Ted Chiang’s ‘Story of Your Life’ (1998); ‘Arrival’ (directed by Denis Villeneuve, 2016)

The jim, jam, jump on the jumpin jive/Makes you dig your jive on the mellow side/ Heptapod-heptapod

In Ted Chiang’s ‘Story of Your Life’ (1998) alien craft appear in Earth orbit. These visitors place 112 viewing devices, known as ‘looking glasses’, at various places on the Earth’s surface: each is ‘a semicircular mirror over ten feet high and twenty across’ that provide audiovisual links to the alien ‘heptapods’ overhead—the aliens are so-called because they have seven tentacular limbs, and seven eyes arranged all around their heads. Linguist Louise Banks and physicist Gary Donnelly are recruited by the U.S. Army to work on establishing communications, to learn the heptapod language and teach them English, via one of the nine looking glass positioned in the U.S.. They interact with two heptapods, nicknamed Flapper and Raspberry after the kinds of noises they respectively make. The alien language, as Louise begins slowly to learn it, is radically different to any human languages, with completely free word order and each utterance including many layers of center-embedded clauses—in this, Chiang is drawing on Ian Watson’s great novel of science-fictional linguistics and alien encounter The Embedding (1973). The two scientists work together: Gary applies concepts from physics, such as Fermat's Principle of Least Time—the story explains this principle with the help of physics diagrams embedded in the narrative—and Louise works with her linguistic knowledge, realising that heptapod language is not temporally sequential, but concurrent: as the ‘ray of light has to know where it will ultimately end up before it can choose the direction to begin moving in’, so the heptapod know the whole of their communication as they speak it. She comes to understand and speak the language in the second of its two forms, the written iteration ‘Heptapod B’ (Heptapod A, the spoken form, is beyond the capacity of human larynxes to replicate).

As they work, over many months, Louise and Gary fall in love.

About half the story is taken up with Louise recalling, as narrator, the process by which she and Gary came to understand heptapod language: these sections are written in the past tense and first person. Interleaved with them are sections written in the future tense and second person, in which Louise, again as narrator, addresses her own daughter. In these portions Louise talks about how she remembers various moments in her daughter’s life: starting with the night she was conceived, various occasions when Louise, as a single parent, raised her, her leaving home and going to university, getting a job and her dying, at the age of twenty-five, in a mountaineering accident. Chiang disposes these not in chronological order of the girl’s growing up: her future memory of visiting the morgue and seeing her daughter’s dead body is only a few pages in to the story.

As Louise learns the heptapod language she understands that they do not experience time sequentially, but as a simultaneity. More, as she herself becomes more fluent in heptapod B, her own consciousness drifts from conventional human apperceptions of time. She starts to get glimpses of her own future. These, we realise, are what constitute the other half of the story: the sections addressed to her daughter are Louise, on the night she agrees to Gary’s suggestion (they have been together for two years at this point) to make a baby together, seeing the future life of her child. Her immersion in Heptapod-B means that she has come to see time the way the aliens do, so she knows that the child will die at 25 in a climbing accident; and that her relationship with Gary will break-up. All this is available to her as a function of her new linguistic perspective. In the course of the tale she ponders what this knowledge means for free will, but she accepts her mournful fate.

She, narrating the story, is adamant that knowledge of the future does not entail any paradox or contradiction where free will is concerned. She imagines a ‘Book of Ages’ in which everyone’s life, past present and future, was written out. If you consulted and discovered your own future, what would you do? Her conclusion:

Freedom isn’t an illusion; it’s perfectly real in the context of sequential consciousness. Within the context of simultaneous consciousness, freedom is not meaningful, but neither is coercion; it’s simply a different context, no more or less valid than the other … knowledge of the future was incompatible with free will. What made it possible to exercise freedom of choice also made it impossible for me to know the future. Conversely, now that I know the future, I would never act contrary to that future, including telling others what I know: those who know the future don’t talk about it. Those who’ve read the Book of Ages never admit to it. [Ted Chiang, ‘Story of Your Life’]

I wonder about this, both in terms of human variety—some given this future-sight might choose not to talk about it, but others, surely would—but also in terms of the story’s own logic: because half of ‘Story of Your Life’ is Louise choosing to talk about the future she knows is coming. (It’s true she tells an as yet unborn child, rather than a sentient and comprehending audience).

At the story’s end the heptapods abruptly announce they are leaving. They don’t say why, or ever explain why they came in the first place: they just go. Louise writes a book explaining how to learn the heptapod language.

