Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang

Ever wondered how difficult it would be to communicate with aliens? Probably a bit harder than Star Trek makes it appear - in fact a person might have to change her whole view of the space-time continuum to truly understand their point of view. Non-Spoiler Summary In A Nutshell: "Story of Your Life" follows Dr. Louise Banks, a linguist who alternates between describing her efforts at learning to communicate with aliens and explaining to her daughter the trials of being a parent. The story begins as several alien ships take up orbit around Earth and place hundreds of looking glasses at various places around the world to help facilitate communications with humans. In the USA the military sets up two person teams, composed on one linguist and one physicist, at each of its nine looking glass locations in order to learn as much as possible about the aliens without giving away any critical information. The aliens, dubbed "heptapods" because of their radially symmetric form, have a spoken…