Through the eyes of linguist Louise Banks, the story follows her research into cracking the language of an alien species, enabling communication between races and resulting in her unexpected ability to know what the future holds.

Because much of the story is based upon theories of linguistic relativity, it took Chiang five years researching linguistics in order to be able to write the story. The variational principle concerns finding functions that optimize the values of quantities that depend on those functions.

In the 'Story Notes' section of the 1999 version, Chiang writes that the story came from his fascination with the variational principle in physics. Instead, through their writing system, they have access to every event at once, which allows them to remember the future as well as the past.Ĭhiang has stated that his inspiration for writing the story came from contemplating the philosophical question of free will and determinism, wondering how to make such an abstract argument concrete. Banks decodes the heptapod languages and soon discovers that they do not write according to a linear passage of time. They make contact with two heptapods who they nickname Flapper and Raspberry. Gary Donnelly is supposed to learn about their physics, mathematics, and technology. Banks is tasked with learning the aliens' language, while Dr. Gary Donnelly are assigned to one of the sites. There are nine looking glasses in the United States, and Dr. The humans nickname these devices 'looking glasses,' and they can communicate with heptapods through these devices. In the past, aliens (called 'heptapods') enter Earth's orbit and place 112 devices across the globe. She addresses the story to her daughter and alternates between describing moments from the future and recounting what happened in the past. Louise Banks the day her daughter is conceived. The story was the basis for Denis Villeneuve's 2016 film Arrival, which was nominated for eight Academy Awards and won one, for Best Sound Editing. It was then reprinted in his short-story collection, Stories of Your Life and Others, in 2002. The approximately 50-page-long work was first published in 1998 in the second volume of the Starlight anthology. ' Story of Your Life' is an award-winning science fiction novella by acclaimed short story writer Ted Chiang.

Arrival and story of your life