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Established in 1949

A Research Assignment
Submitted to
Department of English, Faculty of Arts
The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Vadodara.

As a Partial Requirement for

The Degree of Master of Arts in English

Determinism as Cosmic Horror: An Analysis of Ted Chiang’s “Story of

Your Life”

Submitted by
Ningombam Captain Singh
(2017033800070956)

Under the Supervision of

Dr. Rajesh Bharvad
Department of English, Faculty of Arts
The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Vadodara.

March 2021
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Table of Contents

Sr.No. Contents Page No.

1 Introduction 03

2 Annotated Bibliography 04

3 Related Literature Review 06

4 Research Gaps 10

5 Conclusion 11

6 A Select Bibliography 12
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Introduction

Ted Chiang is an American science fiction writer. His work has won four Nebula

awards, four Hugo awards, the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and four

Locus awards. Chiang has published seventeen short stories, novelettes, and novellas as of

2019. His short story "Story of Your Life" was the basis of the film Arrival (2016). He is also

an artist in residence at the University of Notre Dame. Critic John Clute has written that

Chiang's work has a "tight-hewn and lucid style... which has a magnetic effect on the reader".

About the author:

Chiang was born in 1967 in Port Jefferson, New York. Both of his parents were

born in China and emigrated to Taiwan with their families during the Chinese Communist

Revolution before emigrating to the United States. His Chinese name is Chiang Feng-nan. He

graduated from Brown University with a computer science degree. He had been submitting

stories to magazines since high school and after attending the Clarion Writers Workshop in

1989 he sold his first story, "The Tower of Babylon", to the Omni science magazine. As of

July 2002, he was working as a technical writer in the software industry and resided in

Bellevue, Washington, near Seattle. He has won numerous science fiction awards for his

works: a Nebula Award for "Tower of Babylon" (1990); the John W. Campbell Award for

Best New Writer in 1992; a Nebula Award and the Theodore Sturgeon Award for "Story of

Your Life" (1998); a Sidewise Award for "Seventy-Two Letters" (2000); a Nebula Award,

Locus Award, and Hugo Award for his novelette "Hell Is the Absence of God" (2002); a

Nebula and Hugo Award for his novelette "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" (2007); a

Science Fiction Association Award, a Locus Award, and the Hugo Award for Best Short
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Story for "Exhalation" (2009); and a Hugo Award and Locus Award for his novella "The

Lifecycle of Software Objects" (2010).

About the novella:

"Story of Your Life" is a science fiction novella by Chiang, first published in

"Starlight 2" in 1998, and in 2002 in Chiang's collection of short stories, "Stories of Your

Life and Others". Its major themes are language and determinism. "Story of Your Life" won

the 2000 Nebula Award for Best Novella, as well as the 1999 Theodore Sturgeon Award. It

was nominated for the 1999 Hugo Award for Best Novella. The novella has been translated

into Italian, Japanese, French and German. A film adaptation of the story by Eric Heisserer,

titled Arrival and directed by Denis Villeneuve, was released in 2016. It stars Amy Adams,

Jeremy Renner, and Forest Whitaker and was nominated for eight Academy Awards,

including Best Picture; it won the award for Best Sound Editing. The film also won the 2017

Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation.

Annotated Bibliography

1. Chiang, Ted. "Story of Your Life". Stories of Your Life and Others (e-book ed.). Picador,

2002. p. 76. ISBN 978-1-4472-8198-6.

This is a science fiction novella by American writer Ted Chiang, first published in Starlight 2

in 1998, and in 2002 in Chiang's collection of short stories, Stories of Your Life and Others.

Its major themes are language and determinism.

2. Joshi, S.T. Icons of Horror and the Supernatural: An Encyclopedia of Our Worst

Nightmares. Greenwood, 2006. p.107. ISBN 0313337802.

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This book overviews 24 of the most significant icons of horror and the supernatural. Included

are alphabetically arranged extended entries on the icons. Each entry is written by a leading

authority on the subject and is accessible to general readers.

