Heptapods: The Aliens of Arrival, Their Language and Non-Linear Time

Ted Chiang wrote the heptapods to solve a problem in physics. "Story of Your Life" (1998) grew from his interest in Fermat's principle of least time, the fact that light takes the fastest path between two points as though it already knew the destination, and from the question of what a mind would be like if it experienced the world that way, as a whole rather than as a sequence. The story's narrator, the linguist Louise Banks, learns the heptapods' language and comes to perceive her own life, including the birth and early death of her daughter, as a single completed shape. Chiang's aliens do not invade, negotiate or explain; they arrive, talk through a screen for a while and leave, and the story is about the woman who learns to read them.

Denis Villeneuve's Arrival (2016) kept the spine and added a planet. Eric Heisserer's screenplay gave the heptapods twelve ships, hovering at sites from Montana to Shanghai to the Indian Ocean, and put the world's militaries on a countdown while Banks, played by Amy Adams, and the physicist Ian Donnelly work in a Montana tent. The film earned eight Academy Award nominations, won for sound editing, and was praised by linguists for showing fieldwork as it is: a whiteboard, a word at a time, months of it. Jessica Coon of McGill University, who consulted, has said the office set was built from photographs of hers.

The heptapods are built to have no front. Each is a barrel-shaped body several metres tall on seven limbs that end in starfish-like hands, with an eye at the top of each limb, so that the creature sees in every direction and has no reason to turn; Chiang describes them as looking like a barrel suspended at the intersection of seven limbs. The film reduced this to a shape glimpsed through mist: a dark, whale-grey mass on seven tapering legs, the "hands" splayed against the glass to spray ink. They live in a thick atmosphere behind a transparent barrier, which the humans cannot cross without suits; their voices, in the film, are low sub-bass pulses that Villeneuve's sound team built from whale calls and slowed strings.

The shells are the film's invention. Twelve matte-black lens shapes, about 450 metres tall, hang a few metres above the ground at twelve sites with no obvious pattern, opening every eighteen hours to admit a team through a shaft in which gravity turns sideways. Their material, propulsion and origin are never described, and at the end they lift, fold and vanish without a wake. The film's refusal to explain the ships is the same refusal Chiang made about the beings: the story is about the language, and the technology exists only to bring the language within reach of a whiteboard.

The heptapods have two languages that do not correspond. Heptapod A, the spoken one, is ordinary in structure and impossible in sound. Heptapod B, the written one, is semasiographic: it records meaning without recording speech, the way a mathematical equation does, and a sentence is a single circular logogram whose parts are written simultaneously rather than in order, so that the writer must know the whole thought before beginning the first stroke. Chiang built the idea from real ideas in linguistics, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that a language shapes its speakers' perception, and pushed it to the limit: a mind fluent in Heptapod B experiences events the way the language writes them, all at once, and Banks begins to remember her future.

The film made the logograms physical. Designed by the artist Martine Bertrand and the production designer Patrice Vermette, they are rings of black ink with splashes and gaps that carry the meaning, sprayed from the heptapods' hands and analyzed by the humans with software that decomposes each ring into components; about a hundred were drawn for the production. The film's crisis turns on one of them, the ring the humans translate as "offer weapon," and its resolution turns on Banks using a memory of the future, a phone call with a Chinese general that has not yet happened, to stop a war. Linguists have pointed out that Sapir-Whorf in its strong form is not supported by evidence; Chiang and the film both know this and take the premise as a thought experiment rather than a claim.

Arrival is the rare alien film about the part of first contact that real institutions have actually planned for. The SETI community adopted a Declaration of Principles in 1989, revised since, covering what to do on detecting a signal: verify it, tell other observatories, tell the public, and do not reply without international consultation. The film's twelve national teams, each hoarding its own translation, and the Chinese decision to stop sharing are the scenario the protocol was written to prevent, and Banks's insistence on building vocabulary before asking the big question is what any SETI linguist would say. The only real candidate signal, the Wow! signal of August 1977, lasted 72 seconds, was never repeated and carried no content, which is the more likely shape of real contact than a ship over Montana.

The heptapods also invert the lore this Knowledge Base mostly covers. They are the opposite of Greys: enormous, slow, unreadable, uninterested in bodies, and patient enough to spend months on a single word. The CE-5 contact protocols of Steven Greer's movement, which invite contact by meditation, and the film's protocol of contact by grammar are two answers to the same question of how a person and an alien could begin, and Chiang's answer is the one that can be taught in a classroom. The sci-fi predictions article notes that the film's working method, not its aliens, is its most accurate forecast.