Ted Chiang's story, Story of Your Life focuses on the perception of the main character Dr, Louise Banks who is asked by the military to help understand the communications of the heptapod aliens. Chiang's story parallels Delany's Babel-17 in the sense that the main character's own perception begins to change as she learns more of the alien language."And one had to know the initial and final states and meet the goal; one needed the knowledge of the effects before the causes could be initiated. I was growing to understand that, too" (Chiang 130). Fermat's principle of least time factors into her and Gary's linguistic work on learning the language when she comes to the realization that in order to write this synthetic language you must know how
