Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang pg. 1-15

Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life”, pages 1-15, seemed very different from all the previous science fiction novels and short stories that I have read. It seemed to be more in tune with actual reality than what I normally find science fiction to be like. This probably lends itself to the fact that the story alternates between the normal, familiar moments to human beings every day, about growing up, and then living in the alien world. The story starts off in a world that seems very normal to me, in a way that I did not even guess what kind of science fiction tidbits were in store for me. The story talks about how the narrator wants to tell her child how she was born, as well as the narrator’s reflections on her child growing up. It also is the story of how the narrator is sent to help decode an alien language, the language of the “Heptapods,” and how the narrator meets the child’s father through this. However, in the beginning, we know of the child’s start and end, for the narrator says “I’d love to tell you the story of this evening, the night you’re conceived, but the right time to do that would be when you’re ready to have children of your own, and we’ll never get that chance” (117). The fact that we know of the child’s birth as well as death definitely helps set up the rest of the story—what happens in between that time. However, the alien story seems to go in chronological order while the story of the narrator’s daughter growing up is rather nonlinear. Since I have not yet finished the story at this point, I cannot say for sure what I think this implies, but for some reason it evokes to me a sense that perhaps the mother, or narrator, will start to view her career in translating the alien language as ever more so important than child rearing, for she is so organized in her approach towards telling the story of the aliens. Or, if the memories are simply recollections as she thinks through her story, then perhaps this theory is not so.