This week, I read a short story called The Story of Your Life, which is one of eight included in a collection called Stories of Your Life: And Others, by Ted Chiang. I can’t quite remember how I heard about this book, but I do recall that it was generally well reviewed and tends to come up in many “even if you don’t like science fiction, you should read…” conversations online. Having been in my reading queue for some time, it became #1 this week. So far, I’m very much absorbed by it.

The story is told from the point of view of a woman (we eventually learn her name is Louise, but I had to look back to make sure) who speaks/writes with a strange tense that seems to straddle the past and future—saying things like, “Right now, your dad and I have been married for about two years, living on Ellis Avenue; when we move you you’ll still be too young to remember the house, but we’ll show you pictures of it, tell you stories about it.” She’s talking about the past, and the past’s future, which is, presumably, still the past. It takes some getting used to, but the odd tense becomes central to the story.

Louise tells the story of her involvement in learning the language of an…wait for it!…alien species who arrive unannounced and remain in orbit, using “windows” somehow sent down to Earth (we never learn how) that enable two-way visual communication on a large scale. (Think massive, wall-sized Skype windows.) A recognized expert in linguistics, the government has brought her in to help communicate with the aliens—seven-legged, radially symmetric beings, generally biologically different from humans in a radical way. Their vocalizations earn them the nicknames, “Flapper” and “Raspberry.”

Louise bounces back and forth between the story of learning the alien language and recounting her now deceased daughter’s childhood. We learn many things about both—how she decodes the language, how she raises her daughter alone, and then, over time, how the two stories converge. Her discovery about how the alien language works is central to understanding why this story exists. The alien written language is “semasiographic,” which means it “conveys meaning without an reference to speech.” A good example of this is the “no smoking” symbol that simply uses a circle bisected by a diagonal line. No words, no reference to spoken sounds. This insight helps her to understand the alien mindset, which becomes increasingly understood as very much unlike ours. They don’t have a concept of cause and effect. To them, there is little difference between what happens now and what happens later. Their spoken sentences don’t rely upon sequence—rearranging their words doesn’t change the meaning to them—and their written language is monolithically symbolic. The more complex the thought, the bigger and more complex the symbol, but it’s always just one symbol. As she learns to write like them, Louise begins to think like them. The tense-weirdness that stuck out so much at the beginning of the story makes more sense.

Eventually, we also learn that the scientist with whom she worked on the alien language project was the father of Louise’s child (I started to suspect this probably later than the average person would… not to quick sometimes), that they divorced at some point, and that some time after that, their daughter died in a rock climbing accident as a young adult. It also finally becomes clear that the entire marriage and child rearing years are all after the alien encounter. That seems trivial, but at the beginning of the story, her language made the sequence seem to be be opposite—that the alien story came later. Again, her sympathetic “tetrapod consciousness” explains this.

What’s fascinating is that the encounter is completely anticlimactic. The aliens, who had been clear that their purpose was only to observe, just abruptly leave one day. Aside from their language, the humans learned nothing new from the heptapods. The story, playing with tense the entire time, sets us up to learn the lesson that a full-life seems inclined to teach—that things don’t tend to go the way we expect them to. Typically, an alien encounter in the science fiction genre leads to significant world change: enlightenment, new technology, transformation, the opening up of possibilities and the expansion of our universe. Chiang provides an alien contact scenario that is just as likely as any fantasy we’ve conjured. Perhaps it wouldn’t change anything. Perhaps they would come, look around a little and leave. And that would be it. Why not? Why do we expect that they’d come with the intent of changing everything for us? Why do some even hope for this?

I’m looking forward to reading more from Chiang. I like the way he pushes the boundaries of the science fiction genre (that’s what it should be all about, really) and reframes my expectations of what might/will/should happen.

Posted at 11:15am and tagged with: book, reading, science-fiction, longreads,.