(listen to episode on Spotify)
(music: delayed sine pitch hills)
Ted Chiang background, non-spoiler discussion
Nate:
Good evening and welcome to Chrononauts, a science fiction and literature history podcast. I'm Nate and I'm joined by my co-host, JM and Gretchen, and this month we're taking a look at stories involving linguistics and languages in science fiction. You can listen to previous segments on Ursula Le Guin's "Author of The Acacia Seeds", Jack Vance's "The Languages of Pao", Samuel Delany's "Babel-17", and this segment will be focused on Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life".
So Ted Chiang was born in 1967 in Port Jefferson, New York, which makes him by far the youngest author to appear on Chrononauts. The work we're covering tonight's story of your life is also the most recent work we've covered from 1998. And the second from the 1990s, the first was "Children of Men" from 1992, but that is a bit different in that P.D. James was 72 years old when she wrote that one, very much an author from the generation that we've been talking about for this episode, meaning Ursula Le Guin.
JM:
And the thing that struck me most about that was that it was a work of an elderly person, right?
Nate:
Yeah, but as such, Chiang's career is still very much in progress and being an active author in the middle of his life. His influences and frame of reference in pop and technological culture is going to be very much the same as ours and pretty much everybody else listening to the podcast at the time of this airing. So again, a very different experience for the podcast. But that said, let's give a brief story of his life.
He started writing science fiction at an early age and submitted to magazines in high school. His first published story was sold to Omni, which was "Tower of Babylon" published in 1990.
JM:
Yeah, that was a cool magazine, huh?
Nate:
Yeah, I was about to say Omni was a pretty weird and cool publication. And I used to get bundled with some computer magazines, and also like publish like weird paranormal type stuff in addition to science fiction stories. Yeah, cool magazine for sure.
But Chiang has written, I believe, 18 short stories and a fair amount of nonfiction. His work is incredibly critically acclaimed. He's won four Nebula Awards, four Hugo Awards, the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, Six Locust Awards, and even made Barack Obama's 2019 summer reading list. He has a book out about him in April of this year about his work, "The Philosophy of Ted Chiang", edited by David Friedell. So he's also got an emerging body of academic criticism in addition to all of his accolades.
So it's pretty cool that he works in short stories and not novels. And he has a good quote about this where he says, "I'd write a novel if I thought I had an idea which could sustain one, but so far I don't think I've had one. Some people have suggested I expand one story or another into a novel, but so far I prefer to leave them as is. When I'm writing a story, I usually think about how to keep it short, because I don't think anyone will put up with it for very long. I would obviously have to shift gears and work in a more expansive mode if I were to tackle a novel. I'm in no hurry, though, I'm perfectly content working at shorter lengths."
JM:
Yeah, and good for him for sticking to that.
Nate:
Yeah, absolutely.
JM:
I guess he has a mainline in technical writing, though?
Nate:
Yeah, he's also done a fair amount of technical writing as part of his, I guess, non-science fiction career.
Gretchen:
When I was looking him up on my university library page, several pieces from Nature and other science journals came up with him.
Nate:
Yeah, a lot of non-fiction publications, in particular the New Yorker, he had a lot of fair stuff published in, including some of the stories. I mean, I definitely can respect the commitment to short stories for sure, and as we discussed many, many times, it's really the backbone of the genre in a lot of ways, and it has kind of been what's driven the trends and development of the genre since the beginning, really.
So this one, "Story of Your Life", was initially published in Starlight in 1998, and it's been republished a bunch of times, including "Stories of Your Life and Others", as well as "The Big Book of Science Fiction". So Chiang studied Latin in high school, and he says that's the extent of the foreign language learning he's had since he was an adult, and he's generally interested more in linguistics in general, rather than the ins and outs of the languages themselves. And indeed, this story, we get some really cool approaches to language, both verbal and written. So what did you guys think of this?
JM:
I liked it. I thought it was an interesting contrast to the Delany. I mean, to me, this felt like even though there was definitely a focus, a more of a focus on the language study side of things, the story felt very mainstream, kind of, not in a bad way, necessarily. Just like it just felt very, I don't know, sort of more accessible, I guess, to a general public, maybe in a lot of ways. Yeah, whereas like somebody like Delany is really on the cutting edge of a New Wave and kind of into being an iconoclast and smashing the boundaries of genre and everything like that, this feels a lot more like restrained and something that, well, yeah, I mean, it's on Barack Obama's reading list, apparently. I don't know, I've taken a look at his things before, and I kind of wonder if he's actually reading and listening to all the stuff that's listed, like he probably has PR people and stuff. Anyway, I don't want to get into that. It's just, but it was good. There's an interesting contrast to the movie that was based on this, which I'm sure we'll get into talking about later.
Yeah, the story feels very low key and kind of small scale, but it's an interesting backdrop for what basically seems to be like a character drama, and I enjoyed it. I don't know that I necessarily loved it. I think there's another Ted Chiang story, which unfortunately I've actually forgotten the name of. I meant to try and find it before we did the episode, but it was in an anthology somewhere. There's like one of those best in the year anthologies that I was, I think I actually listened to an audiobook version. And I really enjoyed that story. I think I like that one more than this. But this one just had such an interesting speculation about language and about the nonlinear aspect of true time, which I thought was really interesting because, you know, it goes into the idea of physics, the dimension of time is something that we're kind of following on a set course, but it's not necessarily how time is. And like, every event in time might sort of be simultaneous in a way. So if you had something that could perceive time like that, that would be a really interesting springboard for a story, I guess, right?
