"Stories of Your Life"

[fiefoe]

Ted Chiang convinced me with the very first story that he is as excellent as everybody says he is. That and the titular story are my favorites.

• When they began the tower, the architects knew that more wood would be needed to fuel the kilns than could be found on the plain, so they had a forest of trees planted. ('Tower of Babylon')
• The upward and downward ramps would around each other without touching, but they were joined by corridors through the tower's body... The crews crossed over to exchange carts.
• (Twilight:) The darkness climbed the tower, like a canopy unfurling upward.
• They have soil spread on them, so people may grow vegetables. At this height water is scarce, so onions are most commonly grown.
• The town was inseparable from the caravan.. yet any caravan was essentially a journey.. This town was never intended as a permanent place, it was merely part of a centuries-long journey.
• They had reached the height of the first of the celestial bodies. They squinted at the moon's pitted face, marveled at its stately motion that scorned any support.
• Now the light of day shone upward, which seemed unnatural to the utmost.
• By this construction, Yahweh's work was indicated, and Yahweh's work was concealed... He would tell them about the shape of the world.
• What Godel would have given to see this language, where modifying a statement causes the entire grammar to be adjusted. ('Understand')
• Much of what is conventionally described as "personality" is at my discretion.
• I shall also shave my scalp, to allow greater radiative cooling for the heightened blood flow to my head.
• Their script isn't word divided; a sentence is written by joining the logograms for the constituent words. ('Story of Your Life')
• The heptapods.. built (a sentence) out of strokes irrespective of individual semagrams.
• The ray of light has to know where it will ultimately end up before it can choose the direction to begin moving in.
• I found myself in a meditative state, contemplating the way in which premises and conclusions were inter-chaneable.
• The physical attributes that humans found intuitive, like kinetic energy or acceleration, were all properties of an object at a given moment in time. And these were conducive to a chronological, causal interpretation of events.. In contrast, the physical attributes that the heptapods found intuitive, like "action" or those other things defined by intergrals, were meaningful only over a period of time. And these were conducive to a teleological interpretation of events...
• a goal of minimizing or maximizing. And one had to know the initial and final states to meet that goal;
• What if the experience of knowing the future changed a person? What if it evoked a sense of urgency, a sense of obligation to act precisely as she knew she would?
• Every physical event was an utterance that could be parsed in two entirely different ways, one causal and the other teleological,
• (The heptapods) act to create the future, to enact chronology. <> Freedom isn't an illusion; it's perfectly real in the context of sequential consciousness. Within the context of simultaneous consciousness, freedom is not meaningful.
• Before, my memories grew like a column of cigarette ash, laid down by the infinitesimal sliver of combustion that was my consciousness.
• Current thing held that there was a lexical universe as well as a physical one, and bringing an object together with a compatible name caused the latent potentialities of both to be realized. ('Seventy-two Letters')
• They could find no difference between megafeotuses of succeeding generations in terms of size or vitality.
• The search is to discover a euonym for the human species. You wish for mankind to perpetuate itself through nomenclature.
• When Joseph's brothers created a female golem they could share sexually without violating the prohibition against such behavior with a woman... It was from such ignoble soil that their research grew.
• A new species requires progenitors containing vast numbers of descendants nested within their reproductive organs.
• "Here we are forming a secret organization nested within a secret organization. If only foetuses were so easily induced."
• Another possibility: that if a creature could be expressed in a name, reproducing that creature was equivalent to transcribing the name. An organism could contain, instead of a tiny analogue of its body, a lexical representation instead. <> Humanity would become a vehicle for the name as well as a product of it.
• The appearance of the holy site was an object lesson in what happened when the celestial and terrestrial realms touched: the landscape was variously scarred by lava flows, gaping fissures, and impact craters. ('Hell Is the Absence of God')
• Appreciating beauty would become a consensual interaction, something you do only when both parties, the beholder and the beheld, agree to it.