In one story, the Babylonians develop architecture to the level that they build a tower higher than the moon that reshapes their astronomy. Chiang imagines inventions that blurs the line between those disciplines, or upends them completely. We have this taxonomy of what science is and how we organize it into disciplines. This demonstrates a common theme in Chiang’s short science fiction. What if linguistics turns out to be a more objective description of the universe than math? What if our models of math and physics are subjective and human-centric? Chiang’s aliens have an entirely different model of the physical universe that’s just as true. The novella version of “Story of Your Life” takes that twist one turn further. He helped put together the Voyager Golden Records, and later wrote the novel “Contact.” But what if he was wrong? Carl Sagan famously predicted that the way to communicate would be to start from basic physical and mathematical principles. The physicist tries to speak to them with math, but fails.
The US government recruits two scientists to try to communicate with them: a physicist and a linguist. In both versions, aliens appear on Earth. The movie “Arrival” is an adaptation of Ted Chiang’s novella “Story of Your Life.” It’s one story in this collection.
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