I’ve just finished reading “The story of your life” the other day and I can’t say I’m impressed. Based on the comments I’ve read about the movie I expected it to be mind boggling. The author claims that knowing the future affects free will but he doesn’t bother explaining how could anyone know the future or why would there be only one – quantum mechanics for example states that there could be countless futures/universes. For my standards the story is too swallow. I’m used to reading hard sci-fi where usually authors go into excessive detail to describe their worlds. Chiang doesn’t do that. He just presents a theory and lets it linger in your mind. It reads more like philosophy rather than sci-fi.
I don't think it's nearly as good as "Understand" or "Exhalation" or "Hell is the Absence of God" (all discussed in OP). Like "Life Cycle of Software Objects", it seems seriously overrated. But "Story of Your Life" is definitely one of the more confusing stories and I had to read it at least twice before I thought I understood what sort of Chiang-style message Chiang was going for.
What I take him as suggesting is not that the aliens really are tapping into quantum woo to see the future (this is what inferior SF authors might do and maybe have in the movie which I haven't seen), any more than light rays see into the future in order to take the shortest path, but doing something more like Watts's _Blindsight_ in trying to explore different kinds of minds: that given the reversibility of the laws of physics and the arrow of time, there is no logical or privileged reason to have a conscious experience of the universe as time unfolding sequentially and computationally according to a program computing 1 planck-second at a time, rather than as an Einsteinian 4D block universe in which the block universe is the optimal path between boundary conditions and everything unfolds as it must and already has. This is similar to points Drescher makes in _Good and Real_: a brain could try to understand the universe by taking the present and extrapolating forward but it also takes the present and extrapolate backward. You can 'remember' the future as easily as the past.
The aliens could be doing this, and it is as valid a way of cognition as anything else. And then the drama comes from the protagonist slowly adopting this way of thinking herself to come to terms with her grief over her daughter's death by adopting a timeless Lagrangian way of thinking and explaining it to the reader who is still trapped in the algorithmic perspective.
Yes yes yes. We read "Story of Your Life" in my Sci-fi reading club, and several people came away with the misunderstanding that the aliens could see the future or something like that. But your interpretation is correct (IMHO). Chiang was making a point about the subjective nature of consciousness, or at least one aspect of it.
His works are definitely more philosophical, though I think that's always been an important part of sci-fi; Asimov never explained how a positronic brain worked, just explored the possibilities of a hypothetical world. Chiang takes philosophical writing right up to the point of Jorge Luis Borges, and if that's not your thing, that's reasonable. If you are looking for more world-building and detail, though, I do recommend his "Tower of Babylon," which describes the engineering challenges of building the Biblical Tower of Babel, assuming that the flat-Earth, solid sky model of Biblical cosmology was really true.
Your appraisal's right, his work is more philosophical/speculative than "hard" SF. But I don't see a problem with that. There's room for both in science fiction. If you don't particularly prefer the spec-fic stuff, there's nothing wrong with that either. It depends on what you see the purpose of scifi as being: Is it to explore cool tech/science we can't explore in reality yet, or is it to use tech/science to ask questions we can't answer in reality yet?
Sure it's both and a gazillion other things. But here's the thing, even as a philosophical theme I don't find it presented very well. Why for example can't you act on free will? Who's stopping you? The future? And who's enforcing it?
He could for example go down the path of the simulation hypothesis which also renders free will irrelevant. But he didn't. I don't know, perhaps after a while it will hit but right now I can't really see the greatness in the scenario. I don't mean to dismiss it, just saying so to open a conversation.
You are saying this free will stuff because you are conditioned to believe in free will. Someone who knew that there was only one future would find the idea of free will to be like some kind of fairy tale -- the lack of it doesn't require any more explanation than the lack of Santa Claus.
In our current non-fictional universe, where we don't know if there is free will, then if you want to believe in it, maybe the burden of proof is on you to explain how it would even be possible given what we know of the universe.
So I am not sure why you think a fiction author is failing at is job by not explaining the mechanism by which there is not free will.
Astonishingly hard to imagine how any such exploration would not have diminished the story. This is a woman narrating an extraordinary experience and a relationship with her daughter, not a physicist giving a lecture on the structure of the universe.
I think in this case the film works better than the story. It's not one of my favourites of Chiang's but the impact & consequences of Louise learning the heptapod language is far greater on film than it is in prose.
I found it to be a story where the payoff takes a little while to percolate. It did not hit me immediately - I even had to search around for an explanation. It is intentionally left a bit open, and the specific "scientific" details are left up to your imagination, beyond the linguistics work. Once it hit me, though, I slowly became more and more impressed.
