He currently works as a technical writer in the software industry and resides in Bellevue, near Seattle, Washington. He graduated from Brown University with a Computer Science degree. Ted Chiang is an American speculative fiction writer.
doi: 10.3389/ chiang story of your life filetype pdf “Time and Narrative: An Investigation of Storytelling Abilities in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder. įerretti, Francesco, Ines Adornetti, Alessandea Chiera, Serena Nicchiarelli, Giovanni Valeri, Rita Magni, Stefano Vicari, and Andrea Marini. “The 1990s: When Technology Upended Our World.” History Stories, History, January 31, 2019. “Language, Memory, and Mental Time Travel: An Evolutionary Perspective.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 13 (217): 1-9. London: Pan Macmillan, 333-4.Ĭorballis, Michael C. “Story Notes: Story of Your Life.” Stories of Your Life and Others. “Story of Your Life.” In Starlight 2, edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden. “Relativism.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. The upheaval in Louise’s understanding of her own subjectivity in time mirrors the shift in humanity’s understanding of our place in the universe, and both serve to rehearse possibilities for new ways in which humans can relate to each other as we become more closely networked and known to each other.īaghramian, Maria and Carter, J.
But it can also be read as a meditation on uncertainty: the everyday uncertainty that allows us to exercise our imaginations and free wills as our lives play out in real time, and the radical uncertainty about the Future that an encounter with technologically advanced aliens who presumably do know our future makes explicit. In some ways, the story is about inevitability and how a human might cope with an entirely alien form of language, consciousness, and knowledge of her own future, her daughter’s future. Louise gains a new experiential mode of simultaneous consciousness, but at the same time becomes alienated from the present moment and from her fellow humans as she tries to reconcile her knowledge of the inevitable with the feeling that she is now an actor in a play that nobody else knows they are in. They come to Earth to hold up a mirror – or a hundred and twelve looking glasses – to humanity, and the people who look closely and study diligently see…themselves, but their entire selves. The heptapods’ function in the story is to serve as an otherworldly Other, a catalyst for learning an alien language and an alien worldview. This first contact story is not about the aliens per se. Louise Banks gains enough proficiency in Heptapod B to start thinking like the heptapods do, she begins to “remember” her own future and finds that it comes with an attendant “sense of urgency, a sense of obligation to act precisely as she knew she would” (Chiang 1998, 29).
Our ability as readers to comprehend the text itself, a series of recursive but disjointed scenes from the narrator’s past and future, as a narrative with global coherence is a demonstration of humans’ capacity for increasingly complex mental time travel, a faculty related to episodic memory and believed to be augmented by new technologies (Corballis 2019 Ferretti et al 2018). In “Story of Your Life,” Chiang uses innovations in nonlinear narrative techniques and the invention of a semasiographic written language called Heptapod B to explore the ways that the structure of language influences cognition (Baghramian and Carter 2019). The sensational and the newsworthy serve to highlight a quieter revolution, though, a deep revision of the everyday ways that people related to language, the experience of time, and each other.
Nirvana released “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and Microsoft released Windows 95. Third Wave feminism was gaining momentum at the same time as the dot-com bubble. News of the Gulf War was televised in real time, gay rights activists found close-knit communities online as hate crimes peaked across the country, and by 1998 the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal was underway, spurred by rumors posted on an obscure political weblog (Darke 2019).
It was before the rise of now-ubiquitous and near-instantaneous communications technologies like smartphones and social media, but the collapse of time and distance had already begun to accelerate. Ted Chiang’s novella “Story of Your Life,” an elegant experiment combining aliens, variational principles, and the linguistic relativity hypothesis, was first published in 1998, just as the western world was coming online and people were beginning to come in contact with each other in unprecedented ways.