The fact that we’re made of elements that were born in the heart of stars, that happens to be true, and that contributed to this astronaut’s experience, but someone could have the exact same experience contemplating something which is not true; for instance, that we are all children of God or whatever, any religious claim you want to use. He made some very important discoveries into the nature of language, thus transforming the way we think, learn, and language like we know now; First you have to think of the sentence. They are silver, and were changed to ruby for the movie to show up better in color film. What do stories have to do with time-travel? If the claim is, as he phrases it, that there is a preferred order for the clauses in conditional constructions in all languages, it's pretty hard to disprove—you'd need a language in which both orders were equally "preferred"...whatever that might mean. And you know, this is something I’m interested in, and yeah, there’s a sense in which “What’s Expected Of Us” falls into this category, also the story “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” falls into this category, and there’s even a sense in which for my first collection, “Story of Your Life”, falls in this category. Likewise, in the same way that you control the parts of the future by taking actions, you also control parts of the past.14 You perceive the past as fixed and your belief about the past world certain, and the future mutable, as you predict, plan, and take actions to change the future; things often do not go as you expect or hope, but that evidence changes your beliefs about the past—but why couldn’t you perceive the past as uncertain, your predictions about the future as certain, and mistakes then change what you believed about the future? Science fiction and fantasy are very closely related genres, and a lot of people say that the genres are so close that there’s actually no meaningful distinction to be made between the two. I didn’t see it in the contract when I signed up. …More interesting was the fact that Heptapod B was changing the way I thought. Louise immerses herself in Heptapod B, becoming better and better and writing complex sentences of her own. It’s a very esoteric procedure, and not something that will ever be widely performed. My story ends on a note that, to me, is ultimately life affirming. It didn't follow the pattern of human languages, as expected, but it was comprehensible so far: free word order, even to the extent that there was no preferred order for the clauses in a conditional statement, in defiance of a human language "universal."