It’s a great story, beautifully constructed, thought-provoking, moving. The sections about Louise and Gary working to decipher the heptapod language are, in themselves forward-looking—the language is mystery they are hoping, in the future, to solve—but are written in the past tense. What the past tense does is construe memory, and the portions of the story about Louise’s ‘memories’ of her daughter are, counter-intuitively, written in the future tense. The 2016 movie adaptation (to which I come below), by moving the story into a different medium, turns this aspect into a more straightforward twist or surprise: clips of Louise (Amy Adams) with a young girl ‘read’ to the cinema audience as flashbacks, because we are familiar with the cinematic convention of the flashback; only at the end of the movie do we realise that they have been ‘flash-forwards’ all along.

Two things about Chiang’s story particularly strike me. One is that it is an exercise in Sapir-Whorf fiction: a speculative extrapolation that takes as axiomatic not just that Sapir and Whorf were correct, but that the strong version of their hypothesis is the right one: viz, the language one speaks radically determines the reality one perceives. This is a little problematic, in the terms that Chiang develops the idea. Sapir-Whorf don’t suggest that picking up a little conversational French, or Hopi, on the side means that you will experience a radical alteration in one’s entire consciousness and perception. The core language—English, in Louise’s case—will continue to provide the structuring of her consciousness. I suppose we could imagine her immersing herself in heptapodspeak, to the point where she forgets the English she used to know, thinks and dreams in heptapod, and starts to experience the world through that lens. But even then, it surely goes beyond plausibility that this change would do more than shift the experiential perception of time—such that instead of thinking of time in discrete units of minutes, hours, days like a Westerner you start to think of time as a less differentiated flow like, a Hopi. But ‘if I speak these words rather than those words I will literally see the future’ is magic, not linguistics. Words describe the world. The particular way they describe the world may, as Sapir and Whorf thought, shape the structure and limits of our ability to think about that world; but words do not directly effect and change reality—that’s a magic spell, not a function of actual language.

But alright: let’s swallow the premise, for the sake of the story. Louise learns heptapod and it means she can see the future, The story gives us that future and it … looks exactly like the present. The story extrapolates a quarter century into the future and it involves Louise’s daughter doing entirely ordinary, recognisable things: doing her chores, graduating university, getting a job, going on holiday. But this buries, as the phrase goes, the lede. Louise has written a book that teaches us how to learn the language of the heptapods. Which is to say, Louise has written a book that, for anyone interested in doing so, teaches them to see the future. There now exists in the world a manual that teaches us how to have true and infallible visions of the to-come. Surely many people would use the book to acquire this skill. I suppose some might deliberately avoid it, not wanting to know their fate, and some might simply not care. But surely many people would avail themselves of this new possibility. The premise, in other words, is: what would the world look like if millions of people were suddenly able to see the future? How might that change the way the world works? Imagine families speaking nothing but heptapod—using technical prostheses or getting their larynxes surgically altered so they can actually speak it, as well as write it—raising their children to speak heptapod. A large population no longer living in sequential time. When Pandora opened her box, all manner of ills and evils flew out, but she managed to slam the lid back down before the worst of all ills got free: knowledge of the future. Would the post-heptapod world be Pandoran? Or something better.

This is the Narnian wardrobe problem:—although ‘problem’ is a tendentious way of putting it, I concede. What I mean is: the more dramatically interesting aspect of C S Lewis’s Fantasy novum is ignored in the story that Lewis chooses to tell, or so it seems to me. The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe takes its main characters, the four Pevensie kids, through the magic portal of the wardrobe and into wintry Narnia—a cast iron lamppost in the middle of a medieval forest—where they have exciting adventures, eventually becoming kings and queens: King Peter the Magnificent, Queen Susan the Gentle, King Edmund the Just and Queen Lucy the Valiant. They grow to adulthood in this world, until, many years later, they chance upon the lamppost again, and tumble back into our world, no longer adults, now children. Only a few hours have passed on Earth, for all the years (decades?) they spent in Narnia. Then Lewis stops. But this is where the story starts, surely—what would it be like to have an adult consciousness inside the body of a child? To have passed through puberty, and then suddenly to have the hormone tap switched off? You could hardly go back to you former existence; but neither could you expect to live as an adult. Would you go mad, or use your beyond-your-seeming-years wisdom to some purpose? How would you cope? Would you try to explain? Would you betray yourself, and reveal the Narnia portal to the world—would governments attempt to exploit it? The psychological interest in the story begins at the end; but that's exactly the place where Lewis drops the bar down and ends things.

Denis Villeneuve’s movie adaptation of this story is a major achievement: handsomely mounted, well-acted: one of his best films. Generally we can say that screen-text science fiction is different to written-text science fiction. Where SF, as short stories and novels, is a literature of ideas, cool notions, brain-expanding speculations and extrapolations—such as is the case with Chiang’s story—films, TV shows and video games are much less suited to the communication of ideas. It can be done, and Arrival does convey some of the ideas of its source material—characters can talk at one another, explaining concepts and ideas, a voiceover can explain or elaborate—but film is primarily a visual idiom, and it does images and motion well: it can convey kinetic excitement, and heightened emotion. SF cinema tends to trade not in ideas but in visual spectacularism. That’s all fine: the ideas in Star Wars are few and not very interesting, but the visual splendour and excitement and marvellousness of the movie are superb.

