Ted Chiang's 1998 novella about a linguist who learns an alien language whose structure gives her the ability to perceive time non-linearly — the basis for the film Arrival — exploring how language shapes cognition and the nature of free will when the future is known.
Creates the most philosophically sophisticated alien-contact story in SF — the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (language shapes thought) taken to its logical science-fictional extreme produces a meditation on free will, love, and the nature of time that works simultaneously as SF and philosophy.
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