Our language and our conception of time have much in common. Both proceed as a march, one thing after another. (You’re not reading this sentence backward, just as you can’t travel back in time.) From that, well, straightforward observation spring the wondrous complexities of Ted Chiang's 1998 sci-fi short story, "The Story of Your Life" (the basis for last year's hit movie Arrival). In it, a mysterious visitation by aliens prompts the Earth's linguists to ponder the nature of our language and thus, duh-duh-dum, time itself. For next week, let's read Chiang's very first short story, "Tower of Babylon." Meantime, it’s time to talk–and cry—together.
So, did you tear up?
Sarah Fallon, Senior Editor: Yes. And now I'm inside-voice crying again as I refer back to the text.
Jason Kehe, Associate Editor: Same. Sort of that watery-eyed, verge-of-hiccuping face.
Jay Dayrit, Editorial Operations Manager: Good God, yes! Shedding tears on the train. You know, my usual commute home on a Wednesday night. Louise's relationship with her daughter seemed so real, made all the more tragic knowing she was not recalling memories but rather foreshadowing what will be. That wrecked me to the core.
Anna Louise Vlasits, Editorial Fellow: No, but I had to hold my kid for a while afterward. There's this branch of philosophy that says having a kid is a "transformative experience"—you can’t know what it will be like until you have one, and that means that no human has the the knowledge to choose whether to have a child or not, because you can’t know "what it’s like" until you do it. I thought a lot about whether, if I had knowledge of the future, I would have chosen to have my kid the way that Louise chose to have hers. Then I had to stop thinking about it.
The linguist as hero—go!
Kehe: Has to be one of the lesser-represented professions in sci-fi—though it makes so much sense in the context of first contact. Do linguists love Ted Chiang for elevating one of their own? I won’t pretend that dabbling undergraduately in language-acquisition research qualifies me to pass judgment on Louise-as-linguist, but there wasn’t really a moment where I doubted Chiang’s basic understanding. Nor did I ever feel condescended to or overburdened in the explanations. They were so well integrated into the plot and purpose that I fully believed these characters were saying exactly what they were supposed to be saying. Semasiographic? Sure!
Dayrit: Me too. It seemed well researched. I wasn’t about to go fact-checking everything. Did learn a new word, though: glottographic. Gonna drop that at a cocktail party soon. Chiang’s hero made so much sense she got me wondering where the hell the linguists have been in sci-fi all along. Sure there’s Uhura, but it took our esteemed colleague and resident sci-fi expert, Adam Rogers, to remind me that James Spader played a linguist in Stargate. Maybe I just overlook them because linguists tend not to run around with laser guns, shooting aliens in the face. They prefer a subtler, diplomatically effective approach.
Katie Palmer, Senior Editor: By comparison, was anyone else underwhelmed by physicist Gary? That was probably done pointedly---it’s nice to have the hard science subjugated to the soft science in sci-fi---and I liked that. But it also kind of made Gary’s character feel weak and irrelevant at points; like, why are you still here if you’re just going to make jokes and take the linguist out to dinner? I have no concept of why they fell in love.
Fallon: Shared context. If you were in a tent talking to aliens (profound) and being smart (sexy!) with someone day after day, you might end up falling for him/her too.
Could you follow the time jumps?
Fallon: No, not at first. And I was kind of annoyed at the story to start. What did the two narratives have to do with each other? The daughter has been killed off on the fifth page. It didn’t make any sense. But then it started to dawn on me what was happening.
Dayrit: No, but having already seen the movie, I knew going into the short story that it didn’t matter, that even the verb tenses didn’t matter.
Vlasits: I saw Arrival over the weekend just before reading the story, so I had the framework set up to accept the time jumps---maybe the movie gave me a little heptapod magic to be able to parse the story more easily?
And what do we make broadly of the structure?
Fallon: I read it twice, and once you know what’s happening, the perfection of the structure becomes so clear. Like the way he repeats certain phrases. Did you notice that when she goes to ID her daughter’s body she says, "Yes, that's her. She's mine," and then at the very end, when she's describing being able to pick her daughter out of the sea of babies, she says the exact same thing? ... Wait, excuse me, I have to go get a tissue.
Or, like, how they’re talking about this alien language potentially being a primitive one where the reader needs to know the message’s context ... but hey-o, we just had the Roxie/Nelson date scene where people understand what’s being said because of the context—the inside joke between the two girls.
And then, of course, as the meaning of the story becomes more and more clear, Chiang links the scenes more and more clearly. The heptapods "use language to actualize," then a few lines later, the linguist is reading the story of the three bears to her daughter just because the daughter wants to hear it (even though she knows it). She’s using language to actualize.