In the case of Arrival, screenwriter Eric Heisserer and director Denis Villeneuve made some substantial alterations to the source material by way of adaptation. In the movie the heptapod space-ships do not remain in Earth orbit, but descend almost to the earth at various global locations, hovering a few metres over the ground, looking rather like gigantic coprolites. Rather than communicating at one remove, via the ‘looking glasses’, Louise and Ian (for some opaque reason, the movie renames Chiang’s Gary Donnelly ‘Ian Donnelly’) physically enter the spacecrafts and engage the heptapods face to face, albeit on the far side of a glass barrier.

The movie throws in stuff not in the story to generate tension and cinematic excitement. We are shown that other countries suspect the heptapods of staging an invasion: China puts its fleet on standby to attack the spaceships. International co-operation—a requisite for the business of decoding and understanding the heptapods—breaks down. At the halfway point some rogue US soldiers (I think: it’s not altogether clear) secrete a bomb aboard the heptapod spacecraft in which Louise and Ian are interacting with the aliens. This explodes, and Louise and Ian are saved only by the intervention of the heptapods, who use some kind of force-field to eject the two humans from the room in which the explosion happens. One of the two heptapods with which they have been meeting (renamed in the movie ‘Abbot and Costello’, for some, again opaque reason) is fatally injured by the blast. International tension ramps up, the US military prepare to abandon the base beneath the heptapod craft. China gives the aliens a 24 hour ultimatum to leave, or they will open fire on their craft. In the story, none of this happens, and the aliens simply leave, their departure as inexplicable as their coming. The movie fills-in a reason for their arrival: as ‘Abbot’ is dying, ‘Costello’ explains to Louise—who now understands the aliens’ particular relationship to time—that they came to Earth to help humanity, because in 3,000 years they themselves will need humanity's help in return. Quid nunc pro quo futuris. Louise defuses the international tension by ringing the Chinese general in charge of their military response, on his private phone, and telling him something that only he can know—his wife’s dying words. This scene is a rather awkwardly inserted into the narrative, I think: it’s there to illustrate the future-vision of which Louise is now capable: once the astonished General Shang understand, he stands-down his army and calls Louise to tell her, in her future, what the words are, so that past-Louise can know them in order to call him. It’s an unnecessary little curlicue in the plotting, since the alien craft—having completed their mission, taught Louise their language and set-up the reciprocal human help three millennia away—depart anyway. It’s also a distraction, a minor twist that isn’t needed because the major twist is ongoing: that what viewers had assumed were flashbacks—such that the love-story between Louise and Ian reads as a woman with tragedy in her past finding joy again with the love of her life—is upended. This relationship will produce the daughter we have been seeing, who will die (in the movie, at age 12 of cancer rather than at age 25 of falling off a mountain: an alteration made, I suppose, to ramp-up the pathos). This revelation is very effective, a coup de théâtre, surprising and moving, and it balances the ‘success! We deciphered the alien language!’ happy ending with an unexpected draught of tragedy.

Really this is the main change that Heisserer and Villeneuve make to their source material. Chiang’s story is about Louise and Gary falling in love, but it concentrate much more on the relationship between Louise and her daughter. It is, really, about that relationship, which is why the form is so effective. Time travel stories are a way of talking about our own relationship to the past (or the future), which is to say they are ‘actually’ about memory, about where we come from and how that shapes us, and about anticipation, hopes and fears of the to-come, of what we grow into. Take Rowling’s ‘time turner’. In one sense this novum is an awkwardness for Rowling: once she has introduced it into her world she has to dispose of it, or it would short-circuit the plotting she needs to do—if, for instance, the defenders of Hogwarts at the final battle had time-turners, they could rewind and replay every moment in the battle until they were victorious. So once she introduces them, in Prisoner of Azkaban, she has to unintroduce them again (in Half-Blood Prince Hermione reads a newspaper account of an accident at the Ministry of Magic, in which a cabinet containing all the time-turners in the world has been destroyed. On account of the turners' special properties, the cabinet falls, shatters and repairs itself endlessly in a rather neat temporal short-circuit, that happens to keep them conveniently out of the way of the remainder of the storytelling Rowling has to do.) But the time-turners are worth bringing-in, nonetheless. One of Rowling’s themes in the Potter novels is the relationship between the parental generation and the children who succeed them. Harry misses and idolises his parents. As the novels go on he discovers his Dad was a bit of a bully when he was Harry's age; he has to reevaluate who his Dad was, recognise his failings as well as his merits, as we all do with our parents. In Azkaban, threatened by Dementors, Harry is saved by somebody casting a patronus spell: a stag. He thinks this is his father, except obviously it can't be, since his father is dead. At the end of the novel it turns out that it was he himself, time-returned, who saved himself. Wendy Doniger is right about how forceful and touching this scene is:

