Stories of Your Life and Others

This story utilizes narration in first and second person to tell two strands of the plot. The first-person narration traces the more straightforward plot points through chronological order, whereas the second person viewpoint is interwoven to indicate the protagonist’s reflection on her daughter’s life from a perspective that includes past, present and future melded into one whole.

Dr. Louise Banks, a linguist, tells her daughter the story of how she was conceived. She also claims to know how the story of her daughter’s life ends. It all begins with the arrival of alien ships and the appearance of strange artifacts in meadows across the world. Colonel Weber approaches Louise and physicist Dr. Gary Donnelly with a recording of the language the aliens use. Louise explains that one can grasp a foreign language only through communication: “[I]t’s possible our ears simply can’t recognize the distinctions they consider meaningful’” (91). Weber is concerned that the aliens should not also learn English in the process.

Louise tells her daughter about having to identify her dead body, after she died in a rock-climbing fall at the age of 25. 

There are 112 alien artifacts in the world, and the military assigns a team of scientists to each one. Louise and Gary approach what looks like a mirror, but it grows transparent to reveal an empty room. The alien, which they call a ‘heptapod’ looks like “a barrel suspended at the intersection of seven limbs. It was radially symmetric, and any of its limbs could serve as an arm or a leg. The one in front of me was walking around on four legs, three non-adjacent arms curled up at its sides” (94). They seem to have no skeleton, and possess seven lidless eyes, which look in all directions at once. Louise begins her attempts to communicate with one of the pair of heptapods that enter the room. The aliens “speak” in flutters, recorded as vibrations by a spectrograph, that Louise cannot reproduce vocally. Louise realizes it might be easier to recognize the aliens’ graphemes, if they have a written language. Weber approves the new approach, even though he is afraid of revealing too much about human technology to the aliens.

The aliens’ writing seems to be logographic, meaning that a single image or letter represents a whole word or sentence. Louise introduces actions and verbs, and aliens repeat the process, from which Louise concludes their language possesses analogs for verbs and nouns, evident in their speech pattern. Nevertheless, their logograms are single and continuous: “[I]t looked more like a bunch of intricate graphic designs” (104). Louise realizes that within the complex logograms the markers for separate words also change shape, rotate, and become distorted in different pronouncements, while the sentence is represented with no breaks. Gary suggests their language might reflect their bodies’ radial symmetry—they have no ‘forward’ direction as humans do. This would imply the aliens use a nonlinear system of orthography, a grammar in two dimensions. Louise believes aliens use “‘‘semasiographic’ writing, because it conveys meaning without reference to speech. There’s no correspondence between its components and any particular sounds’” (106).

Louise remembers her daughter’s college graduation, disbelieving that the young woman is be the same girl she used to lift in her arms. She remembers how daughter as a sullen teenager, ashamed to be seen with her mother in shopping malls: “Living with you will be like aiming for a moving target; you’ll always be further along than I expect” (112). She also remembers her daughter’s rebellious behavior after Louise and her husband split up. Gary is revealed to be the father of Louise’s daughter.

As communication with the aliens progresses, the physicists try to communicate about mathematics and physics, having success with arithmetic only. The linguists, meanwhile, learn that the aliens’ writing has no fixed word order, as they better understand better the writing’s two-dimensional characteristics. Although the aliens maintain that they are here to observe, they seem incurious. Finally, physicists achieve a breakthrough with the refraction of light when it hits water. According to Fermat’s variational principle of least time, light changes its path when it hits water to achieve the fastest route between point A in the air and point B in the water. Gary assumes this is a defining principle governing how heptapods think and perceive the world. He also invites Louise for dinner.

At dinner, Gary tells Louise that the aliens have a very different understanding of physics. What humans consider fundamental, the heptapods struggle with, and vice versa. Yet their systems describe the same physical universe.

Louise analyzes the way heptapods write, realizing that when beginning a sentence the heptapod already knows how the whole sentence will look, as the first stroke flows through the rest of the structure: “No one could lay out such an intricate design at the speed needed for holding a conversation. At least, no human could” (120). Learning to write it herself, Louise notices how the language begins to change the way she thinks; her thoughts become “graphically coded.” The language seems to her almost like a mandala, a Hindu and Buddhist symbol representing the circular nature of the universe. Studying the language puts her into a meditative state, as she contemplates causes and effects as simultaneous, rather than one preceding the other linearly.

As Louise and Gary talk about Fermat’s principle over dinner, Gary explains that a variational principle is not cause-and-effect like many principles in physics; It is purposive, almost like a command to the light to travel down a certain way, thereby suggesting that the light “knows” its destination. Louise grasps that while humans think chronologically, heptapods seem to have the beginning and the end in mind as they write and think. Gary explains that there is no physical difference between past and future events, but the existence of free will must be a factor in changing outcomes. Louise imagines a Book of Ages, which records past, present, and future. She concludes this is logically impossible, because if an individual reads what will happen next, that person could decide to do the opposite, creating a paradox. Humans and heptapods perceive the same world differently, and their development is thus vastly different; humans developed sequential thinking, and heptapods developed “simultaneous awareness.” Their perception of events is “all at once,” understanding the underlying purpose. 

Louise has a recurring dream about her daughter’s death. It is not her daughter but Louise herself who is rock climbing, carrying her three-year-old on her back. She then dreams the reality of the morgue, and wakes next to Gary in the past. 

Writing in the heptapods’ language, Louise understands that speech for them is an issue because one word has to follow another. In writing, however, everything can be expressed simultaneously. Heptapods therefore “act to create the future, to enact chronology” (133), not follow it. For them, language is performative—they utilize it to actualize a reality, not just to communicate it. Having learned to think in this new way, Louise understands the future and knows she will not attempt to act against it, nor will she tell anyone what she knows.

Weber asks Louise to translate the military’s desire to trade with heptapods, which they refuse, only accepting an exchange of unknown items. By now, Louise knows how the conversation and event will play out; her mind has become “an amalgam of human and heptapod” (136). Her memories comprise not just her past but also her future, up until her death.

Eight exchanges take place. During two, heptapods share their knowledge of other alien species. On another occasion, they share their history. After the eighth exchange, the heptapods announce they are leaving. At once, all their ships leave Earth. Their last exchange is a new class of superconducting materials, which Japan already developed. Humans will never learn why the aliens came or why they left.

Louise tells her daughter that contact with the aliens changed her life. She decides to have a baby with Gary, fully knowing the endpoint of both her daughter’s life and her own.