Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life" was the basis for Denis Villeneuve's film "Arrival". The movie isn't a literal adaption of the short story, but IMHO it is very true to the original.
Since all of Chiang's stories are short stories or novellas, they've very approachable. You're not committing to a full novel, you can easily read these stories in a single sitting.
Ted Chiang is one of my favorite writers. I don't think I've read a single story of his that I didn't find interesting, and a lot of the ideas raise profound deeply engaging questions.
I actually don't think that it's very true to the original - arguably, it loses the entire point of the original. In particular, I agree with Gwern's take (https://gwern.net/story-of-your-life) that the original Story of Your Life does not involve any time travel/precognition, while Arrival makes it very clear that Louise has precognition.
To be clear, I quite like Arrival. I just think its message is quite different from the short story.
Yeah I agree. I read the short story after having seen the movie and I thought the language/time stuff was clearly different. That's also why they changed the cause of the daughter's death from a climbing accident to an illness, because it wouldn't make sense for her to be killed by mountain climbing if her mother could have seen it coming.
Disagree. I thought there's a part in the story where the narrator talks about the inability to change the future. she knew her daughter would die in a fall and couldn't change it
Maybe my previous comment wasn't clear enough, since I agree with you. I think both versions make sense in their own context:
In the short story she sees all of her life "simultaneously" but it all still works with our typical notions of causality. The future can't influence the past, and so she can't use knowledge of the future in the present.
In the movie, she gets glimpses of the future which she then uses in the present. She learns the Chinese general's phone number from a memory of the future and then calls him. In the movie it wouldn't have made sense for her to see her daughter die in an accident and then not act on that information at all, so they changed it to an illness which she couldn't prevent even with foreknowledge.
I feel its super clear if you read the story before the movie existed. Also the physics examples, which aren't in the movie, make this clear.
There are two views of the world, in one you have freewill and experience making choices. In the other, you have no free will, and the things you do are set. They are set and you know what they are.
That's why its important that her daughter died of something preventable, so when you find out at the end that it hasn't happen yet, yet she does nothing to stop it even though it is in the future, you are getting a taste of seeing the world in this second way.
Cancer, there is nothing anyone can do, and it throws aside the whole premise.
The acting on seeing things in the future break the premise as well.
The point of the story was that you can't act on the future. If you can see the future you can't change it. It's also why the aliens had no strong reason for coming or leaving. They were always going to come, have the explosion and leave.
> and on my first read, I thought [Story of My Life] was downright mediocre—it seemed like some formal experimentation ... wrapped around an unnecessarily confusing plot & second-rate physics mumbo-jumbo in the service of a heavy-handed point. On my second read years later, having read some more about related topics in physics & philosophy since, I realized that I (along with almost everyone else who read it, judging from online discussions & reviews of the story and Arrival) might have been badly mistaken and that the plot was deliberately open to misreading and the physics mumbo-jumbo was in fact the whole point and the formal structure nicely reflected that.
> Didn't she do something like this in the short story as well? The part where she learns the non-zero-sum phrase?
If you carefully read the section, she learns the "non-zero-sum" phrase before having her daughter. The flashforward where she uses the "non-zero-sum" phrase is just her recalling the memory - no precognition required.
> “Mom, what do you call it when both sides can win?” I’ll look up from my computer and the paper I’ll be writing. “What, you mean a win-win situation?” … “I’m sorry, I don’t know it either. Why don’t you call your dad?”…A representative from the State Department named Hossner had the job of briefing the U.S scientists on our agenda with the heptapods. We sat in the video-conference room, listening to him lecture…“You mean it’s a non-zero-sum game?” Gary said in mock incredulity. “Oh my gosh.”…“A non-zero-sum game.” “What?” You’ll reverse course, heading back from your bedroom. “When both sides can win: I just remembered, it’s called a non-zero-sum game”
I watched the movie first, found out who wrote it, and read the book it was in.
I did love a lot the short story, and kind of got mad at "Arrival" for some of the changes it makes to the story. But.
After several (SEVERAL) re watches of the movie, I got to "understand" what Villeneuve was about, and I fell in love with the movie as well.
