow, thanks to her new insight gained from learning Heptapod B, Louise knew everything that was going to happen all along.
I’ll admit that this idea was the hardest for me to grasp, given my non-philosophical background. Chiang was quite brave to dig up this metaphysical landmine, though I don’t think he went beyond a few tentative probes at an answer (putting his stance into words makes it sound rather simplistic: “Once you know the future, you kind of go along with it and play the game anyway. Free will isn’t meaningful in this context, but neither is determinism”). The nuances come from the way the experience of knowing the future is fleshed out — the theoretical becomes almost visceral when we see the future enacted through Louise’s eyes as she watches her daughter grow up, knowing at every moment that she will outlive her child by many years.
For me, the heptapods’ worldview made more sense when I came to think of it as sort of a “meta” idea for the process of writing a story. Language serves as a means of actualization for the heptapods, much in the way that a story, which is at first a fleeting but vivid series of impressions in a writer’s mind, is “realized” through the telling or performance of it.(*) This experience isn’t limited to writers or storytellers only, I think. Narrative psychology holds that we make meaning out of our lives by constructing coherent stories from our experiences, with beginnings and endings and vague morals (if not an Aesop’s Fable-style lesson, then at least some illustrative/illuminative purpose behind telling the story). Also, we tend to tell stories chronologically, but memories, as they stream through our (sub)consciousness, are not always so neatly ordered. Doesn’t that ultimately make our experience “teleological” and “simultaneous,” the way heptapods experience life?
One notable aspect of “Story of Your Life” is that Chiang isn’t afraid to directly confront real-life philosophical and scientific theories in his story. He’ll even give you long, intimidating blocks of text in the middle of the heptapod-storyline as he explains the basics of Fermat’s principle in Louise’s voice, for example. I’d been under the impression that science-fiction writers usually shy away from doing so, either to focus on the moral implications of their futuristic scenarios or to avoid catching flak from real scientists for playing around gratuitously with the laws of general relativity. (Then again, Chiang works a “regular job” as a technical writer, so he seems well qualified to cross the line.) However, Chiang manages to balance this technical precision well with the “emotional resonance” that I can’t quite explain but can identify in a good story — some basic, raw sense of authenticity that arises from the way the narrator articulates a character’s state of mind after something changes or is realized irrevocably (if that makes any sense. Anyway, the way this feeling is evoked seems to come as much from the idea’s form, or language, as it does from content). To me, this balance achieved in “Story of Your Life” marks the ultimate marriage of “science” and “fiction” in the genre — it may not be perfect, but it’s really something else.
In the end, Ted Chiang did not reinvent the field of physics or introduce an entirely original philosophical theory to the world.**** Rather, “Story of Your Life” is an experience or a thought experiment, or maybe a little of both.
UPDATE: You might have noticed that I scrupulously avoided going into the scientific part of my review beyond very nebulous terms. Having long forgotten the concepts covered in my high school calculus class (which also marked my last substantial exposure to any math beyond calculator arithmetic), I found this math-oriented review of “Story of Your Life” quite helpful. (However, you do not need to know calculus in order to understand and enjoy the story — I promise.)
(*) Language here is used as a means to an end, rather than as a means of communicating information, according to Chiang.
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*Note that Heptapod B is just a language like any other, but like all languages (under the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, more commonly known now as the idea of linguistic relativity**), it embodies the way its speakers think about the world. So essentially, if these aliens see all the events happening in the world as a path to a predetermined end, the grammar, syntax, and form of their language should ostensibly reflect — and, in Chiang’s story, realize — this worldview.
**Sub-note: Yes, I had to read Benjamin Lee Whorf’s “The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language” in my introductory anthropology class last fall (which I keep bringing up on this blog, for some reason), but I do not claim to understand it well. Please read with care.
***I only have a superficial conception of these long-debated ideas in philosophy — the links are there in case you want a deeper background into the many limbs of the debate. It’s probably sufficient just to know that Chiang explores this question: “What is it like to know the future — and what, then, would be the significance of your actions in the chronological present?” This question is easiest to explore in the medium of speculative fiction, of course, but Chiang stirs things up by complicating the idea of linear causality (I think).
****I was actually disappointed at first when I got to the last few pages and read the physicist’s report that “no information new to mankind” had been discovered (“Was that a cop-out?”), but I got over it once I realized the true focus of the story. Anyway, that just goes to show how high a bar Chiang has set with his writing.