Thanks to a wonderfully complex and subtle episode of time travel that traces a Möbius twist in the chronological sequence, Harry encounters himself in the loop where past and present come together and overlap. The first time he lives through this period, he sees, across a lake, someone he vaguely recognises: perhaps his father? No, his father is dead, but that person sends a silver stag which saves him from present danger. When he goes back in time, he runs to the same place to see who it was, and there’s no one else there: he is the one who sends the stag to save himself in the future. The moment when Harry realises that he mistook himself for his father is powerful; and it is, after all, the only real kind of time travel there is: each of us becomes, in adulthood, someone who lived some thirty years before us, someone who must save our own life.

Chiang’s story does something similar, I think, although inverting the relationship: parent to child rather than the other way about. The ‘normal’ course of events is that the parent dies before the child; but in this case that order is reversed.

Villeneuve’s movie is much less interested in the mother-daughter relationship, which appears in a few flash-forwards, infantalised (because of the decision to kill off the daughter at the age of 12 rather than 25) and rather schematic. The film is much more interested in the love-story between Louise and Gary-Crossed-Out-Ian. One intriguing element is why Ian is absent from Louise’s visions of the future. In Chiang’s story, the implication is that the couple has simply split up, as couples sometimes do, and that Gary does his share of child-rearing (the daughter stays with him at the weekend for instance). In the movie the break seems more absolute, either (I’m not sure it’s made clear) because Ian is angry that Louise went ahead and conceived a child, knowing that the child would die, without telling him—or perhaps because he, being informed of the child’s inevitable future, simply couldn’t bear to remain, because it was too painful. This is an interesting issue: of the ‘better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all’ kind. Would you continue with a pregnancy if you knew, for a certainty, that the child you carried would die at twelve?

One element here is the design of the Heptapod-B script. In Chiang’s story, this is not described, beyond the fact that the ‘logograms’ the aliens write can be in any order, and can be moved around or rotated without changing their meaning. The film-makers developed the idea of an annular script.

Conceptualization began with screenwriter of the film, Eric Heisserer, who decided to base Heptapod B's circular script on the etchings in the One Ring from The Lord of the Rings. Due to this, Heisserer's circular illustrations of Heptapod B initially bore a strong resemblance to J. R. R Tolkien's Tengwar script. Afterwards, Patrice Vermette, the production designer for Arrival, worked alongside other crew members to further develop Heptapod B … Vermette's wife, artist Martine Bertrand, offered to sketch some conceptual designs for the language. Bertrand approached Vermette with some designs for Heptapod B, which deviated from the more mathematical or hieroglyphic conceptualizations the crew had come up with, and instead appeared as more "inky and smoky" characters. These designs were approved by director Denis Villeneuve, who gave Bertrand the task of developing 15 similar designs for Heptapod B. Once the design for Heptapod B was developed, Patrice Vermette and his team oversaw the semantics behind the characters. After several characters and definitions were developed, Stephen Wolfram, computer scientist and founder of Wolfram Mathematica, and his son, Christopher, were asked to analyze them; they did so utilising the Wolfram Language to section each character into 12 different parts in order, and found that certain patterns repeated through the characters. Heptapod B characters were also sent to Jessica Coon, an associate professor in linguistics at McGill University who was asked to annotate the characters as if she were analyzing them in real life. As Vermette and his team gained more insight on the semantics behind Heptapod B, they developed a dictionary of roughly 100 Heptapod B logograms, 71 of which were used in the film. With their research into Heptapod B, both Vermette and Christopher Wolfram stated that resources were available to build a larger vocabulary for Heptapod B, but this process would require an extensive amount of time.

That the alien language, the tongue that gives speakers the ability literally to see the future, takes the form of a ring is appropriate not only in the sense that the premise reconfigures time from being linear to being circularly all-around, all-present, but in that the movie is tracing out the path of two people to marriage. It has always struck me that Tolkien—a man happily married, a man who believed in the importance of marriage, not just as a partnership but as a actual sacrament, should have chosen, as the embodiment of the ultimate evil in his imaginary fantasyland, a wedding band—the other rings of power are adorned with jewels, but the One Ring is a plain gold round (I write about this choice here, actually). The ring links and harmonizes; but it also binds (the band in ‘wedding band’ is the same word as bind), confines, limits. Arrival is about that: interested throughout in confinement, in both senses; in enclosed spaces and imprisonment, on the ties that bind.