10/26/2022 0 Comments Story of your life by ted chiang pdf#STORY OF YOUR LIFE BY TED CHIANG PDF PLUS#Plus I recall some villainizing of the Chinese in the film, which plays no part in the text. #STORY OF YOUR LIFE BY TED CHIANG PDF MOVIE#A minor one, for instance, is that the movie emphasizes the Sapir-Whorf-ness of Louise’s perceptual transformation, doing exactly what Chiang (overtly) doesn't: over-explain things. So basically I experienced the short story like a heptapod, already aware of its entirety! Well, not really. Less so in the short story, but only because I saw it coming. Fallon: Yes, yes, zero sum is the pivot! Kehe: That scene in the movie is so, like, soul-awakeningly good. I love how both the story and the movie seem to have the same crucial turning point where a single phrase connects the two threads of the story, when you move immediately from the scene where Gary uses "non-zero-sum game" to remembering that phrase with the daughter. Palmer: I saw the movie first, and while there are a few lovely things in the story I’m glad I got to experience, I think the slow unfolding of the time play was totally spoiled because I knew it was coming. The structure is really an ode to repeated reading.įor those who saw Arrival (or now intend to), thoughts?įallon: I haven’t seen the movie, but I cannot wait to see how they translate logograms and inflected speech to the big screen. It points at the value of reading stories or watching plays and movies more than once to get the richness of them, which is also what Louise is trying to argue about why being unlocked from time isn’t damaging to her life. It’s almost like the structure is set up to be a story that must be read twice. Ugh, our glottographic written language is so earthbound! Vlasits: I think it’s telling, Sarah, that you read it twice in order to get to all of those details. The structure perfectly reflected the theme of simultaneous awareness, as much as a medium designed for our measly sequential mode of awareness can possibly be. The heptapods "use language to actualize," then a few lines later, the linguist is reading the story of the three bears to her daughter just because the daughter wants to hear it (even though she knows it). but hey-o, we just had the Roxie/Nelson date scene where people understand what’s being said because of the context-the inside joke between the two girls.Īnd then, of course, as the meaning of the story becomes more and more clear, Chiang links the scenes more and more clearly. Or, like, how they’re talking about this alien language potentially being a primitive one where the reader needs to know the message’s context. Wait, excuse me, I have to go get a tissue. She's mine," and then at the very end, when she's describing being able to pick her daughter out of the sea of babies, she says the exact same thing?. Did you notice that when she goes to ID her daughter’s body she says, "Yes, that's her. If you were in a tent talking to aliens (profound) and being smart (sexy!) with someone day after day, you might end up falling for him/her too.Īnd what do we make broadly of the structure?įallon: I read it twice, and once you know what’s happening, the perfection of the structure becomes so clear. But it also kind of made Gary’s character feel weak and irrelevant at points like, why are you still here if you’re just going to make jokes and take the linguist out to dinner? I have no concept of why they fell in love. Katie Palmer, Senior Editor: By comparison, was anyone else underwhelmed by physicist Gary? That was probably done pointedly-it’s nice to have the hard science subjugated to the soft science in sci-fi-and I liked that. They prefer a subtler, diplomatically effective approach. Maybe I just overlook them because linguists tend not to run around with laser guns, shooting aliens in the face. Sure there’s Uhura, but it took our esteemed colleague and resident sci-fi expert, Adam Rogers, to remind me that James Spader played a linguist in Stargate. Chiang’s hero made so much sense she got me wondering where the hell the linguists have been in sci-fi all along. Gonna drop that at a cocktail party soon. Did learn a new word, though: glottographic. I wasn’t about to go fact-checking everything. They were so well integrated into the plot and purpose that I fully believed these characters were saying exactly what they were supposed to be saying. Nor did I ever feel condescended to or overburdened in the explanations. Do linguists love Ted Chiang for elevating one of their own? I won’t pretend that dabbling undergraduately in language-acquisition research qualifies me to pass judgment on Louise-as-linguist, but there wasn’t really a moment where I doubted Chiang’s basic understanding. Kehe: Has to be one of the lesser-represented professions in sci-fi-though it makes so much sense in the context of first contact.
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