3. Heisserer, Eric (August 20, 2015). "Arrival Screenplay" (PDF). Script Slug.

p. 125. Archived (PDF) from the original on September 28, 2019. Retrieved September

28, 2019.

This is a screenplay based on the Nebula-winning science fiction novella, "Story of Your

Life" by Ted Chiang, written in 1998. As with the film, "Story of Your Life" involves Earth's

first communication with heptapods who speak in a cryptic language.

4. Mellor, D. H. The Facts of Causation, London: Routledge, 1995

The Facts of Causation is a book on one of the ground-breaking theories in metaphysics. We

cannot understand the world and our place in it without understanding causation. Mellor

shows us that to understand the world and our lives we must understand causation.

5. Nagel, Ernest. "Determinism in history". Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.

1960 pp. 291–317.

It is an article on determinism in which Nagel redefined the term as the impotence of

deliberate human action to influence history. The purpose of this paper was to disprove five

major arguments which opponents of determinism advance.

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6. Nguyen, Trung. History of Humans. Is There a God?. 3. 2016.

EnCognitive. ISBN 9781927091265.

“History of Humans”, the third book in the series “Is There a God?” discusses the origin of

humans and humanity. This book merges cosmic indifference with nihilism proposing

intellectual arguments inclined toward atheistic standards.

7. Ralickas, Vivian. "'Cosmic Horror' and the Question of the Sublime in Lovecraft." Journal

of the Fantastic in the Arts 18, no. 3 (2008): 364.

This paper analyses the Kantian notions of sublimity abound in Lovecraft's fiction:

phenomena whose principal characteristics are their formlessness, infinite expanse, or

superhuman might. Ralickas further dissects Lovecraft’s pronouncements on “cosmic horror"

and the effect he aimed to convey in his stories.

Related Literature Review

In a common layman's perspective, while reading Chiang's novella, one might be

confronted with Linguistic jargons which are prevalent in the text. A superficial reading of

his slow yet steady prose style will not reveal a sense of dread, but only after a thorough

reading with other influences in mind such as the works of the writer H.P. Lovecraft or

filmmaker Ridley Scott, it becomes apparent that the novella has potential interpretations for

Cosmicism and Lovecraftian Horror. This can only be achieved by drawing comparisons and

enacting touchstones of previous literature already established in this particular domain. In

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this methodology of comparative study, the implied idea of determinism that has already been

established with the study of this text is chosen for further analysis and dissection.

The scope of this review is however, limited. Most existing researches on

determinism as a school of thought tend to meddle with Physical Science, with scopes in

Physics and Probability. Hence, the choices laid for this topic are restricted from its

inception. While citing excerpts from such specific literature, particular crosschecking

becomes necessary to investigate the provenance of such a research, whether they tend to

deepen into Physical Science or remain far removed from such an undertaking.

Determinism was developed by the Greek philosophers during the 6th and 7th

centuries BC by the Pre-socratic philosophers Heraclitus and Leucippus, later Aristotle, and

mainly by the Stoics. Determinism is the philosophical view that all events are determined

completely by previously existing causes. One of the primary research articles on

determinism is "Free will, determinism, and the possibility of doing otherwise." (2014) by

Christian List. According to List, the roots of the notion of determinism lie in a very common

philosophical idea: the idea that "everything can, in principle, be explained, or that everything

that is, has a sufficient reason for being and being as it is, and not otherwise."

Works like G.D. Caruso's "Free Will and Consciousness: A Determinist Account

of the Illusion of Free Will" proves that a modern understanding of free will grants humans

the ability to make choices freely; we can plot our own lives and are thus totally responsible

for those choices. Earlier traditions would see it in the light of humankind having been

destined for perfection but now being subject to the consequences of original sin,

environmental forces and the factor of Providence. In Christian thinking, the theologian

Armenius in the seventeenth century put this latter view forward. His theology is often called

Arminianism. However, prior to that, the reformer Martin Luther had written a book On the

Bondage of the Will, suggesting that since the Fall, man's will was bent towards making bad
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choices and therefore it was much more difficult to choose to do good. Deterministic theories

throughout the history of philosophy have sprung from diverse and sometimes overlapping

motives and considerations.