Nate:
Yeah, definitely.
JM:
Yeah, I mean, the idea of first contact is here. And that's also really cool. A really fun science fiction idea that basically offers endless possibilities and tied in with the linguistics angle. It's really interesting and really interesting food for thought.
I guess a part of me, wishes maybe it was a bit more weird, I don't know, but I enjoyed it a lot.
Gretchen:
I actually do have the "Story of Your Life and Others". So I have like the collection of several stories by Chiang. And I do remember, even though I also do enjoy this story, I do think some of the other stories that he's written have stood out a little bit for me. I think that is because yeah, this one does feel a little bit more mainstream feel, as you were saying, JM. I think that the ideas are definitely interesting. And I do like that using really broad topics and such a broad event, such as like first contact with aliens to explore an individual's sort of life and like their psyche and what is happening in their relationships. I think that's really, it's a good idea. It's not that I dislike the story. I think it's a really interesting one. But I will say that I think it stands out less to me than the other stories that we've covered this episode.
Nate:
Yeah, I like this one a lot. And I definitely would like to check out the other stories in that anthology. I really do like how grounded and down to earth it is. The story is basically a meditation on grief and anticipatory grief. And I think it works really well without elaborate flying around the solar system and going to the edge of the universe and like crazy concepts or anything like that. Yeah, I just like how these are like real characters in the modern day and they interact with a similar subject.
JM:
I think it kind of goes back to being a pretty accessible story that that certainly got known in the mainstream, right? And I mean, sure, yeah, maybe people who don't even read science fiction normally could read this and get along with it. And certainly "Arrival" was a pretty popular movie too.
Gretchen:
I think that that is what really launched the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis back until popular culture was this story and the film that adapts it. So yeah, really interesting to see that how this influenced people's ideas of linguistics, not necessarily even just the impact of the story itself on science fiction, but also on the field of linguistics.
Nate:
Yeah, it is a really interesting subject as we've been discussing this entire time and the story handles it in an interesting way. It doesn't explicitly mention the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis even though the movie does in dialogue. So that is kind of neat that they stuck it in there. But yeah, another central concept with regards to the language in this one as being more of like a numerical analyzer for time that works through memory. It's kind of weird how it comes up in the story. But it kind of reminded me of some of the other stories that we've dealt with that deal with time and specifically thinking of "The Automaton Ear" way back in the days of the podcast where they construct a device that looks backward in time, given that you could reconstruct what the universe looked like based on the impressions that sound and light or I think it was specifically just sound in that. But yeah, it's that idea that you could trace the spatial and physical events in the universe back and forth through a time scale.
JM:
Through space and relations of space and time, right? Yeah. Right, exactly.
Nate:
Yeah, you could trace it backwards and forwards.
JM:
Right. And the whole idea that like we're seeing things in the universe now that happened thousands of years ago, right?
Nate:
Right.
JM:
So it kind of shakes our whole perception of time is that it's like, we're not perceiving time on the scale of the universe, we're just experiencing moment to moment because we have no other ability, right? That's that's what we're, I guess, programmed to do.
Gretchen:
Despite we have mentioned even just in the past few episodes, the feelings that we have towards Vonnegut, it does feel a bit of the "Slaughterhouse Five" concept of time.
JM:
Yeah, it's kind of interesting because I say this story is more mainstream. But in terms of like, actually seeing how the language progresses into the lives of the characters in the story, this was the most abstract, which is kind of interesting because like, it kind of follows a pattern in some ways, maybe "Languages of Pao" is the simplest story. But it's also where everything is very clearly laid out. And I can see exactly how language would influence the characters in that way. Middle is "Babel-17". I'm kind of almost there, like I almost see how a language without personal like first person pronouns would emphasize this sort of utilitarian, almost like computer like way of thinking, speed and expediency could influence something in the way that that that expressed in "Babel-17".
This is a really hard concept to get to grasp with in this story. And yet he does a pretty good job of doing that. In some ways, I don't know, this is an unusual thing to say. The movie may do that even better. But I mean, we'll see what you guys think of that when we get to talking about that.
Nate:
Yeah, we will. But I don't know, I liked how the story version handles the language and its effects on the main character, Louise, even though I think taken out of context and as a vacuum, it's a little hokey thinking about. I just don't think a language would work that way. But I think in the context of the story, used as a, again, reflection of grief, and as a metaphor for that whole process works very, very well in the context of the story.
JM:
Even though they're absolutely, absolutely nothing alike in any way, that just kind of made me think of "House on the Borderland" too and how like, they travel to the end of the universe, and how it's all just metaphor about grief and loss and so on. It's just kind of, yeah, odd parallel that popped into my head.
Nate:
I mean, it's a very human subject that is certainly not going to be any less relevant in the future. And again, well, I mean, "House on the Borderlands" goes to like, crazy places to the end of the universe, but it is nice to, I guess, read something more grounded to real life characters that does use this, these science fiction tropes like first contact and non-humanoid extraterrestrial life and all that stuff. It's kind of neat to see that in a science fiction story, especially for this podcast, where we really haven't encountered too much stuff like this, just because we've been looking at earlier eras and things like that, where I just wouldn't think that a lot of this kind of stuff would be published in the 50s and 60s, like the other stories that we were talking about this time.
