Instead, what appears to be precognition in Chiang’s story is actually far more interesting, and a novel twist on psychology and physics: classical physics allows usefully interpreting the laws of physics in both a ‘forward’ way in which events happen step by step, but also a teleological way in which events are simply the unique optimal solution to a set of constraints including the outcome and allows reasoning ‘backwards’. At no point does the protagonist travel in time or enjoy precognitive powers, interpreting the story this way leads to many serious plot holes, it renders most of the exposition-heavy dialogue (which is a large fraction of the wordcount) completely irrelevant, and genuine precognition undercuts the themes of tragedy & acceptance. However, movie viewers often misread the short story: “Story” is not a time-travel movie. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is 'so it goes.One of Ted Chiang’s most noted philosophical SF short stories, “Story of Your Life”, was made into a successful time-travel movie, Arrival, sparking interest in the original. When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them.

The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance.

All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. I particularly loved this this passage from the book, where Vonnegut is describing an alien species that does not perceive time as linear: Both Arrival and Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughter-House Five raise very interesting questions about our perception of time.

Arrival and story of your life