Story of Your Life

"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.

A film adaptation of the story, Arrival, was conceived and adapted by Eric Heisserer, and released in 2016. It was nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Adapted Screenplay. The film also won the 2017 Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation and the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation.

"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 aliens to Earth 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.

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." 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 comes naturally to them.

Soon, Louise becomes 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?"

One day, after an information exchange between humans and the heptapods, the heptapods 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.