JM:
You know, you know, what else makes this feel like modern stuff, though? This is a funny thing I'd observed because I just read "Project Hail Mary" last year, and I read this, obviously, and there was something else. I think it's one of the most popular science fiction authors nowadays is Adrian Tchaikovsky. And I haven't read this book, but I think it's "The Children of Time", and then there's something else that I was thinking of too. So now you know how like, okay, back in the 50s and 60s, for example, mainstream ideas about aliens were like stereotypically little green men, right? You know what it is now? Spider aliens. It is. It's like aliens that look kind of like spiders. They have a lot of different legs, and they, you know, limbs, and they're kind of like interchangeable, like arms of legs. And they scuttle around, and they're really smart. And sometimes they talk funny. So the guy in "Project Hail Mary" was alone out there in space until he met his alien friend, which is like a rock spider kind of creature that is very compact and very heavy and has a funny way and cute way of speaking, trying to speak to him and stuff like that. Then yeah, I don't know, the aliens here were kind of spider like, I guess, just seems like I'm not sure where that started, but it's like, it makes sense to me. I mean, it makes sense to me that maybe intelligent race of aliens that could learn to use tools and stuff like that would have like many, what's the term, not pseudopods, but like, you know, many limbs and be able to manipulate stuff very well and whatnot.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, spiders are really crazy looking creatures, and it's certainly been in popular science fiction for a while of spider aliens, the classic Doctor Who serial.
JM:
Oh yeah, that too.
Nate:
Yeah.
(music: driving synth)
spoiler summary, spoiler discussion, "Arrival" discussion
Nate:
"Story of Your Life" begins with Louise Banks telling her child the story of their life jumping forwards and backwards in time, alluding to future events, but grounding the story like "Tristram Shandy" before her at the moment of conception and then fast forwarding to an amusing teen angst anecdote at age 13, alluding to her departure and how the story will end.
Alien ships started to show up a few years ago, and she jumps to when the military show up with a recording of something that appears to be an alien speaking, but sounds like a wet dog shaking off. It's made by something that isn't a larynx, and thus can't be replicated by humans or really understood by them, as this human ear is trained to hear and process sounds produced by the human larynx.
A sound spectrograph could help Louise notes, and given this story was written in 1998, and Cool Edit Pro, the software I use for editing this podcast, has an extremely useful spectrograph feature, and the version I have says copyright between 1999 and 2003. She probably wouldn't have to wait very long for a rather accessible one.
But she would need to talk to the aliens directly to make any real progress, and the colonel is hesitant at first. Then the story suddenly cuts to Louise going to the morgue to identify her daughter when she's 25, before cutting back to talking about getting checked into the secure area with the alien devices.
JM:
All this time that he's doing that, we're like, oh, these are flashbacks, right? Like, you know, we're thinking that that's a common story device, and somehow this is going to mean something by the end. And it's a little different, and I appreciated that.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
It all kind of makes sense in the end of the day. It works, you know.
Nate:
Yeah, it definitely does. Yeah.
But yeah, the alien landing site is one of 120 from all over the world, what they're calling looking glasses. And there she meets Gary Donnelly, and they set up in front of one of these looking glasses, which transforms into some kind of visual portal thing, in which an alien appears presumably overhead in a mothership or something. A strange looking creature with seven legs that they call heptapods.
Louise had known some Portuguese from doing field work in the Amazon, but this would be her first monolingual job. And she points at herself and says "human", and says "human" when she points at Gary. The heptapods pick up on it and say something in their fluttery language, which she has to analyze with the spectrograph. Since they're being recorded, they can play it back, even if they can't make the sounds themselves, which is at least something.
She released this experience to some apocryphal tale of possible mythical origin of the English landing in Australia, and asking the natives what the animal they saw was. And they responded with "kangaroo", which means "what did you say?" in that language.
JM:
So I thought I read somewhere that this was really apocryphal that that that yeah, yeah.
Nate:
Yeah, I think it even says in the story.
JM:
They mentioned in the movie too, but I don't I don't know that that anybody questions. But yeah, it's a fun story that I heard many times before. So yeah.
Gretchen:
I hadn't read the story in a while. I'd watched the movie afterwards. I was like, I can't remember if they questioned this in the story. And then yes, they end up in the story. It is like, no, this is just not really a thing that happened.
Nate:
Yeah, it is a neat tale, though. And I guess it does illustrate the concept of what she's trying to say with the difficulty of making first contact where language is totally unknown on both sides. And I mean, now you have the added difficulty of being from a totally different species where not only can you not understand the other's language, but you can't even make the sounds yourself.
JM:
Yeah, that would always bring about the second question for me. It was like, is he saying he doesn't know what a kangaroo is? Or is he saying he doesn't know what the guy's asking?
Nate:
Yeah, right, right. Yeah.
JM:
It's like, okay, so he probably knows what a kangaroo is.
Nate:
I would imagine so, yeah.
But yeah, this anecdote flashes back to the childhood memory of Louise's daughter learning the term maid of honor. And Louise proposes the idea of trying to get the heptapods to share their writing system in conjunction with the fanatic pronunciation, an idea which is approved, and again, flashes back to memory of her daughter, this time, teenage, and going on a date. They dub the aliens Raspberry and Flapper, heptapod writing doesn't use an alphabet, which makes it harder. And their script isn't word divided, rather the symbols link and change orientation, depending on what they're near, which makes it even harder to decipher and near impossible to write for the humans.