In literature, the conflict between determinism and free will has been portrayed

from Greek tragedy to the novels of George Eliot and Thomas Hardy and beyond. In a special

sense, any fictional character's actions are determined by the author. In Sophocles' Oedipus'

Rex, whose fate is foretold by a prophecy from the Delphic oracle. Oedipus tries everything

he knows to avoid fulfilling the prophecy, but ironically, everything he does only helps to

fulfil it. He finds that, as the prophecy predicted, he has killed his own father and married his

own mother. English novelist Thomas Hardy often uses this same sort of irony. In "Tess of

the d'Urbervilles", for example, Tess is undecided whether to tell her fiancé, Angel, of her

past. She decides to write a letter, delivers it, but unbeknown to her, the letter slips under a

carpet and is never found. We are left to decide whether: it is an unlucky accident or some

sort of malevolent fate. In the novels of another Victorian writer, George Eliot, there is a

more obvious moral pattern. For example, in Middlemarch, the religious hypocrite Bulstrode

finds that however much he tries to hide his past, an apparent series of coincidences actually

reveal it. His actions help to achieve the opposite of what he wishes. But here, unlike with

Tess or Oedipus, we feel fate, or destiny, is a moral force. Novelists often use a deterministic

course of story as a plot device. They have to use coincidences to make a plot work. If

coincidences are patterned or weighted one way or the other, the audience no longer sees

them as coincidences but some systematic force of destiny. The writer then needs to provide

some sort of interpretation for this force beyond that of the needs of his own plot

manipulation.

According to Carl Hoefer's "Causal Determinism" from The Stanford

Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2016 Edition): "Determinism is the idea that every event
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is necessitated by antecedent events and conditions together with the laws of nature. The idea

is ancient, but first became subject to clarification and mathematical analysis in the

eighteenth century." Determinism is deeply connected with our understanding of the physical

sciences and their explanatory ambitions, on the one hand, and with our views about human

free action on the other. In both of these general areas there is no agreement over whether

determinism is true or false. The sense of dread in a deterministic universe is cosmic. The

term "Cosmic horror" is interchangeably used with "Lovecraftian Horror", which is a

subgenre of horror fiction that emphasizes the horror of the unknown more than gore or other

elements of shock. It is named after the American author H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937). His

work emphasizes a philosophy of cosmicism, the idea that the reality underlying the veneer

of normality is so alien that seeing it would be harmful. Cosmicism is the literary philosophy

developed and used by Lovecraft in his weird fiction. He was a writer of philosophically

intense horror stories that involve occult phenomena like astral possession and alien

miscegenation, and the themes of his fiction over time contributed to the development of this

philosophy.

According to Vivian Ralickas' "Cosmic Horror and the Question of the Sublime

in Lovecraft", cosmic horror has been characterized as: The "fear and awe we feel when

confronted by phenomena beyond our comprehension, whose scope extends beyond the

narrow field of human affairs and boasts of cosmic significance". In a sense, Lovecraft's

writing is very spiritual. He is trying to articulate a more correct understanding of gothic

horror than many people of his time or himself were very familiar with, but it would be an

enormous mistake to say that Lovecraft himself was not aware of gothic fiction that worked

on a level by virtue of the fact that the ghosts in a story like "The Yellow Wall-Paper" by

Charlotte Perkins, is capable of traversing the conscious space, the veil, the threshold or the

limen, in and out consciousness. He is talking about the perpetual existence of consciousness,
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the life-in-death subsisting on life, beyond mortal life. He was interested in the survival of

consciousness. This finer articulation of the ghost into the daemonic, a being existing as life

beyond death, was the goal of his writing as far as trying to articulate, which is better

understood now than it was in the past. Such will be the case of Ted Chiang.

The leading authority on Lovecraft is an American writer of Indian decent, S.T.

