Book Review: Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life"

“The Story of Your Life,” by Ted Chiang

Read Tuesday, September 5, 2017

First, let me say, I watched Arrival, prior to Chiang's story which it was based on. I found Arrival’s plot moving and ideas compelling. I was surprised, after reading the story itself, at how much of a departure the film was from it. I would like to say something about that departure and what I think of it, but let's start with the story itself.

STORY OF YOUR LIFE

I don’t like pigeon-holing any creative work, but since you have to start somewhere, I think it is safe to say this is a story primarily about two things: free will and language's effects on how we live. After reading the story I recommended it to my  mom, whose first response was, “it’s sad.” Considering Chiang's overall story arc, that is an interesting first observation to make. The structure of “Story of Your Life” is composed of two interweaving plots. The first arc concerns Laurie Banks as she narrates her daughter's life to her, as yet, unborn daughter. This narration is told from multiple historical perspectives and so prefigures the sense of timelessness that the second structural element will deal with. The story of the family is fairly simple, Laurie meets her husband Gary during a research project. They eventually fall in love and have a daughter. At the age of 25 their daughter dies during a hiking trip. After her death, we assume, Gary leaves Laurie in grief. 

The second story concerns this research project. An alien species, referred to as heptapods, have mysteriously appeared on Earth. They have presented communication devices called "looking glasses" that the military and scientists are using to communicate with them. This second story arc is concerned primarily with the nature of the heptapod's language. Their language is reflected by their anatomy. The heptapods have a cylindrical structure, no front, no back. The military recruits the mother of the family, Louise, a linguist, in an attempt at interpreting the heptapod’s language. Her partner in research, Gary, will ultimately become her husband. We know from the first page of the book that their daughter will die and that they will divorce. What links these two story lines is the nuance the heptapod language adds to each of their responses to their daughter’s death. To go back to my mom’s reaction, is this a sad or a happy story? The meaning to that question is tied to the meaning of the story.

But before I can say more about the story’s larger purpose, I have to give a fuller account of the heptapod’s language. Chiang is doing here what SF does best, he is conducting a thought experiment. He imagines a civilization with a language based on Fermat’s Principle of Least Time. Fermat’s principle runs contrary to our basic intuition of how the world operates. We see things as operating causally. From our perspective events occur linearly, in a string. Object "A" hits Object "B" causing Object "B" to roll over and hit Object "C." Fermat’s principle, on the contrary, presents a view of physics that is teleological. In other words, events are dictated by their end, not by a cause. For example, a refracted beam of light as it enters a pool of water moves in the direction it does because that is the best way for the beam of light to get to its destination, not because something compelled it to move in the direction it is moving. Its goal is to reach its end in either the minimum or maximum amount of time. This strange idea, that a beam of light could know where it would end up, suggests a physics that is not causal but teleological. 

Chiang's example of causal relations is depicted through the military figures in the story who want to conduct a series of gift exchanges with the heptapods. Their logic is, "We give them some of our technology, they give us some of theirs." Their interactions with the heptapods are much less nuanced and subtle than Laurie and Gary's interactions. Unlike the military, Laurie's initial interactions are grounded on trust rather than suspicion. Laurie also realizes that coming to understand the heptapods is far more important and valuable than gaining any technological information. 

Chiang refers to the heptapod’s language as semagrams. We are likely intended to think of Chinese ideograms, where a picture represents an idea rather than a sound. Semagrams, unlike glottographics (writing that represents speech), represent thought without any reference to speech. They are semasiographic, that is, they conveys meaning through signs or icons rather than speech or sound. The consequence is that this language is not confined to the linearity that speech and sound are necessarily confined to. We listen to sounds from beginning to end. Pictures can be viewed from any point. They are not dependent on time. It is these images independence from time that gives them their multidimensionality and freedom from causality.

Another friend of mine, Larry Jamison, noticed the link between the viewing screen, called a “looking glass” and the looking glass from the second of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books. Alternate languages suggest alternate ways of being and existing, like another dimension, or Alice’s Wonderland. I think Larry is on target in making this link.

I say all this, but I still sense I’m missing significant elements of Chiang’s story. What is the final verdict? Is the story merely asking us to think in a broader and less localized, cause and effect, type mentality? Or is it richer than that? The purpose of the story of the mother and daughter is to illustrate how one might think in a non-casual mode. The mother seems to examine the life of her daughter from many angles of time, always taking into account the past and future of that moment. This is part of what Chiang is up to. 

One other aspect to consider is where this story fits within the larger scope of science fiction. Surely, there are scores of stories that consider how one's language shapes one's world view. I'm not deeply read in classic SF, so my examples are limited, but the two books I first thought of were Samuel R. Delany's Babel-17 and China Miéville's Embassytown. Unlike Chiang's short story, these novels give much greater scope to the potentials and pitfalls of language. Delany's Babel-17, as an added bonus, has given me one of my favorite opening quotations:

"Nowhere is civilization so perfectly mirrored as in speech. If our knowledge of speech, or the speech itself, is not yet perfect, neither is civilization." 

Mario Pei 

(As quoted in Samuel Delany's Babel-17)

THE FILM

The film radically underplays the death of Louise’s daughter, a central element in the story, by adding an entirely new scenario—the conflict of nations as well as localized panic in the streets. Surely, one reason for these changes was to heighten the tension of the film and so make it more attractive to a general audience. Likewise, they radically simplify the language component of the story. Not surprisingly, the heptapods are now seen “face-to-face” and not on a video-screen. None of these changes significantly detracted from my enjoyment of the film. And there was one great innovation that I suspect Chiang might have been envious himself, the heptapods are now able to “write” by emitting a cloud of ink from their tentacles. In the story the heptapod script is described as being something like an MC Escher print. I imagined them to be more rectangular. They are elsewhere described as being like mandalas, which can be circular or rectangular. There is in the story the suggestion that the script is like calligraphy and there are also suggestions that it is similar to Chinese ideograms. There is one scene in the story where their script is described as being like frost growing across a windowpane. This is likely where the director took this image from.