She speculates that it's half symbols and letters, like musical notation or mathematics, and that the spoken grammar seems similar, like grammar in two dimensions. The writing system and spoken language might even be different. And she proposes two names, heptapod A and heptapod B, and proposes the term semagram for the written language form, corresponding to roughly a word in human languages, though they're joined together with other semagrams differently than earth languages, which is described as "fanciful praying mantids drawn in a cursive style, all clinging to each other to form an Escheresque lattice, each slightly different in its stance. And the biggest sentences had an effect similar to that of psychedelic posters, sometimes eye watering, sometimes hypnotic."
So interspersed to this part are more personal reminiscences of a planned trip to Hawaii as a child, of college graduation, and Louise's child becoming a financial analyst, teaching the heptapods basic arithmetic and the elements go okay, but more advanced math and science discussions go nowhere. Progress is made on the spoken and written language. The letter is more two dimensional. Fermat's principle of least time is the first breakthrough they have in trying to communicate physics to them, which Wikipedia defines as "the link between ray optics and wave optics. Fermat's principle states that the path taken by a ray between two given points is the path that can be traveled in the least time." And Fermat developed this principle in 1662, with a few diagrams to illustrate the principle, this clicks for them since they can potentially work backwards and get the various mathematical and physics terms.
Their system of mathematics is differently constructed, one of the reasons Fermat's principle and the illustration of which jumps out at them. Actions to describe things in flux like calculus are elementary to their system, whereas a constant like velocity is harder to describe. But despite this, they're able to get a rough sketch of their solar system. Despite the highly elaborate grammar and absurdly intricate writing system, the calligraphy seems to indicate sentences planned in advance and not written in a linear fashion. In a sense like Fermat's principle, the light has to know where it's going to make the most efficient way to get there. And Louise makes a good progress with heptapod B, which starts to affect how she thinks. Not only is this language quite different, but it is also nonverbal, or at least in the human sense. And she also muses on what it would be like to think in American sign language.
Here is where the linearity of time starts to break a bit. The term "nonzero sum game" is interspersed in the present and the future with Louise's daughter as she struggles to recall the term. The heptapods just maintain that they're there to observe and that they're not willing to trade information. One of the personal anecdotes is her daughter's death at age 25 during a rock climbing accident interspersed with her starting to love climbing at age three. The heptapods had a simultaneous mode of consciousness and the two-dimensional page where all information is visible at once suits their thought patterns.
The heptapods propose gift giving, but won't say what they are giving or what they want. Louise's future memories come back intensely through her heptapod B work, though limited by her human sequential mind.
The story says "the heptapods are neither free nor bound as we understand those concepts, so they don't act according to their will, nor are they helpless automatons. What distinguishes the heptapods mode of awareness is not just their actions coincide with history's events, it is also that their motives coincide with history's purposes. They act to create the future to enact chronology. Freedom isn't an illusion, it's perfectly real in the context of sequential consciousness. Within the context of simultaneous consciousness, freedom is not meaningful, but neither is coercion. It's simply a different context of no more or less valid than the other. It's like that famous optical illusion, the drawing of either an elegant young woman, face down turned away from the viewer, or a wart-nosed crone chin tucked down on her chest. There's no correct interpretation, both are equally valid, but you can't see both at the same time."
The heptapods are somewhat scattershot in what they give. Xenobiology lessons, some inorganic chemistry, heptapod history, but the last one just re-summarizes what the humans told them. The heptapods announce they're leaving, and their final gift describes superconductivity, materials already known, and indeed still has trouble finding real-world usage outside of MRI magnets.
These final musings are recalled with the moments just after her daughter's birth, and recalling to the beginning of the story with the conception, in a sense itself, a cyclical story.
So yeah, I really like this one. Again, yeah, grounded to Earth, not bouncing around the universe or anything like that, like a space opera or fantasy-type story, but I think powerful musings on grief and what it's like to process grief.
JM:
Yeah, I think despite that, the motives of the aliens is nicely kind of obscure. I think, again, keep coming back to this, but the movie feels like it had to spell that out a little more. And this is, I like the mystery aspect of it, kind of.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
I like the fact that, like, okay, they came, they saw, you know, maybe they observed a little bit in their way, they were willing to share, they were willing to share, but nothing else, and then they were going to go. And like, there was nothing humanity could do about that, but it was basically an important experience for Louise, if nothing else, right?
I mean, obviously, I'm sure humanity is very affected by the first contact, but I just feel like, like it's very understated and very personal in the story. And at the same time, the fate of the daughter while tragic, it doesn't seem quite as like pulling on the heartstrings kind of as it is in the film. And that to me is a hilarious thing that they changed, because it just shows the difference between like a multimillion dollar film and quiet reasonably unassuming short story. In the movie, you got to dial up everything and make everything, anything that's a little bit sad has to be turned up to like 10 and made super tragic and like, oh, she's now 12, and she's like dying of cancer, and she never had a chance, and that's really sad, right? Like, it's just in the story, you actually spend a little more time through Louise's eyes, of course, getting to know the daughter and her personality and everything like that. And what it was like, not only raising her, but but seeing her go through her teenage years and stuff like that.
Gretchen:
Because you can't get that time, it's like the film has to rely on sort of emotional shorthand. So you get the same impact, which you can get in the story just because that they are able to focus on that more and you get to see more of Louise's perspective.
Nate:
Again, it makes it feel more human.
Gretchen:
Yeah, yeah.
