#Story of your life online full#

Now, collected here for the first time are all seven of this extraordinary writer's stories so far-plus an eighth story written especially for this volume. Story for story, he is the most honored young writer in modern SF. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1992. Subsequent stories have won the Asimov's SF Magazine reader poll, a second Nebula Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, and the Sidewise Award for alternate history. I don't know yet.Ted Chiang's first published story, ' Tower of Babylon,' won the Nebula Award in 1990. Writing Amazon reviews might be a New Year's resolution. I mostly read Gardner Dozoi's Year's Best anthologies.) I'll be reading the rest of Chiang's collection (there are seven more stories, I think) and then, probably, I'll try writing a review on Amazon or something. (I've read a fair share of golden age sci fi, but I haven't read an absolute tonne, and I readily admit that there's a lot of new stuff of which I am ignorant. (The Sapir-Whorf hypothesisР’В is different from what I call the Bashir-Worf hypothesis: the idea that learning to speak Klingon without the universal translator make you more attractive to Dax symbiotes.) Would we have children if we knew the future, and that future wasn't always good? If we knew the future, would we perform the motions of events in order to make them a reality? And, in a classic time-travel paradox kind of way, wouldn't foreknowledge of the future us to act on it?Р”В¬hiang's 'Story of Your Life' is excellent because it ties together seamlessly the high-concept science fiction with the emotional implications it explores, in a way much more resonant than a lot of sci fi short stories I've read. The story uses the Sapir-Whorf hypthesis, which isР’В the idea that the structure of a language structures thought. This has thematic implications because of the side-plot relating to Dr.

#Story of your life online full#

Of the three, the one that illustrates the idea best is the one that's always given: we go through the ceremony of a wedding, knowing full well that it's going to end with 'I do,' but we still have to go through the full performance in order to make the ceremony 'effective.' We go through the motions to make those motions a reality. Chiang basically lists the standard three examples that J.L. Louise Banks) posits that communication as such would be performative. So how do they communicate?Р”В¬hiang (or the character-narrator, Dr. Eventually, Banks realizes that the aliens experience time non-sequentially.

Louise Banks is struck by the fact that, of all the math Earth has tried communicating with the aliens, they seem best able to communicate Fermat's principle of least time, which is, y'know, a pretty weird principle, because it means that light that hits water seems to 'know' beforehand at which angle to travel in order to hit the water in just such a way that it travels in the least time. Like, what would a language be like if it came from a culture that understood the time-space continuum in a manner completely different from our own? I.e., if it came from a culture that experienced all events simultaneously?Р”Вr. (Some spoilers about the scifi and linguistic theory in the story.) 'Story of Your Life' deals a whole bunch with semiotics. 'Darmok' is probably one of the best TNG episodes.Р”Р„nyways, the Ted Chiang story is even better. (Credit to SA forums poster 'Kirk,' I thinkРІР‚В¦?)

The episode resulted in this neat-o t-shirt: In order to say, 'You and I should fight together against a common enemy,' the alien says, 'Darmok and Jalad, at Tanagra!' which is also an actual historical event involving people called, presumably, Darmok and Jalad. In order to say, for example, something along the lines of, 'Darn, this isn't working,' the alien keeps saying, 'Shaka, when the walls fell,' referring to an historical event. It's reminded me (somewhat) of that Star Trek: The Next Generation Episode, ' Darmok,' where the universal translator doesn't work quite right because the alien language's referential function is kind of on a different wavelength than our own. You can find it here: Stories of Your Life and Others. I just read 'Story of Your Life' by Ted Chiang.