In “Story of Your Life,” the linguist Dr. Louise Banks is narrating to her unborn daughter the story of how she will come to be conceived. Louise tells her daughter that the story of her eventual conception begins with aliens visiting Earth. After mysterious aliens begin orbiting the planet and sending down communications devices known as “looking glasses” to the surface, Louise gets a phone call from the U.S. government asking for a meeting. Colonel Weber of the U.S. military and the physicist Dr. Gary Donnelly come visit Louise at her office. Colonel Weber plays a recording of the aliens’ speech to Louise and asks her what she can tell him about it, but he refuses to give her any additional information. Louise explains to him that to learn the aliens’ language, she’ll need to interact with them.
The U.S. military recruits Louise to learn the aliens’ language in collaboration with Dr. Gary Donnelly, who is supposed to be learning the aliens’ physics. They are one of many teams of researchers stationed at the aliens’ “looking glasses” all over Earth. Through their “looking glass,” Louise and Gary meet two aliens, called “heptapods.” The heptapods, whom Louise names Flapper and Raspberry, each have seven arms and seven eyes arranged symmetrically around their torsos. At first, Louise’s attempts to learn the heptapods’ spoken language, which she calls Heptapod A, progress slowly.
Louise gets the idea to learn Heptapod A and the heptapods’ written language, Heptapod B, simultaneously. Eventually Louise realizes that Heptapod B isn’t an alphabetic language like English; instead of representing the sound of their spoken language, Heptapod B consist of pictures that represent words and that can be combined in any order into giant picture-sentences or picture-paragraphs. Examining tapes of the heptapods writing sentences, Louise realizes that they don’t construct their picture-sentences word by word. Rather, they use brushstrokes that cross many different words, which suggests to Louise that the heptapods know exactly what they are going to write before they start writing.
As Louise and another researcher named Burghart become proficient in Heptapod B, they realize that the heptapods experience time differently from humans. Whereas humans experience time linearly, from past to future, the heptapods experience their entire lives simultaneously. In other words, the heptapods know exactly what they are going to write before they start because they can “remember” the future.
Learning Heptapod B, Louise becomes able to remember the future as well. In so doing, she loses the ability to make different choices from the ones that she knows she is going to make. She comes to feel a tremendous impulse to act out the future script she remembers, despite potential negative consequences. She begins to date Gary, for instance, even though she already knows that they’ll marry and divorce in the future. Eventually, the heptapods leave Earth without ever explaining why they came or revealing the kind of scientific or technological information the military hoped they would.
Interspersed with story of Louise learning Heptapod B are Louise’s memories of the future, which she narrates to her unborn daughter. As Louise falls in love with Gary, she already knows that they’ll have a daughter together. Moreover, she knows that her daughter is going to die at the age of 25 in a climbing accident. Louise remembers both happy and upsetting moments from her daughter’s life: funny things her daughter will say as a child, moments when the daughter will butt heads with her parents, how beautiful the daughter will look at her college graduation ceremony, and so on. At the end of the story, in the present, Louise agrees to have a child with Gary, remembering everything that’s going to happen to her family but unsure of how she will feel about these things when they come to pass.
