The Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang

            In Ted Chiang’s The Story of Your Life, an alien species known as heptapods speak in a very peculiar language. When our protagonist finally understands their written form of communication, known as Heptapod B, she begins to see her life memories all at once. Her memories no longer appear chronologically, as they would for a normal human being. Instead, they appear as they would to a heptapod, all at once, with no chronological ordering or significance. However, even though her memories are affected by her immersion into the heptapod language, her string of consciousness flows like that of a human. As she explains, “Even though I am proficient with Heptapod B, I know I don’t experience reality the way a heptapod does. My mind was cast in the mold of human, sequential languages, and no amount of immersion in an alien language can completely reshape it. My worldview is an amalgam of human and heptapod” (Chiang 173). So, while her memories, both those in the past, and those that have yet to occur, come to her simultaneously, she continues to experience events throughout her life one at a time, as it is in the present moment. There are times when she can think like a heptapod, and see and experience everything all at once, past, present and future. But this is only temporarily. She is, as a whole, caught in between to forms of existence—or, at least, forms of experiencing one’s existence. What was interesting was, at the end, when she explains to her unborn daughter, “From the beginning I knew my destination, and I chose my route accordingly” (Chiang 178). This poses the question about whether our fate is predetermined or shaped by choice. Seeing her future memories influenced the protagonist to make decisions that would comply with them. However, if she hadn’t already known what lay in store for her, could she have chosen otherwise? Was she bound to make all the same choices unwittingly, or could she have easily changed her fate by choosing differently? Perhaps her fate was sealed the minute she learned Heptapod B, and began to go through life partially bound, in a way, to a language and culture that sees everything in a predetermined way. Perhaps, if she’d merely lived her life knowing only human languages, she would have had the ability to influence her own future, something that many humans believe in. It could be that, once the protagonist immerses herself in the heptapod language, she begins to live out her life the way other heptapods do, with both the past and the future set and immovable. Perhaps the immersion caused her fate to be set and immovable. As for the rest of us who live and speak through sequential languages, we live our lives in a way where one event leads to another, just like our sentence structures. In this way, our language affects us, and possibly changes us, as much as we affect and change it. It speaks to the power of language itself, which can easily change how we see the world and ourselves, whether it is through a book, a conversation, or immersion into a whole new linguistic and cultural perspective.