In his famous short story – ‘Story of Your Life’, Ted Chiang tells us a tale of…well, us. Dr. Louise Banks is one of the best linguists on the planet. Aliens with seven limbs – heptapods (Greek hepta – seven, pod – legs) have landed devices which humans are calling ‘looking glasses’ all over the world. Dr. Banks’ job is to learn their language and communicate with them to know their purpose or intentions. A physicist named Dr. Gary Donnelly is accompanying her.
As Louise starts learning their language, we, the readers learn about our languages. How do human languages function? What is the connection between writing and speaking? Or is there any connection necessary?
Their written language is somewhat different than our languages. They use something that Louise calls ‘semagrams’ to construct their sentences. They are not like logograms or ideograms that some Earth-languages use, for example, Japanese. In logogrmas, each graph can has a phonetic sound associated with it and ideograms convey an idea. Semagrams, that the heptapods use in the story are different on a fundamental level. Semagrams can convey meaning without an associated pronunciation.
As the story progresses, Chiang shifts in a nonlinear manner from Louis’s memories of her daughter and her experience of deciphering Heptapod-B – the written alien language. Chiang also uses future-tense in past-tense sentences to give us an idea of how our ‘linear’ way of understanding time influences the way we understand languages.
Garry seemed like a passive character to me in the initial part. But later his role becomes crucial when he explains Louise ‘Fermat’s principle of least time’ or when he talks about variational calculus. All these things – Louise’s investigation, the principle of extreme action, Fermat’s principle, nonlinear storytelling, mingling of tenses and everything else connects.
In the end, we realize Louise’s transformation from thinking linear in time and seeing time as a whole. Her life has forever changed because of her contact with the alien language.
The characters of the story have their arcs, we understand the transformation Louise has gone through and we feel cathartic. In a few pages, Chiang dabbles with big debates like free will vs. determinism, how alien languages can be fundamentally different than ours, how our perception of time and understanding of language are interlaced.
More than that, Chiang makes us wiser by telling us more about ourselves. Although the story is about aliens, it is a human story at its core, one we can relate to. We are somehow forced to look at ourselves as we discover this fictional extraterrestrial species and their language.
This was a good story that has helped me come out of my prejudice about sci-fi. In future, I plan to read Chiang’s other stories as well.
NOTE: This story was adapted into an Oscar nominated feature film – ‘Arrival’.
Image Source: Here
Some references:
Ted Chiang’s Soulful Science Fiction – The New Yorker
Ted Chiang – The Science Fiction Genius Behind Arrival – The Guardian
Why You should Read His Stories – The Economist
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