Or, like, how they’re talking about this alien language potentially being a primitive one where the reader needs to know the message’s context. Wait, excuse me, I have to go get a tissue. She's mine,' and then at the very end, when she's describing being able to pick her daughter out of the sea of babies, she says the exact same thing?. Did you notice that when she goes to ID her daughter’s body she says, 'Yes, that's her. If you were in a tent talking to aliens (profound) and being smart (sexy!) with someone day after day, you might end up falling for him/her too.Īnd what do we make broadly of the structure?įallon: I read it twice, and once you know what’s happening, the perfection of the structure becomes so clear. But it also kind of made Gary’s character feel weak and irrelevant at points like, why are you still here if you’re just going to make jokes and take the linguist out to dinner? I have no concept of why they fell in love.

Katie Palmer, Senior Editor: By comparison, was anyone else underwhelmed by physicist Gary? That was probably done pointedly-it’s nice to have the hard science subjugated to the soft science in sci-fi-and I liked that. They prefer a subtler, diplomatically effective approach. Maybe I just overlook them because linguists tend not to run around with laser guns, shooting aliens in the face. Sure there’s Uhura, but it took our esteemed colleague and resident sci-fi expert, Adam Rogers, to remind me that James Spader played a linguist in Stargate. Chiang’s hero made so much sense she got me wondering where the hell the linguists have been in sci-fi all along. Gonna drop that at a cocktail party soon. Did learn a new word, though: glottographic. I wasn’t about to go fact-checking everything. They were so well integrated into the plot and purpose that I fully believed these characters were saying exactly what they were supposed to be saying. Nor did I ever feel condescended to or overburdened in the explanations. Do linguists love Ted Chiang for elevating one of their own? I won’t pretend that dabbling undergraduately in language-acquisition research qualifies me to pass judgment on Louise-as-linguist, but there wasn’t really a moment where I doubted Chiang’s basic understanding. Kehe: Has to be one of the lesser-represented professions in sci-fi-though it makes so much sense in the context of first contact.

Ted chiang's story of your life