Story of Your Life

Ted Chiang, author

Publisher

Tor Books

Units

one novella (~17,000 words); alternates present-tense sections about first contact with second-person, future-tense sections addressed to the narrator's still-unconceived daughter

isbn13

9780765304193

A linguist recruited to decode an alien language discovers, alongside a physicist colleague's parallel work on Fermat's principle of least time, that the heptapods perceive the whole of time non-sequentially; achieving fluency in their written language lets her experience her own life the same way, including a marriage that will end and a daughter not yet conceived who will die young. First published in the anthology Starlight 2 (Tor, 1998) and collected in Stories of Your Life and Others (Tor, 2002).