#Chiang the story of your life free#
Heptapod A is their spoken language, which is described as having free word order and many levels ofĬenter-embedded clauses. The heptapods have two distinct forms of language. The story revolves aroundĭr. Banks and Gary Donnelly, a physicist also working for the military to gain knowledge of physics from the aliens. After a race of aliens, known as heptapods (due to their 7-pointed radially symmetricalĪppearance), initiate first contact with humanity, the military hires Dr. Banks to discover their language and communicate with them. The story is narrated by Dr. Louise Banks, writing in the past tense. This would be a good time to.) Plot summary (This discussion is heavy on spoilers and may ruin the experience of reading it, so if one hasn’t read it, ‘change’ the future or have ‘alternate or parallel timelines’. Says 3, it’s a single fixed timeline one, and certainly not one where you can ‘see’ or 2 “Story Of Your Life” is not a time-travel story, or to the limited extent that it is, as Chiang Topics in physics & philosophy since, I realized that I (along with almost everyone else who read it, judging from online discussions & reviews of the story andĪrrival) might have been badly mistaken and that the plot was deliberately open to misreading and the physics mumbo-jumbo was in fact the whole point and theįormal structure nicely reflected that so I will explain the point of “Story Of Your Life”, before Arrival makes it impossible to read it correctly. On my second read years later, having read some more about related Unnecessarily confusing plot & second-rate physics mumbo-jumbo in the service of a heavy-handed point. “Story Of Your Life” is not my favorite Chiang story (that would be “Exhalation”), and on my first read, I thought it was downright mediocre-it seemed like some formalĮxperimentation (second-person narration rather than Chiang’s usual first-person or third-person omniscient, nonlinear flashback/forward-heavy plot) wrapped around an
#Chiang the story of your life movie#
Text) which won Nebula & Sturgeon Awards, which brought Chiang to global notice when it was made into the critically-acclaimed movie Arrival in 2016 (8 Oscar nominations, 1 Oscar for sound editing). His most famous short story is the 17500-word 1998 “ Story of Your Life” Each story has a unique starting point, and feels like a world or novel unto itself despite their short page counts. ( Greg Egan with a heart) use those worlds & concepts to examine and build up a powerfulĮmotional point. Chiang’s stories can be described as rigorous world-building 1, taking seriously premises such as the Kabbalah ( “72 Letters”) or intelligence enhancement ( “Understand”) or self-consistent time loops ( “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate”) or a mechanical clockwork universeĮvil in a universe where God exists ( “Hell Is the Absence of God”)Īnd extending them logically, written in a lucid streamlined prose that (like Gene Wolfe’s) seems simple & easy unless one has tried to write like that oneself, but
Most are collected in his 2002 anthology Stories of Your Life and Others ( my review). Ted Chiang is an American SF author of short stories & a novella, noted for both the Protagonist’s attitude towards life and the tragic death of her daughter, teaching her in a somewhat Buddhist or Stoic fashion to embrace life in both its ups and This holistic view of the universe as an immutable ‘block-universe’, in which events unfold as they must, changes the The alien race exemplifies this other,Įqually valid, possible way of thinking and viewing the universe, and the protagonist learns their way of thinking by studying their language, which requires seeing Instead, what appears to be precognition in Chiang’s story is actually far more interesting, and a novel twist on psychology and physics:Ĭlassical physics allows usefully interpreting the laws of physics in both a ‘forward’ way in which events happen step by step, but also a teleological way in whichĮvents are simply the unique optimal solution to a set of constraints including the outcome and allows reasoning ‘backwards’. Time or enjoy precognitive powers, interpreting the story this way leads to many serious plot holes, it renders most of the exposition-heavy dialogue (which is a largeįraction of the wordcount) completely irrelevant, and genuine precognition undercuts the themes of tragedy & acceptance.
At no point does the protagonist travel in However, movie viewers often misread the short story: “Story” is not a time-travel movie. One of Ted Chiang’s most noted philosophical SF short stories, “Story of Your Life”, was made into a successful time-travel movie, Arrival, sparking
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