Joshi. Most of his works are cited in this paper and can be found in the bibliography. Sunand

Tryambak Joshi (born June 22, 1958) is an American writer, musician, critic and award-

winning scholar whose work has largely focused on weird and fantastic fiction, especially the

life and work of H.P. Lovecraft and associated writers. Joshi is a lifelong scholar and editor

of H.P. Lovecraft and restored Lovecraft's texts for Arkham House. He has published a

lengthy biography of H. P. Lovecraft, I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P.

Lovecraft (2 vols). Additionally, Joshi has been a prolific editor of works of weird fiction by

various authors and a historian of the field across a number of volumes. His literary criticism

focuses upon the worldviews of authors.His book "The Weird Tale" examines horror and

fantasy writings by Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Dunsany, M. R. James, Bierce and

Lovecraft. It also examines modern writers, including Shirley Jackson, Ramsey Campbell,

Stephen King, Robert Aickman, Thomas Ligotti, T. E. D. Klein and others, from a similar

viewpoint. Joshi and David E. Schultz edited volumes of Lovecraft's letters with

Necronomicon Press (including those to Robert Bloch, Henry Kuttner, Samuel Loveman and

Vincent Starrett). Joshi and Schultz are now progressively issuing volumes through

Hippocampus Press of H. P. Lovecraft's letters to his correspondents.

Research Gaps
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Ted Chiang's soulful writing has earned him numerous accolades. The nature of

his writing is more inclined toward science and other intellectual studies, such as Linguistics,

hence one often overlooks the possibility of interpreting his works as highlights of primal or

surreptitious topics. His science fiction novella "Story of Your Life" is interpreted with major

themes like language and determinism. While the novella has no elements of suspense, there

is an underlying sense of dread in between the lines. This uncanny yet necessary reading has

led to the search for cosmic horror in his superficially soulful novella. It is hard to find

research articles on Chiang's writings, let alone researches highlighting the connections with

Lovecraft or horror in general. His soulful writings are not studied in depth or applied newer

interpretations. Given the fact that Chiang has become one of the most recognizable names in

science fiction today, it is still in primitive stages in the general analysis of his rich body of

work, that has a multitude of layers. This article aims to contribute some deeper

understanding in analyzing his writings.

Conclusion

Several readings of the novella might not be fruitful to acquire this perspective if

one is not familiar with the literary existence of cosmicism. Once the congruency is

established, the dread in the novella will fall into place to the anatomy of cosmic horror— the

powerlessness of our influence in the course of events. The heptapods are treated as sacred

and unfathomable beings, and it is wrong in assuming that the sacred must always be

benevolent to human life. Even in the Holy Bible, angels are beings that instil tremendous

terror in those people who encounter them. Lovecraft recognized the fact that the sacred

brings cosmic fear. This can be applied to Ted Chiang's novella as it is frightening to digest

the possibility that free will is non-existent in an uncaring universe. The arrival of heptapods
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in the novella shows the aftermath of this possibility i.e. the knowledge of a painful yet

unalterable future. After all, it is beyond human comprehension to fully fathom the

deterministic functioning system of the unknowable cosmos.

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A Select Bibliography

 Baumeister, R. F. Free will, consciousness, and cultural animals. In Are We Free (pp. 65–

85). 2008. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

 Butterfield, J. “Determinism and Indeterminism,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy,

E. Craig (ed.), 1998. London: Routledge.

 Caruso, G. D. Free Will and Consciousness: A Determinist Account of the Illusion of Free

Will. Lanham, 2012 MA: Lexington Books.

 Chiang, Ted. "Story of Your Life". Stories of Your Life and Others (e-book ed.). Picador,

2002. p. 76. ISBN 978-1-4472-8198-6.

 Chiang, Ted. "Story Notes". Stories of Your Life and Others (e-book ed.). Picador, 2015.

p. 223. ISBN 978-1-4472-8198-6.

 Eliot, G., & Ashton, R. Middlemarch. London: Penguin Books, 2003.

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 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wallpaper. Virago Press, 1981.