JM:
I definitely accept the story for what it is, and I appreciate it. And I appreciate the nonlinear time is something I really like. It's like it's kind of plays on the imagination, a different way of looking at people always talk about things like prophecy and stuff like that, or like being able to see in the future. Like, what would that really mean, right? It's not just opening a window and having like Nostradamus-like dreams of the future or something like that. But actually, like, being able to perceive events at the same time. So past, present, and future are kind of like one skein, where yeah, there might be things you have to untangle. But basically, it's all open to you.
The aliens gave their gift. And Louise seemed to be the main recipient and she was able to now do that for better or worse. I could see some people seeing the gift as a curse, right? Again, I think the fact that it's, it changes perception. Like it's not just not just "Oh, no, I can see the future. I know what's going to happen." It's like more than that.
Gretchen:
Yeah, one of the moments that really stands out is the excerpt that you read, Nate, because I think that is such a fascinating concept of perception of that puzzle, the visual puzzle of which, which one you see you can't see simultaneously is really fascinating. And even I do like earlier in the story, the sort of Borgesian book of life moment that she's talking about of how people approach this question and how people really feel about it versus that concept that she then feels later on about having your perspective of everything rather than just your perspective of time change.
Nate:
Yeah, because I mean, it would completely like change how you think about yourself in the universe, especially knowing how future events, like political events and all that wouldn't hold. I mean, it would just be crazy.
Gretchen:
Yeah, it would just change your sense of self. Yeah, not even just I think that's how, you know, people approach it as though everything else will remain the same. You just happen to know the future. But of course, that knowledge would irrevocably transform you and transform everything about you and how you think about things.
JM:
Right. I appreciate the difference between that and prestidigitation type stories where it's like, it doesn't really seem to change the way a character thinks, you know, it might be just like, Oh, I'm going to use this or I'm like afraid of it because I can see it. If this were physically possible, it would probably be like being able to experience time in a way closer to the way physics actually thinks that time must actually be, right? Whereas our perception of it that's leading us to, I mean, obviously things like entropy and all that are like inevitable and they happen anyway. But like, the fact that we are progressing moment to moment to moment, what after the next is, I don't know, a factor of our, I guess, our biology or something about us, right, rather than about time itself. And that maybe for some beings, it isn't that way, right?
It's kind of like, almost like the completely different take on, I mean, a few years ago on the podcast, we did "Flatland", which is a story about two dimensional beings, right? And when we started, we did "The Time Machine" not long before that, and there's this whole discourse at the beginning of "The Time Machine" about how time is a fourth dimension and all that, right? And it's like something you can actually progress along in different ways. Yeah, here we have a speculation that our first contact with beings from another world is going to be with beings who have access to that through the way that they think and through the way that they communicate and so on. That can be transmitted and it can be transmitted to a human being.
So I don't know, I guess it's like "Babel-17" in the way that it just seems like a language can completely alter away the person thinks, right? Like you said, Gretchen, it doesn't mention Sapir-Whorf. And I guess by this time, that whole concept wasn't maybe talked about as much. It's definitely an interesting link with all the other stuff that we've done this series. It's cool that it works like this. I definitely appreciate that. There were times when the, I don't know, the down to earth style and everything, like it just kind of made me feel like I wanted something a little different. But it wasn't too bad. Again, it's a short story and he writes like this, like he doesn't overstay his welcome with anything. And then just when you're thinking it's time for something, he'll introduce one of these like glimpses of the future or you're kind of thinking like, well, this is a really original way of doing this, right? It's just like not a flashback, but it's in a similar style that we would normally associate with a flashback, but it's just very differently done.
Gretchen:
As we learned during the background, he is very aware of not overstaying his welcome and not wanting people to lose interest.
Nate:
Yeah, and good for him. I mean, I think that's commendable.
Gretchen:
Oh yeah, definitely. I appreciate when people stick to what they want to write rather than just following people should write a novel just because they've written a bunch of short stories that doesn't necessarily have to be the case.
Nate:
Yeah, because I'm sure he could churn them out and have them still be good sellers. But yeah, I don't know. I respect the fact that he doesn't.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
All right. So I guess should we talk about "Arrival"? Did we all watch this for?
Gretchen:
Yeah. Yeah.
JM:
Yeah, I enjoyed the movie a lot. There were some things about the movie that I thought were, I guess, like kind of what I was saying earlier, it feels like the story dialed up higher, I guess.
Nate:
It definitely is in a lot of ways. Yeah.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
And I guess I didn't really like the movie. So we'll probably have some different feelings on how it does that. But yeah, they, I don't know. We were talking about Rydra Wong and how she might be like capable of doing everything. It seems like here, they really, really make Louise almost like a language superhero. And that like she knows Portuguese, Farsi, Sanskrit and Mandarin at least. And in the story, she knows Portuguese and Russian, which are both pretty impressive to be fluent in, but she has in-text reasons for knowing both. And they both make sense in the context of that world in that she participated in an immersive program for Russian in high school. And she did fieldwork in the Amazon in her professional career for the Portuguese, a place where it makes sense to do linguistic work.
But language like Sanskrit is not only ridiculously hard, but it's not really a spoken language. About 10,000 people claim it's their native tongue. And that's disputed by some scholars who argue that nobody speaks Sanskrit as their native tongue and haven't centuries. And while it's certainly possible to learn the language, the chances are that the Westerner would learn Sanskrit and not also have like PhD level knowledge of Hinduism, Buddhism or Jainism is kind of difficult to believe, never mind Mandarin on top of that, which is also an extremely difficult language and completely unrelated to all of the other languages she knows. So it's not like they would help her out anyway.
