Story of Your Life is a 1998 science fiction novella by Ted Chiang. If you want to just read it the whole text is available here or spoken here. Spoilers follow. It tells the stories of an extraterrestrial first contact, the life of her daughter, and the way these two narratives interrelate from the perspective of Dr. Louise Banks. Louise tells the story in a slightly obtuse order for reasons that become apparent by the end of the tale.
The inciting incident for the whole tale is alien spaceships arriving in Earth orbit. Not long after this the United States military reaches out to Dr. Banks for her expertise as a linguist. For whatever reason the aliens didn't bother learning a single human language so everyone is at a bit of a loss for how to communicate. She joins the contact effort where she meets her future husband, physicist Dr. Gary Donnelly. They meet the aliens which communicate through a glass sheet that acts like a TV screen by transmitting sound and image. Conveniently the aliens have a spoken and written language just like us. That's where the convenience ends. The aliens are heptapods with radial symmetry and completely separate respiratory and consumptive orifices on the top and bottom of there bodies. After recovering from the initial shock Louise gets to work establishing baseline communication. Despite huge differences between our species the initial attempt to establish syntax from alien utterances proceeds smoothly but human ears are specific instruments and efforts to comprehend the nuances of what sounds like coughing are slow at best. Louise decides to try to move to written forms and discovers that the aliens have an equally obtuse writing system of logograms which can be rotated at any angle and are arbitrarily large which makes them pretty hard to wrap our poor little human minds around. If that weren't bad enough the grammars are different meaning it's functionally a different language from spoken heptapod.
As though first contact translation wasn't confusing enough the narrative takes brief trips into the future to relay interactions that will occur between Louise and her daughter. These interactions are all described as matter of fact future tense. Matter of fact like a recalled memory; future tense as in not having happened yet. Louise's precollections paint a tumultuous but loving relationship that exists between them over the course of their lives.
Back in the past, language learning is going swimmingly but the physics department is stone walled trying to get any exchanges until they bring up Fermat’s Principle of Least time. It seems like the aliens have very different conceptualizations of the same laws of physics with notions of complex things as simple and parts that we find simple as complex. Where we see causality they see intention. At the same time Louise is learning to think in the alien script. Her inner eye draws sprawling complex designs representing whole paragraphs of info. Eventually the logograms appear in her head fully formed with no assembly time. She notes that this provides no attendant speeding of thought; rather generating a lingering gestalt proportional to the size of the symbol. It's around this point in time that Louise begins to remember the future.
Imagine you had the book describing your whole life from beginning to end. You turn to read about tomorrow and see that you are going to stub your toe. Do you stub your toe because the book said to or does the book say it because you are going to? That question has no answer. Without linear time causality is a bad framing. The aliens don't experience time in slices front to back and now neither does Louise. Time to go buy some winning lottery tickets, right? Not so fast. If the future is some definite thing then you can't alter it. If it isn't some definite thing then she'd see a multitude of futures which she doesn't. So is she trapped in some unalterable duration; an actor forced through time's stage play? Well, that's a matter of perspective. Are you trapped in a single moment in time? You are in a single moment in time but are you trapped in it? All of Louise's motives, fears, desires, and impulses are still there and each choice is just as intentional from outside of linear time as it was in it. The nature of her experience has changed but its output is the same. Every want generates its choice which generates its action in the same fashion as before with only the thoughts in between looking different.
Back in normal human reality the aliens finished their visit and leave without providing any cool technology much to the government's chagrin. Louise and Gary get married. They decide to have a child. They will get divorced. Their daughter will grow up into a beautiful and vivacious young woman. She will die tragically at age twenty five in a rock climbing accident. Louise is thinking of all of these things as she slow dances with her husband right before he will say "Do you want to make a baby."
Story of Your Life is one of the most melancholic stories I've ever read. It accomplishes this without a shred of regret seeping into the narrative. The protagonist has no self pity. She lives the life she chose/chooses/will choose to live and she knows it. That's a hell of a juxtaposition with the loss of a child but Ted Chiang sells it. After you're done crying, this story really keeps you thinking. Even ignoring a reality where the strong version of the Sapir Whorf hypothesis grants precognition this story's ontology is bizarre. Consciousness can't violate causality but it can generate a language that makes fundamental states of mind contagious. The characters can't change things but after her transition Louise makes a comment about something being a good idea and feels smug about her foreknowledge. In one of the flash forwards her daughter makes a prediction about the weather and claims to have a sixth sense about these things. Another character expresses confusion about the tone of the conversation which Louise brushes off as an inside joke. Neither of these things are impossible or even implausible under normal causality but it seems like the future info is imperfectly screened off from present conversations. Is consciousness an epiphenomena or not!? I have the same problem with his other short story What's expected of us but its paradoxes are a bit more obvious. Most of Chiang's stories have some fuzzy, ambiguous conceit straddling the line between implausibility and impossibility at their core. He then goes the extra mile and gives said conceit extreme emotional importance for the point of view character. It's a heady mixture that twists brain and heart at once.
I think it's a fair assumption that this is Chiang's most popular work given that it's they only one to be made into a full length movie. Arrival came out in 2017 and starred Amy Adams as Louise Banks. The plot starts out mostly the same and ends pretty differently. Given how much of the story is just Louise's inner life changes were inevitable but it still manages to hit most of the important emotional beats and it's a good cerebral sci-fi thriller on top of that.
I apologize if parts of this write up were choppy or sparse. I was trying to match the story's weird pacing and tangential tendencies. It packs an unreal amount of story telling into a fairly small word count. If I haven't made it apparent, this is one of my favorite novellas. I'm really hoping that you just went ahead and read the story rather than reading my lousy summation because if you didn't I've spoiled you for the best parts. On the other hand knowing the plot and still reading and enjoying it would be thematically appropriate.
IRON NODER XVI: MORE STUBBORN-HARD THAN HAMMER'D IRON