 Grilo, Ana (November 25, 2016). "Contrast and Compare: Arrival and 'Story of Your

Life'". Kirkus Reviews. Retrieved March 10, 2017.

 Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the D'urbervilles. New York: Modern Library. 1919.

 Heisserer, Eric (August 20, 2015). "Arrival Screenplay" (PDF). Script Slug.

p. 125. Archived (PDF) from the original on September 28, 2019. Retrieved September 28,

2019.

 Hoefer, Carl. "Causal Determinism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2016

Edition), 2016. Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =

<https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2016/entries/determinism-causal/>.

 Johnson, Brian. "Prehistories of Posthumanism: Cosmic Indifferentism, Alien Genesis, and

Ecology from H. P. Lovecraft to Ridley Scott". In Sederholm, Carl H.; Weinstock, Jeffrey

Andrew (eds.). The Age of Lovecraft. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016.

pp. 97–116.
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 Joshi, S.T. Icons of Horror and the Supernatural: An Encyclopedia of Our Worst Nightmares.

Greenwood. p.107. 2006. ISBN 0313337802.

 List, Christian. Free will, determinism, and the possibility of doing otherwise. pp. 156-178.

2014. ISSN 0029-462

 Lovecraft, H. P. Crawling Chaos: Selected works 1920-1935 H. P. Lovecraft. introduction by

Colin Wilson. Creation Press, 1992. ISBN 1-871592-72-0.

 Mellor, D. H. The Facts of Causation, London: Routledge, 1995.

 Mitchell, Charles P. The Complete H. P. Lovecraft Filmography. Westport, CT: Greenwood

Press, 2001.

 Nagel, Ernest. "Determinism in history". Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 1960.

pp. 291–317.

 Nguyen, Trung. History of Humans. Is There a God? 2016. ISBN 9781927091265.

 17

 Peak, David. The Spectacle of the Void. U.S.A.: Schism Press. 2014. p. 15. ISBN 978-

1503007161.

 Ralickas, Vivian. "'Cosmic Horror' and the Question of the Sublime in Lovecraft." Journal of

the Fantastic in the Arts 18, 2008, no. 3: 364.

 Roberts, John T "Determinism". In Sahotra Sarkar; Jessica Pfeifer (eds.). The Philosophy of

Science: A-M. Taylor & Francis,2006. pp. 197. ISBN 978-0415977098.

 Rothman, Joshua. "Ted Chiang's Soulful Science Fiction". The New Yorker. Retrieved

January 7, 2017.

 Solomon, Avi (January 29, 2014). "Stories of Ted Chiang's Life and Others: An interview

with the wisest, smartest scifi writer there is". Medium.com. Retrieved March 8, 2017.

 "Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang, Winner, Best Novella in 1999". nebulas.sfwa.org.

Retrieved January 31, 2018.

 "Ted Chiang". Internet Speculative Fiction Database (Summary Bibliography).

Retrieved October 4, 2012.

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 "The Legendary Ted Chiang on Seeing His Stories Adapted and the Ever-Expanding

Popularity of SF". Electric Literature. July 18, 2016.

 Ulaby, Neda. "'Arrival' Author's Approach To Science Fiction? Slow, Steady And

Successful". NPR.org. Retrieved June 22, 2020.

 Werndl, C. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Science. Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2016. Online at www.oxfordhandbooks.com, December 2015.

 William F. Touponce. Lord Dunsany, H.P. Lovecraft, and Ray Bradbury: Spectral Journeys.

Scarecrow Press, 2013. p. 62. ISBN 978-0-8108-9220-0.

 Zanchi, Luca. "The Moving Image and the Time of Prophecy: Trauma and Precognition in L.

Von Trier's Melancholia (2011) and D. Villeneuve's Arrival (2016)", 2020. Journal of

Religion & Film. 24 (1).

 Zutter, Natalie. "Your First Look at Arrival, the Adaptation of Ted Chiang's Novella Story of

Your Life". TOR. tor.com. Retrieved January 31, 2018.