Story of Your Life Study Guide

Ted Chiang, born in Port Jefferson, New York in 1967, studied computer science at Brown University. His first published short story, “Tower of Babylon,” appeared in the science-fiction magazine Omni in 1990. In 1991, “The Tower of Babylon” won the Nebula Award for Best Novelette. He has published two books of science-fiction and fantasy short stories, Stories of Your Life and Others (2002) and Exhalation: Stories (2019). Ted Chiang is considered one of the most accomplished and influential science-fiction writers of the contemporary period. His short stories have won Nebula Awards, Hugo Awards, and a British Science Fiction Association Award. They have also been nominated for the World Fantasy Award and the James Tiptree, Jr. Award. In addition to writing short fiction, Ted Chiang has taught fiction writing at the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. In 2016, his 1998 short story “Story of Your Life” was adapted into a film called Arrival.

Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” was first published in the science-fiction anthology Starlight 2 in 1998. Among other themes, the story represents the tension between academic researchers’ desire to understand mysterious aliens and the U.S. military’s desire to control and exploit the aliens. 1998 coincided with President Bill Clinton’s second term. In the year prior to the story’s publication, the U.S. government admitted well after the fact that it had interfered in the Laotian Civil War from the 1950s through the 1970s and also apologized for unethical government medical experiments on African American men during the Tuskegee Syphilis Study from 1932 to 1972. The U.S. government’s admissions of past grievous mistakes during this period may have influenced the depiction in “Story of Your Life” of U.S. military and government officials as hostile, aggressive, and suspicious toward an alien species.

Ted Chiang is a science-fiction and fantasy writer preoccupied with questions of language, technology, and free will. “Story of Your Life” imagines an alien language that enables the humans who learn it to “remember” their futures with absolute accuracy, thus depriving them of their free will. His short story “What’s Expected of Us,” originally published in the magazine Nature in 2005 and republished in his short story collection Exhalation: Stories in 2019, similarly tells the story of a new technology called the Predictor that can tell the future and thus reveals the nonexistence of free will. These stories were likely influenced by Isaac Asimov’s Foundation (1951), which imagines an academic discipline called psychohistory that can accurately predict the futures of large populations, thereby casting doubt on the existence of free will as a characteristic of populations. As “Story of Your Life” and “What’s Expected of Us” deal with forms of time travel, they may also have been influenced by Octavia Butler’s 1979 Kindred, a science-fiction novel about an African American woman forced to travel back in time and meet her ancestors under antebellum slavery. As in “Story of Your Life,” the protagonist is forced into traumatic situations to preserve the reality of her timeline.