And I don't know, the setup of where the army comes to her, they ask her to translate the alien stuff, like expecting she would just like know it like a human language. And the fact that she says like it doesn't work that way seems like a surprise and new information to the guy.
JM:
It's almost exactly the same as "Babel-17" though.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah, it's like, they're like, oh, even the general says at the end, well, I thought I would just give her the transcript and she'd like, just do it like that. And then she's like asking for their recordings and everything. What is this? Like, yeah.
Gretchen:
I watched the film a couple of times once on my own, right after I first read the story, and then I rewatched it a couple of years ago for a class about narratology and the study of narratives. And we kind of looked at it through the lens of how narratives represent time and sequence of events. I did revisit this for the podcast. I didn't watch the full thing. Yeah, even watching that, you do see that Louise is very much the language expert, like she just happens to know everything about linguistics and language. It is very much like, as you were saying, Nate, very superpowers that she has. Or I feel like I think you can excuse that with Rydra as this is being a bit of a more fantastical story. We see that there's reasons behind it and there's flaws that come with that. But I don't feel like you get that from Louise in the film.
Nate:
No, I mean, she literally saves the world, which is, I don't know, kind of the difference in scope here.
But I don't know, a couple of things I did really like about the film is Amy Adams is great in the lead. Like, I really think she's a good actress. And even though she didn't win the Oscar for this, it's good that this film got nominated for a whole bunch of awards and that performance got recognized.
Gretchen:
I was going to ask, I couldn't remember if she had won or not. I remember she was nominated.
JM:
Yeah, it seemed like it was really well done. It seemed like I kind of appreciated their attempts to puff up the story a little bit. Like, sometimes they work at those final scenes with the music and everything. And it is like, really emotional and really pulling all the heartstrings a lot. And that's a typical, I guess, movie presentation for you in a way. I mean, you know, again, like this starting out with the daughter, you know, she's just a young kid. She's dying of cancer. She never even got to be a teenager, right? Like, it's almost funny the way like you could see somebody looking at the story and going, well, that's cool. But how can we make that more sad? Making the audience want to shed some tears, right? We'll make her 12 and we'll make her have cancer.
Nate:
Yeah, it did seem like one of those like tragedy pornish, unnecessary things that they changed. Another thing I really liked about the film is the design of the heptapod script itself. And the various semagrams when they come together and form the complex message at the climax of the film. Yeah, it's a really cool design. And I can understand why for plot purposes they totally dropped the spoken language.
JM:
Yeah, they really seem to want to show that off in the film, right?
Nate:
But aside from that, I just did not like the visual design of this movie, the aliens and the spacecraft environments I thought look really, really dull. And I can see why they changed it from like a weird portal device to them actually boarding the alien craft for some, I don't know, in-movie action or.
JM:
Yeah, I noticed that right away. It's like, oh, they're not like, they want to show a lot more than they do in the story, right?
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
They really took their time with that stuff too. I was watching it with a couple of people and my friend even said, well, it's cool, but it's a little slow. It's like, yeah, I guess. But they really want to show off the alien craft and everything like.
Nate:
Yeah, and the craft just like isn't really interesting looking, though. And I don't know if it's like digital photography or CG or what it is, but I don't know visually just didn't do it for me. And particular there's one CG shot in the helicopter where they're landing at the site that's just like really, really ugly. And it looks like scenes that feels like you're watching a video game cut scene. And I don't know. I know the director is like well acclaimed. He did the new "Blade Runner" and "Dune" movies. And I don't know the Dune movies I thought were pretty decent. At least I saw the first one. I haven't seen the second one.
JM:
He's now the director of the new James Bond movie that's coming.
Nate:
Yeah, right. I heard about that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
JM:
Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, those are things that I wouldn't really notice and nobody I was watching with really commented on that. So interesting.
Nate:
Every time I think about like visual design in science fiction movie, I would just think that like Mario Bava made "Planet of the Vampires" for like the modern equivalent of a million dollars. And these are like, I mean, this isn't like a huge budget, but this is still like 40, 50 million dollars, I think it took to make this.
JM:
Bava was like $400,000 is too much to make a movie. Yeah, you're taking your take your money back. So that's what happened with "Danger Diabolik", right? It's like, yeah, Dino De Laurentiis? Sorry, I don't want you micromanaging me. Here's, here's your $400,000, like, whatever.
Nate:
Yeah, yeah. And it looks amazing, too. He really had magic. But yeah, I think my biggest complaint about this film is that they turn the focus of the story away from the anticipatory grief angle of the novella. And while it's still definitely present in the film, it very much feels secondary to this whole like "Day the Earth Stood Still" or "27th Day" plot where the...
JM:
Absolutely. Yeah.
Nate:
I mean, the main focus in the tension is the geopolitical implications of what's going to happen to humanity as a whole with their dealings from the heptapods. And yeah, like I said, Louise saves the world calling the Chinese general's personal cell phone. I mean, I think it really takes away from the novella's meditation on grief and it being like a personal human thing.
Gretchen:
Yeah, very much less that character drama, which, you know, makes sense if they want to make this into like a big budget Hollywood sci-fi film.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah. I will point out, though, that unlike "Children of Men", they actually changed the name of the story. And this is more like "The Story of Your Life" than "Children of Men" film is like the "Children of Men" book. And so this one bothered me a lot less than that one did.