Dayrit: Totally agree. The structure perfectly reflected the theme of simultaneous awareness, as much as a medium designed for our measly sequential mode of awareness can possibly be. Ugh, our glottographic written language is so earthbound!
Vlasits: I think it’s telling, Sarah, that you read it twice in order to get to all of those details. It’s almost like the structure is set up to be a story that must be read twice. It points at the value of reading stories or watching plays and movies more than once to get the richness of them, which is also what Louise is trying to argue about why being unlocked from time isn’t damaging to her life. The structure is really an ode to repeated reading.
Did you like the look of the aliens?
Fallon: They seemed nice. Neither awful nor ethereal. But of course the fact that they have neither front nor back and curly arms that perform many functions at once make them, well, ligatures. We’re word-beings with fronts and backs and middles. They’re semagrams.
Dayrit: I found them comical yet endearing, like an octopus trying to escape a wine barrel, flappy blowholes for talking, boney hole for eating and maybe pooping. But beyond their appearance, I was charmed by their anthropological dispositions, not here to pillage and plunder, just here to observe. And that ending, where they just unceremoniously leave, kinda like ducking out of party, leaving behind their looking glasses like old Tupperware.
Palmer: I was super entertained that where I imagine the Meduse in Binti have sharp stabby weapons, the heptapods have a mouth and/or anus.
For those who saw Arrival (or now intend to), thoughts?
Fallon: I haven’t seen the movie, but I cannot wait to see how they translate logograms and inflected speech to the big screen.
Palmer: I saw the movie first, and while there are a few lovely things in the story I’m glad I got to experience, I think the slow unfolding of the time play was totally spoiled because I knew it was coming. I love how both the story and the movie seem to have the same crucial turning point where a single phrase connects the two threads of the story, when you move immediately from the scene where Gary uses "non-zero-sum game" to remembering that phrase with the daughter.
Fallon: Yes, yes, zero sum is the pivot!
Kehe: That scene in the movie is so, like, soul-awakeningly good. Less so in the short story, but only because I saw it coming. So basically I experienced the short story like a heptapod, already aware of its entirety! Well, not really. There are some differences. A minor one, for instance, is that the movie emphasizes the Sapir-Whorf-ness of Louise’s perceptual transformation, doing exactly what Chiang (overtly) doesn't: over-explain things. Plus I recall some villainizing of the Chinese in the film, which plays no part in the text. So Hollywood. I kinda wish I would’ve read the short first.
Dayrit: I feel the movie was "inspired by" the short story, not "based on." Hollywood did take a lot of liberties. The movie was much more bellicose, pitting country against country, folding in elements of terrorism, the Russians and the Chinese on the verge of triggering WWIII. While I don’t agree with all the movie’s choices, like Forest Whitaker’s Boston-by-way-of-Savannah accent, it felt properly scaled. The ending of the short story, while more than satisfying as a literary experience, would not have worked in a big-budget film. The movie certainly does a better job at showing Louise’s transition from a sequential mode of awareness to a simultaneous mode of awareness. It kind of just happened in the short story, no Eureka moment, as if she just figured out how to conjugate in Heptapod B. Highly neat, but underwhelming. I suppose a scene in which Louise’s mind is blown would not have been in keeping with the overall mood of the short story.
__Are heptapods four-dimensional creatures, then? Able to see all of a sequence of time in a blink, the way we would see a statue in a blink? __
Vlasits: I buy it. I think maybe the more interesting question is whether someone like Louise could be suddenly—or gradually for that matter—unlocked from time. My reading of the story is that she experiences it as this out-of-order set of thoughts. But would a human be able to make sense of things happening out of order in this way? Is it like The Time Traveler’s Wife where one person experiences time in a different order than the other? Or is she experiencing it all more than one time? Chiang acknowledges that she can’t quite experience things the way the heptapods do, but it seems like it would be hard to accept an out-of-order existence after experiencing the world in order. This was definitely the most science-fiction-y part for me.
Do you guys seek to achieve the maximum? Or the minimum?
Dayrit: I didn’t really get the whole maximum-minimum concept. Can someone please explain?
Fallon: Well, I guess they say that having children exposes you to the maximum possible joy and also leaves you vulnerable to the absolutely worst thing that can happen to your heart. Most of the time you’re just taking the quickest path through it, trying to get them to vacuum the floor and just kind of muffling along. But then you have those two moments that I mentioned above of "That’s her, she’s mine." And those are the best and worst moments of your life. But more broadly, some people seek to minimize harms to them, some people seek to maximize pleasure. I guess that’s what I was getting at. I think I just kind of take the most pragmatic line through things. Boring.
