Ted Chiang The Story Of Your Life

[Leroy Turcios]

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]

"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 the 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.

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]

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 Miville described "Story of Your Life" as "tender" with an "astonishingly moving culmination", which he said is "surprising" considering it is achieved using science.[13]

The new movie Arrival is drawing sufficient praise as a smart and stylish science fiction film that Kate and I actually went to the trouble of getting a sitter so we could see it in the theater Friday night. It is, indeed, a very good movie, and probably the best adaptation one could hope for of the Ted Chiang story "Story of Your Life" (which is one of the best science fiction stories in any medium over the last mumble years). I was, however, disappointed that they left out nearly all of the physics that's in the original.

First, a brief, non-spoiler summary, before diving into the details: In the film, Amy Adams plays Dr. Louise Banks, a linguist who is recruited by the military to help them communicate with the aliens in one of twelve "shells" that have appeared at random locations on the surface of the Earth. She's paired with theoretical physicist Dr. Ian Donnelly (played by Jeremy Renner), and the two of them spend a lot of time writing messages back and forth to the alien "heptapods," who appear only on the far side of a transparent partition. As Louise figures out the heptapod language, it leads to a transformation in the way she sees the world, one with significant emotional costs to her, but that might be the key to saving the whole communicate-with-aliens enterprise.

(If you haven't seen the movie, and don't want essential plot points spoiled, please enjoy this publicity photo of Amy Adams with the alien shell in the background, and then go see the movie before reading on.)

The way this plays out in the movie, the fact that Ian is a physicist has basically no relevance to anything. He's important because of the emotional role he plays in Louise's future life, but he could be a medical doctor, a CIA agent, or even a soldier assigned to her as a bodyguard without fundamentally changing the plot.

In the original story, it's critically important that Gary Donnelly is a physicist, because he makes discoveries about heptapod physics that illuminate and inspire the discoveries that Louise makes about their language. And those discoveries provide the in-story justification for the shift to Louise's sense of time that makes the whole thing work. Removing that physics aspect not only leaves Jeremy Renner with very little to do in the movie, it shifts the story in the direction of woo-woo "mystical aliens are mystical" in a way that I don't really care for.

The film doesn't contradict the original story, though, so if you know the physics basis, you can mentally put it back in and fix the major problem. And if you don't know the physics basis, well, that's what I'm here for...

The key realization that Gary/Ian has in the story is that the aliens don't seem interested when scientists try to connect with them using really simple physics, but react with great enthusiasm when shown some material derived from the Lagrangian formulation of classical physics. This version of classical physics, named after Joseph-Louis Lagrange, explains all the same phenomena as Newtonian mechanics not in terms of forces, but in terms of minimization of the "action" associated with moving from one place to another.

The Lagrangian approach to physics is part of the general category of least action principles, of which the easiest to explain is Fermat's Principle from optics, which holds that light rays moving from one point to another always follow the path that takes the shortest time to travel. In empty space, that means a straight line, but when light moves between different media, interactions with the medium change its speed, which leads to the phenomenon of refraction. Fermat's principle of least time gives you another way to think about the path light follows from point A to point B, and gets all the same answers.

Least-action principles in general work in more or less the same way, though the quantities they minimize are less intuitive than "travel time"-- for Lagrangian mechanics, you're minimizing the "action," which is the integral of the difference between kinetic and potential energy over time as the system of interest moves from one state to another. In practice, there's a straightforward recipe for getting from the energy of the system to the equations telling you how the system changes state, so we don't really integrate action over particular paths, but the conceptual foundation is the same: if you know the state of the system at the start and end, the system moves from one state to another through whatever sequence of intermediate states minimizes the action.

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