In “Story of Your Life,” Chiang uses innovations in nonlinear narrative techniques and the invention of a semasiographic written language called Heptapod B to explore the ways that the structure of language influences cognition (Baghramian and Carter 2019). The sensational and the newsworthy serve to highlight a quieter revolution, though, a deep revision of the everyday ways that people related to language, the experience of time, and each other. Nirvana released “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and Microsoft released Windows 95. Third Wave feminism was gaining momentum at the same time as the dot-com bubble. News of the Gulf War was televised in real time, gay rights activists found close-knit communities online as hate crimes peaked across the country, and by 1998 the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal was underway, spurred by rumors posted on an obscure political weblog (Darke 2019). It was before the rise of now-ubiquitous and near-instantaneous communications technologies like smartphones and social media, but the collapse of time and distance had already begun to accelerate. Ted Chiang’s novella “Story of Your Life,” an elegant experiment combining aliens, variational principles, and the linguistic relativity hypothesis, was first published in 1998, just as the western world was coming online and people were beginning to come in contact with each other in unprecedented ways.
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