Nate:
Yeah, that is true. I mean, I'm not complaining that they change it. I'm just complaining that they changed it in ways that I thought were dumb.
Gretchen:
Funny story about the name change is that because I bought my copy of "Story of Your Life" and others secondhand, it is the motion picture copy that they put out. I remember when I was asking my mom to bring it the next time that she came to Albany a few months ago, I was like, it's the "Story of Your Life and Others" by Ted Chiang, if you can get that from my shelf. And she's like, I don't see it anywhere. And then I eventually realized it was because on the spine, it says "Arrival", so she couldn't find it.
I definitely don't really care much for the design of the film myself either. Although I do really enjoy the effort that they put into this written language. I believe it was created like entirely by like a separate artist that was working on the film for that. I can't remember if it was like they did plan out like an entire language for that.
Nate:
I don't think it was an entire language, but I think it was like a functional vocabulary, maybe like 100 semagrams or something like that.
Gretchen:
That makes more sense. I couldn't remember the details behind that, but I knew with something like that.
Nate:
Yeah, no, they definitely put a lot of legitimate effort into doing that whole process. And that's definitely to be commended, because that's something you could easily like brush off as a minor plot point. And the fact that they put that level of detail in for the angle that's kind of crucial to the whole, I wouldn't say technology angle, but the like it's a science fictiony angle of, you know, how do you communicate with an unknown species?
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
So yeah, that's cool that that effort was there, even though, yeah, I just don't know why the rest of the film was kind of drab. I mean, I guess the "Dune" film looked a little drab too, but that kind of makes sense in world, because you get this, I don't, it's like a kind of fascisty take on the story, which makes sense for how it unfolds in later books. And he is shooting the "Dune Messiah", though I don't know if he'll do the later books in the series.
JM:
Yeah, I don't know. It's weird. He's got all these projects on the go, like he wants to do "Rendezvous with Rama" or something like that, too.
Nate:
Yeah, I don't know, "Rendezvous with Rama", like, I don't know, it would definitely need to be more imaginative with the set design. That was one thing that I was thinking about when they have those opening scenes of boarding the alien spacecraft, and they got to make sure they're in the suits and go through the decontamination chambers and all that so they don't breathe toxic gas or get infected by some deadly microbe or whatever.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
All that kind of consideration is put into "Rendezvous with Rama" on what it would be like to interact with this totally unknown vessel, and you just have no idea what the function of anything it is and what it would look like. But Clarke describes the derelict in like a more imaginative way, where everything here is just like flat surfaces and planes and all that. It looks a very, like, very simple design, almost to, well, almost like a flaw, where I think equally simple design in science fiction, thinking of "2001"'s the monolith or whatever, it just looks so stark-compassed to its surroundings, where it's like juts out at you, and this film, even though the, I don't know, they look like giant contacts in the film, it just never really evokes that same kind of strange otherworldliness that they were kind of trying to go for, but I don't know.
JM:
Yeah, I really appreciate that. It seemed like they spent so much time with that and as a non-visual person. I did watch it with audio description, so there was like some description of, like, especially the low-gravity stuff and everything like that, and, you know, I was like, okay, they're really going all out with this, they're making it like something a little special that wasn't in the story, and I kind of thought, well, maybe that's a good thing, but yeah, I mean, it kind of goes back to weirder is better, right? Make it more, you know, like, make it more unusual, right? Like, just, yeah, I don't know. Interesting.
Nate:
But yeah, I don't know. Interesting comparison point. The film obviously did really, really well. It was very critically acclaimed, won a whole bunch of awards and all that, so I mean, I'm sure Ted Chiang got paid pretty big for that, so good for him. Yeah, I don't know. I liked the story. The movie I wasn't so warm about, but I didn't hate it either.
JM:
Okay. Yeah.
Nate:
I had not seen it when it came out, and I actually didn't know that the story and the film were related until I think we were talking, it's like, "oh, yeah, it's the Arrival movie". I don't know. I'm definitely behind on contemporary science fiction film.
JM:
Right. So I think I've made a lot of the changes, like what I was saying about the increased sentimentality and stuff like that. Like, they're kind of what I expect from a film a lot of the time, like, especially a very expensive film, right? You want to, you want to show the world events you want. I mean, you make it big, make it dial everything up a lot. And yeah, I mean, maybe one of the things to appreciate about the short story is that it is a short story. It has a very specific focus. And it's not that, right? It's just, I don't know. Yeah, I see what you're getting at. And right away, even I did notice, like, yeah, they're dialing it up here, like it's obviously, it's easy to be very cynical about, especially film and television and how they're really, I don't know, they really seem to do a lot to very, very clearly and obviously pander to an audience. Whereas, you don't really get that from a reasonably humble short story, I guess. So yeah.
Nate:
Well, all right, cool. This is a lot of fun. Doing this language in linguistics is a really fascinating concept in general. So I think all these stories really pair very, very well with one another.
JM:
I agree.
Gretchen:
I think also it could definitely be a topic to revisit, especially since researching this topic, we came across a couple of other stories that we didn't cover here. So I definitely be interested in checking this more out.
Nate:
Yeah. And certainly I enjoyed all of the stories that we read for this, even though I have criticisms about all of them in some way, I think that, yeah, a really good set of stories. So that's cool.
