Cecily's Reviews > Arrival

“Reading is nothing; comprehension is everything”.
Sarah Richards

I read the title short story while away at a conference for technical writers. The quote above came from a presentation about transforming the Government Digital Service, but the issues of communication (context and audience) that are at the heart of this story are key to technical writing and had echoes in many of the presentations. Perhaps it is no coincidence that Ted Chiang is also a technical writer.

Note: This review is just the title story. I've reviewed the others in this collection HERE.

Same Old, Same Old? No

Aliens arrive. They are suitably weird-looking: radially symmetric, with seven eyes and seven limbs on a barrel-shaped body, topped by a puckered orifice, but with no face and no front and back. They seem keen to communicate via devices humans nickname looking glasses. The military take charge. Of course they do. That’s what always happens. Then things escalate...

But this is different. Linguist Dr Louise Banks tells, in linear fashion, how she and colleagues learned the alien languages. But that narrative is interspersed with non-chronological episodes from her daughter’s life.

The heptapods’ spoken and written languages are unrelated to each other, and the latter has strange properties that affect Louise’s consciousness, specifically her perception of time and free will. This shapes the telling and curious grammar of her daughter’s story, “I remember [past tense] what it’ll [future] be like to…” It is a Borgesian paradox.

Linguistic Relativity - Sapir-Whorf

The story is underpinned by the idea that the structure of a language can affect the cognition of those who use it: Linguistic Relativity.

Heptapod A (spoken) is relatively straightforward and uninteresting; it “sounded vaguely like that of a wet dog shaking the water out of its fur”.

But Heptapod B (written) is very different. It is a totally separate language: the symbols don’t relate to individual spoken words (logographic) or objects (picture writing), and there is no word order, in part because there are no words as such. Heptapod B has its own visual syntax (semasiographic), akin to mathematical equations, some sign languages, and the notation of music or dance.

It is written in a single smooth, sinuous, and rippling style that reflects the heptapods’ own physical movements. It’s also described as an Escheresque lattice and being like psychedelic posters. More significantly, it is not sequential. This seems to reflect the heptapods’ modes of thought and it certainly comes to affect Louise’s perception of the world and the way she tells the story of her daughter’s life.

China Mieville's sci-fi novel, Embassytown, also features aliens with a totally different sort of language to those known to humans. I reviewed it HERE.

Orwell takes the idea of linguistic relativity to an extreme with Newspeak making “thoughtcrime literally impossible”. See Nineteen Eighty Four, reviewed HERE.

Fermat’s Principle of Least Time

Fermat, Sapir-Whorf, free will, and Heptapod B are intricately connected. At times, I wondered if the linguistics and maths/physics was getting too esoteric, but it didn't quite jump the shark and it all wove together brilliantly.

The detail below is for reference, and is spoilered, because understanding this is what the story is about (on the page, though not on screen).
(view spoiler)[

Light travels faster in air than water. When a ray of light hits water, it is refracted, taking a longer, but faster route. But Fermat’s Principle of Least Time is a variational principle: light always follows an extreme path (maximum or minimum). It describes light in goal-oriented terms, rather than the more familiar causal, chronological terms. It assumes the ray of light “knows” its destination.

It's like a lifeguard who can run faster than she can swim: she takes a longer route that has more beach and less sea, to get to the drowning person more quickly.

Similarly, because Heptapod B has no fixed word order, no beginning or end, “the heptapod had to know how the entire sentence would be laid out before it could write the very first stroke”. This language is teleological, “one needed knowledge of the effects before the causes could be initiated”. The result is simultaneous consciousness, where you live in the present (like a newborn baby) and in the past and future.

This makes the heptapods rather like Vonnegut’s Tralfamadorians in Slaughterhouse Five, reviewed HERE, living in all time, simultaneously.

For such beings, sequential speech is a slow and inefficient mode. And if they already know the future of what they’ll say and hear, why speak at all? Louise infers that heptapod language is performative: saying something makes it so, like “You’re under arrest” or “I now pronounce you man and wife”.

But if you know the effects, the end, you know the future. And if you know the future, really know it, it’s fixed, so you can’t have free will. The two are mutually exclusive. And yet at the end, Louise says, (view spoiler)[“From the beginning I knew my destination, and I chose my route accordingly.” How could both be true? (hide spoiler)]
(hide spoiler)]

UPDATE re Film

A good film, but not a great one, imo, and it makes more sense if you've read the story first. It was released in November 2016: Arrival. I feared, from the trailers, there would be very little linguistics, physics, or philosophy, and that it would be mostly a standard CGI-heavy, alien-action movie, with the world at risk, and a Hollywood ending.

The soundtrack is slightly ethereal, but not distractingly so, and Heptapod B looks beautiful and equally ethereal. There were some new and heightened plot threads, which is OK when adapting for a different medium (a new, dramatic intervention, and more international geo-political stuff).

I liked the way it didn't shy away from some of the technicalities of the linguistics, but what was really odd was that Ian's position as a theoretical physicist made no sense, because he never explained, or even mentioned, the maths/physics stuff about perception of time that was key to it all (see spoiler re Fermat’s Principle of Least Time, above)!

Overall, I was pleasantly surprised, though people wanting standard Hollywood fare might be disappointed.

There's a really informative video about what changes were made for screen, and how those decisions were reached: here. It's 13 minutes, with captions if you can't listen.

Other Links

I read this story thanks to Apatt, whose excellent review is here.

This is the title story of a collection that I reviewed HERE.

That collection includes a story with a non-linear, ideogramatic language, Understand, which I reviewed here.

Posts about the linguistic aspects on Language Log (one of the few sites where it’s worth reading comments):
1. Language is Messy (includes film trailer)
2. Language is Messy part 2, Arabic script
3. Alien Encounters
See also this interview about the linguistics in the film with Prof Betty Berner.

NY Review of Books on the book, the film, and the physics: here.

Other sic-fi books with a linguistic theme on this GR list.

Thoughts to Ponder

• If you could read a Borgesian Book of Ages that records every event, past and future, would you?
(Overview of JL Borges stories reviewed HERE.)

• We know we’re all going to die, but would you knowingly choose (view spoiler)[to have a child if you knew that child would die young (hide spoiler)]? Except that knowing the future and having free will are mutually exclusive, which presumably means you have no choice in the matter.

• So, if you had a choice between knowing the future and having free will, which would you choose?

• “The rabbit is ready to eat.”
Who will be eating what? Context is all, and one interpretation excludes the equally valid other.

• “The only way to learn an unknown language is to interact with a native speaker… No alien could have learned human languages by monitoring our broadcasts.”
So is there any point in the Pioneer Plaque, illustrated at the top, or Carl Sagan’s Arecibo Message?