Source: ted-chiang-story-of-your-life-2000.pdf – Google Drive
This is a really interesting science fiction concerning about language. Firstly, it takes a kind of double-line narrative that intersect together, one is coherent in time, but the other is more like fragments of the past time. And the two story line have some some crossing or connecting parts like “non-zero-sum game” “salad bowl”, giving a sense of the writer reading through a projection of her memory.
So this pattern has similarity with the “simultaneous mode of consciousness”(Chiang, 25), which is the thinking mode of the heptapods. The whole book is the whole picture of her life demonstrated in front of us. And the overlapping points of her description are the shared stroke of the pictographic language.
Their language is not a linear language. B seems to be more significant or represents them better compared to A. And their is no connection between their two language, differing from humans’ communication of talking that generates thoughts from an invisible mouth spitting words out to express. But about that mute person’s pattern of communication?? So our language have many forms…
I think the so-called free will and determinism is still proposed from humans perception of the world. There could be other ways that beyond our recognition