Story of Your Life

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Story of Your Life is a first time in 1998 in the magazine Starlight published short story of the American author Ted Chiang . The German translation of the story of your life appeared in 2011 in a short story collection comprising five works entitled Hell is the absence of God by Golkonda-Verlag . The short story belongs to the genre of science fiction and there to the sub-genre of first contact stories.

action

The story told in the first person consists of a framework plot in the form of the first contact narrative and an embedded second narrative thread in which the narrator addresses her future daughter, who will perish as a young adult on a climbing tour in the mountains. The framework story is written in the past tense, the second narrative thread in the future tense II .

Framework story

Alien spaceships take up position in earth orbit . The aliens refuse to come into personal contact with humanity . Instead, devices called “mirrors” are being placed in various places on earth, through which image and sound signals can be transmitted directly between the spaceships and the earth. Teams of a natural scientist and a linguist are formed to communicate with the aliens through these devices. One of the American teams consists of the physicist Gary Donelly and the linguist Louise Banks, the protagonist and narrator of the story.

Communication with the extraterrestrials, called heptapods because of their seven flexible limbs , is very difficult at first. Although these also communicate via modulated sound waves, the sounds they generate cannot be imitated by humans. Banks decides to use the aliens' written language. This is logographic , whereby each of the extremely complex characters does not just stand for a word, but includes complete statements. With enormous effort, Banks succeeds in gradually acquiring the written language. At the same time, she acquired an ever deeper understanding of the way the heptapods thought ( see Sapir-Whorf hypothesis ). It turns out that the heptapods perceive time not as linear and one-sided directed towards the future, but as undirected, whereby they are able to “remember” the future as well as the past. The heptapods do not understand events from their beginning as cause-effect relationships , but rather teleologically from their end. The author Ted Chiang illustrates this using the example of Fermat's principle .

The purpose of making contact is never entirely clear. It seems that the aliens are primarily concerned with obtaining general information about the human species. The hoped-for transfer of knowledge from aliens to humanity never takes place. In the end, the aliens leave the earth without humanity being able to gain new scientific or technological knowledge.

Second narrative thread

Banks penetrates so deeply into the way of thinking of the heptapods that they adopt them and consequently also acquire the ability to remember the future. This ability enables her to “remember” her daughter, who was still unborn at the time of the frame story, and whose father will be her teammate Gary Donelly. In the second narrative strand, she describes important moments in life with her daughter, right up to her violent death in the mountains. The skill acquired by the heptapods raises profound philosophical questions and appears to lead to paradoxes . Banks understands that the ability to remember the future goes hand in hand with a fundamentally affirmative attitude towards life: every spoken word, every action is already known and only needs to be realized in the exact "remembered" form. Banks will therefore have her daughter, despite the great suffering her death will cause her.

filming

The film Arrival is based on this short story.

Awards

The Story of Your Life won the Nebula Award and the Sturgeon Award .

German edition

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Ted Chiang: Hell is the absence of God . Golkonda-Verlag Berlin, ISBN 978-3-942396-12-7 , p. 180.