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"Story of Your Life"
"Story of Your Life"
Short story by Ted Chiang
	Illustration for "Story of Your Life" by Hidenori Watanabe for S-F Magazine
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Science fiction
Publication
Published in	Starlight 2
Publication type	Anthology
Publisher	Tor Books
Publication date	November 1998

"Story of Your Life" is a science fiction novella by American writer Ted Chiang, first published in Starlight 2 in 1998, and later 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, Japanese, French and German.^[1]

A film adaptation of the story, Arrival, was conceived and adapted by Eric Heisserer. Titled and directed by Denis Villeneuve, it was released in 2016. It stars Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, and Forest Whitaker and was nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay; it won the award for Best Sound Editing.^[2]^[3]^[4] The film also won the 2017 Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation and the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation.^[5]^[6]

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 daughter as she grows up, and her daughter's untimely death.

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

Attempts are also made to establish heptapod terminology in physics. Little progress is made, until a presentation of Fermat's Principle of Least Time is given. Gary explains the principle to Louise, giving the example of the refraction of light, and that light will always take the fastest possible route. Louise reasons, "[a] ray of light has to know where it will ultimately end up before it can choose the direction to begin moving in."^[7] She knows the heptapods do not write a sentence one semagram at a time, but draw all the ideograms simultaneously, suggesting they know what the entire sentence will be beforehand. Louise realizes that instead of experiencing events sequentially (causality), heptapods experience all events at once (teleology). This is reflected in their language, and explains why Fermat's Principle of Least Time came naturally to them.

Soon, Louise becomes quite proficient at Heptapod B, and finds that when writing in it, trains of thought are directionless, and premises and conclusions interchangeable. She finds herself starting to think in Heptapod B and begins to see time as heptapods do. Louise sees glimpses of her future and of a daughter she does not yet have. This raises 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 asks 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?"^[8]

One day, after an information exchange with the heptapods, the aliens announce they are leaving. They shut down the looking glasses and their ships disappear. It is never established why they leave, or why they had come in the first place.

Background

In the "Story Notes" section of Stories of Your Life and Others, Chiang writes 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.^[9] 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.'^[9]

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."^[10]

Chiang spent five years researching and familiarizing himself in the field of linguistics before attempting to write "Story of Your Life."^[11]

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".^[12] 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.^[13]

Writing in Kirkus Reviews Ana Grilo called it a "thought-provoking, beautiful story".^[14] 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."^[14] In a review in Entertainment 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".^[15] 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."^[15]

Awards

Award	Year	Result
Nebula Award for Best Novella	2000	Won^[16]
Theodore Sturgeon Award	1999	Won^[17]
Hugo Award for Best Novella	1999	Nominated^[18]
Locus Award for Best Novella	1999	Ranked 10th^[19]
James Tiptree Jr. Award	1998	Shortlisted^[20]

Publication history

Date	Title	Author/Editor	Language	Type
November 1998	Starlight 2	Patrick Nielsen Hayden	English	Anthology
June 1999	The Year's Best Science Fiction: Sixteenth Annual Collection	Gardner Dozois	English	Anthology
June 1999	Year's Best SF 4	David G. Hartwell	English	Anthology
August 1999	The Mammoth Book of the Best New Science Fiction 12	Gardner Dozois	English	Anthology
September 1999	Strani universi 2	Piergiorgio Nicolazzini	Italian	Anthology
May 2000	Al suono di una musica aliena	David G. Hartwell	Italian	Anthology
April 2001	Nebula Awards Showcase 2001	Robert Silverberg	English	Anthology
July 2002	Stories of Your Life and Others	Ted Chiang	English	Collection
February 2005	The Best of the Best: 20 Years of the Year's Best Science Fiction	Gardner Dozois	English	Anthology
November 2007	A Science Fiction Omnibus	Brian Aldiss	English	Anthology
March 2008	The Mammoth Book of the Best of the Best New SF	Gardner Dozois	English	Anthology
November 2009	Il meglio della SF / II. L'Olimpo dei classici moderni	Gardner Dozois	Italian	Anthology
December 2012	Lightspeed	John Joseph Adams	English	Magazine
July 2016	The Big Book of Science Fiction: The Ultimate Collection	Ann VanderMeer, Jeff VanderMeer	English	Anthology

Source: Internet Speculative Fiction Database^[1]

References

^ ^a ^b "Story of Your Life". isfdb.org. Internet Speculative Fiction Database. Retrieved May 24, 2017.
^ "Jeremy Renner Joins Amy Adams in Sci-Fi 'Story of Your Life'". The Hollywood Reporter. March 6, 2015. Retrieved January 31, 2018.
^ Zutter, Natalie (August 8, 2016). "Your First Look at Arrival, the Adaptation of Ted Chiang's Novella Story of Your Life". TOR. tor.com. Retrieved January 31, 2018.
^ "Oscar Nominations: Complete List". Variety. January 24, 2017. Retrieved February 27, 2017.
^ "Nebula Awards 2017". Science Fiction Awards Database. Locus. Archived from the original on May 23, 2017. Retrieved May 24, 2017.
^ "2017 Hugo Awards". World Science Fiction Society. December 31, 2016. Archived from the original on August 12, 2017. Retrieved August 12, 2017.
^ Chiang 2015a, p. 101.
^ Chiang 2015a, p. 106.
^ ^a ^b Chiang 2015b, p. 223.
^ Solomon, Avi (January 29, 2014). "Stories of Ted Chiang's Life and Others: An interview with the wisest, smartest scifi writer there is". Medium.com. Retrieved March 8, 2017.
^ Ulaby, Neda (November 11, 2016). "'Arrival' Author's Approach To Science Fiction? Slow, Steady And Successful". NPR.org. Retrieved June 22, 2020.
^ Gleick, James (January 19, 2017). "When They Came from Another World". The New York Review of Books. Retrieved March 10, 2017.
^ Miéville, China (April 24, 2004). "Stories of Your Life". The Guardian. Retrieved March 10, 2017.
^ ^a ^b Grilo, Ana (November 25, 2016). "Contrast and Compare: Arrival and 'Story of Your Life'". Kirkus Reviews. Retrieved March 10, 2017.
^ ^a ^b Schraub, Samantha (December 13, 2016). "Review: "Story of Your Life"". Emertainment Monthly. Retrieved March 10, 2017.
^ ""Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang, Winner, Best Novella in 1999". nebulas.sfwa.org. Retrieved January 31, 2018.
^ "Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award 1999". Science Fiction Awards Database. Locus. Archived from the original on April 23, 2015. Retrieved April 4, 2017.
^ "1999 Hugo Awards". World Science Fiction Society. July 26, 2007. Archived from the original on May 7, 2011. Retrieved April 4, 2017.
^ "Locus Awards 1999". Science Fiction Awards Database. Retrieved April 4, 2017.
^ "1998 Award Winners & Nomineess". Worlds Without End. Retrieved April 4, 2017.

Works cited

Chiang, Ted (2015a) [2002]. "Story of Your Life". Stories of Your Life and Others (e-book ed.). Picador. p. 76. ISBN 978-1-4472-8198-6.
Chiang, Ted (2015b) [2002]. "Story Notes". Stories of Your Life and Others (e-book ed.). Picador. p. 223. ISBN 978-1-4472-8198-6.