The story of your life

The narration is conducted on behalf of the doctor of sciences, linguist Louise Banks. In her memoirs, two scenes interspersed: on the one hand, Louise talks about the visit of aliens to Earth and attempts to establish contact with them, on the other, the heroine recalls episodes of her relationship with her daughter, who died at the age of 25 (the story about her daughter is written in the form of an appeal to her and in the future tense).

Alien spaceships were in orbit of the Earth unexpectedly. The aliens did not make any demands, but they installed “mirrors” in several places on Earth through which communication sessions were arranged. Each session was attended by two aliens (who were called "heptapods", because they had seven limbs) and two earthlings. Earthlings set their task to master the language of aliens and learn about their scientific and technical achievements, in this regard, Louise was invited to one of the “mirrors” as a specialist in linguistics, physicist Gary acted as her partner. Over time, using the methods of field linguistics , Louise (in collaboration with colleagues from other similar communication centers) was able to understand the spoken language of the aliens and act as a translator.

However, to a greater extent she was interested in the written version of their language, which was a completely autonomous system that did not reflect the oral version and was close to ideographic writing (Louise called it “semographic”). This type of writing had no analogues in earthly languages , with the help of it the meaning was conveyed by combinations of images for individual concepts, which were woven into a huge pattern; shades of meaning were expressed by turning the figures, the slope or thickness of individual lines. If the spoken language of the heptapods was linear, then the letter did not reflect the order of the words in the sentence, but included all the concepts that were contained in the utterance. According to Louise, the writing features of the heptapods were also associated with the arrangement of their bodies (they possessed radial symmetry ), and also reflected their picture of the world. Having learned as a result of a discussion of mathematical and physical laws that Fermat’s principle is fundamental for heptapods, Louise understands that alien thinking is fundamentally different. For them, there is no freedom of choice and causation , since they perceive history not as a sequence, but as a whole, as the totality of all past and only upcoming facts. In other words, heptapods know what is going to happen and follow this knowledge.

More and more immersed in the study of the writing of heptapods and penetrating into their thinking, Louise herself begins to think in a similar way, and she opens her future (for fifty years until her death), but she does not tell people about it. Suddenly, heptapods leave the Earth without revealing the purpose of their visit. At the end of Louise’s story, it becomes clear that her memories of her daughter were not memories: at the time of the story, she was at a time when Louise and her husband Gary (he became a physicist, whom she met during the visit of the heptapods) decide to have a baby, and difficult relationships with her daughter, divorce from her husband, the death of her daughter are events that Louise has yet to experience.

This story is a vivid example of science fiction, for which the plot-forming element (in accordance with the Sepir – Whorf hypothesis ) is a fictional language ^[3] .

Linguist Alexander Piperski , discussing the film adaptation of the story, emphasized that although the writing of the heptapods is very unusual and has no analogues in any natural language, many of the properties of this language “are not so surprising: for example, the radical difference between spoken and written language is similar to the situation in medieval Europe, when everyone had long spoken German and Romance languages, and wrote in Latin ” ^[4] .

• 1999 - Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Prize , in the category Best NF Story ( 1998 )
• 2000 - Nebula Award, Novella Award ( 1998 )
• 2002 - Seiunsh Прем Prize (星雲 賞 Seiunshō, 第 33 回 2002), in the nomination Translated Story
• 2003 - “ Locus ” Award, in the nomination Author's collection (Collection) ( 2002 )
• 2003 - SFinks Award (Nagroda SFinks), in the nomination Foreign story of the year

In 2014, it became known that the story would be filmed by director Denis Villeneuve . Amy Adams was invited to the lead role ^[5] . The first trailer of the film was released in August 2016 ^[6] , the premiere took place on November 11, 2016.

• Your life story on fantlab.ru
• Your life story on the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Karatsupa V. Ted Chan. The story of your life (rus.) . Announcements . Fiction Archive. Date of treatment May 18, 2009. Archived March 31, 2012.