JM:
I agree. And yeah, we've only scratched the surface. There's so many more, like just looking at those two SF encyclopedia works, and they have like entries on linguistics, and they mention a lot of other stories. And there's a lot of other things that I thought of while we were doing this, where I'm like, yeah, we could have done that, we could have done that, right? There's a lot of things. Every time we do a theme episode, I'm kind of expecting one day we'll get comments from people that are like, well, why didn't you do this? Why did you do that? Right? I was just like, well, you know, I mean, we can't do everything, right?
Gretchen:
Where's "Native Tongue"? You didn't cover "Native Tongue".
JM:
We might revisit some of these themes, either as individual pieces or, yeah, who knows? Maybe we'll do a whole series at some point, just coming back to something we did before. Hey, these are stories we didn't cover last time, but they're just as good, right? Or just as interesting.
Nate:
So, well, yeah, certainly a lot of interesting stuff that we could cover. That one in particular sounds really, really interesting. So, yeah, I think with, yeah, there's basically no shortage of stuff, even stuff that we have translated and put on the blogspot could be relevant to this in some way. So, yeah.
JM:
Absolutely.
Nate:
So, all right, Gretchen, why don't you tell us what we have for next time?
Gretchen:
All right, I was trying to think of which story I would like to read. And one of my favorite movies of all time is Andrei Tarkovsky's "Stalker". It's, I love it. It's a favorite film, not just sci-fi, but of any type of film. So I decided, because I haven't read it before, I wanted to choose Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's "Roadside Picnic", so I can really experience what the source material is like.
JM:
So, I originally read this in an older translation. From everything I've read, the most recent translation is the best one, so I'm assuming that's the one we're going to mostly look at.
Nate:
Yeah, I have a copy of this in Russian and I'll take a look at the available translations and give my feedback on the first couple pages.
JM:
Yeah, I mean, I think the one that I read is probably from the 70s or 80s, and even way before doing this podcast, way before thinking that much about translations and stuff, I had a lot of questions about the way they translated "Roadside Picnic" the first time. So, I'm actually really, really curious to read the new translation, because from what I've heard, everybody who's discovered it in the 2010s and beyond has discovered it through this new translation. I have a feeling there might be a very strong contrast between this and the older translation, and I think, I mean, I've read a number of those Strugatsky brothers' things at this point, and I kind of feel like even though I enjoyed them all, I feel like their works haven't been given, or at least until recently perhaps, they weren't given the attention in translation that like Gogol or Tolstoy or Dostoevsky were given. People really spent a lot of time and effort on doing really good translations of those works. I feel like with the Strugatskys, sometimes maybe something was lost a little bit along the way. I feel like maybe "Roadside Picnic" is the opening of a new gate at a new way of translating their work to an English public that maybe didn't experience before.
Nate:
Yeah, certainly some of the translations done in the 60s and 70s of Soviet science fiction from the 60s and 70s in general is a bit uneven, to say the least. I have an anthology of stuff from the 60s of contemporary Soviet stuff from the 50s and 60s primarily, and some of the translations are good, and some of the translations could be better. Yeah, Strugatsky brothers are still very well celebrated within Russia and the Russian-speaking community in the United States. I had mentioned on the podcast before when I went to RBC Video in Brooklyn in the Russian-speaking neighborhood of Brighton Beach. I spent a lot of time looking at their books, but they had an entire wall basically dedicated to Strugatsky brothers, so that's where I got a copy of "Hard to Be a God" and an anthology that has, among other things, "Roadside Picnic". So it'll be cool to take a look at that in translation, and I'll do some comparisons with the original. So yeah, see what the experience is like, and yeah, I've never read the novel before either, and "Stalker" is definitely an amazing film, so that'll be another comparison point to take a look at too.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I'm really curious about that, and I know there's also like, I think there's a couple other types of adaptations like a video game or something, I think.
Nate:
Yeah, I don't know how much the video game has to do with it. I know that the video game is a thing, but yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I don't know too much about it. I've just heard about it, but you know, it might be something to just, I might check out just to see what it's like.
JM:
I'm familiar with the soundtrack to the video game.
Gretchen:
Oh, yes.
JM:
Yeah, but not the video game itself. All right, we're not very much looking forward to that. Yes. It'd be really cool to talk about that, and more Russian science fiction. Yeah, yeah, definitely. We've definitely covered some on Chrononauts before, and it's going to be interesting to delve more into that. And yeah, I've enjoyed the Strugatskys for a long time, despite perhaps questionable translation choices. So yeah.
But for now, I think we've all enjoyed this sojourn into the wonderful world of language and understanding and perspective. And yeah, I feel my mind has been opened, and now I'm ready to destroy the Alliance, who after all are those who invade. Having said all that, we hope your perceptions of time are broad and open and all inclusive. We are Chrononauts, and we will see you very soon when we'll be discussing "Roadside Picnic". Good night.
Bibliography:
Brady, Amy - "Barack Obama’s 2019 Summer Reading List", Chicago Review of Books, https://chireviewofbooks.com/2019/08/20/barack-obamas-2019-summer-reading-list/
Grant, Gavin J. - interview with Ted Chiang, indiebound https://web.archive.org/web/20170407032812/http://www.indiebound.org/author-interviews/chiangted
McCarron, Meghan - "The Legendary Ted Chiang on Seeing His Stories Adapted and the Ever-Expanding Popularity of SF" https://electricliterature.com/the-legendary-ted-chiang-on-seeing-his-stories-adapted-and-the-ever-expanding-popularity-of-sf/
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