It currently sits in probably my top 5 preferred movies to re watch (Being the others both Blade Runners, About Time & Notting Hill in no preferred order)
The anecdote about the most important line in the film is also really funny in that the line seems so deep and philosophical, but it came about almost entirely through improvisation at the last minute.
The whole thing is one of those rare cases where I consider the original story by Ted Chiang, the script by Eric Heisserer, and the film by Denis Villeneuve to all be complimentary.
As much as I enjoy the original Blade Runner, it really does not feel like a masterpiece the way 2049 does.
Note the usage of quotes from Nabokov's Pale Fire during the baseline test. A few I liked:
Do you feel that there's a part of you that's missing? Interlinked.
Did you buy a present for the person you love? Within cells interlinked.
* spoiler alert *
Joe (aka "K") has to pass the baseline test to demonstrate his lack of emotional state.
There's a scene early on in the film where K will be giving a present to his hologram love, Joi. She's the opposite of K - full of emotion, joy, sadness. Joe just had a rough day, comes home, and she tries to cheer him up
Joi : Would you read to me?
[gets up, crosses to table, 'picks up' Nabokov's Pale Fire]
Joi : It'll make you feel better.
'K' : You hate that book.
Yes, of course she hates that book. She is a glowing ball of emotion and doesn't want to ever give that up. She's the most emotional character in the whole film.
It's clear the film is a true labor of love from Hampton Fancher and Michael Green. They put their entire being into this work.
I read a post some time ago that explained how that test came to be - It was created by Ryan Gosling of all people - and it's an incredible story inside an incredible story.
Not sure if this [1] is the post I read back in the day, so I hope it does explain the story correctly (Haven't read this one in particular, just googled for it). Then I thought "May be I picked that from Hacker news" [2] and [3] (May be you should go at these in reverse order)
Crazy to me that people think 2049 was a masterpiece. That film was full of the most generic sci-fi story tropes possible and entirely missed the chaotic, visual genius of the original. It’s a forgettable sci-fi action movie that no one would have looked twice at if it weren’t named Blade Runner.
I barely remember 2049. I remember so much of the original. Ridley Scott and team created the world from scratch and mastered the atmosphere. 2049 is very good, but it's basically a requel.
I think Villeneuve - out of the current cream-of-the-crop directors - best understands how to /adapt/ for film. Chiang has a masterful grasp of the short story format, in turn. Both the short story and film delighted me, and both seem suited well to their medium.
Arrival and Dune Part 1 are both really good, 10/10, adaptations.
Dune 2 to me shows that even with an amazingly talented adapter/director, that there are some limits to what can be conveyed from literature to film.
The limit in Dune 2 comes down to the fact that much of the “action” in the novel takes place via internal monologue. To convey that in film ends up being very, very hard and with Dune you can’t escape it.
In my viewing of Dune 2 I thought they weren’t able to really show the vastness of Paul’s internal journey, his visions of Jihad, struggling with his place in the universe as his mind is transforming. I didn’t feel that was in the film and made a lot of other actions and motivations more confusing.
I’m glad we have so many ways to tell stories, and I’m wholeheartedly for adaptations, but the fact that some types of ideas and stories are best expressed via one medium over another is something to embrace as well.
Certainly true! Expressing internal conflict and ideas in external, comprehensible ways is maybe the single most difficult challenge for the filmmaker. It's very hard to get right. 'The medium is the message' still rings true.
I guess I should re-watch it since I read the story first, then watched the movie and I had a hard time with what I perceived was unnecessary monkeying with the story of the daughter that I felt made the movie story less rich and complex. But it's probably time to revisit both mediums.
I shared this with a friend who grew up native in an Arabic-speaking country. After finishing it, he said he'd like to read it again but in the original Arabic. He'd interpreted it as authentic from his native storytelling culture.
I read both collections after, like others, getting introduced to Ted Chiang because of Arrival, and both rank highly among my favorites. Chiang can write some beautiful prose (best exemplified by "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate") and excels at taking a single interesting idea and taking it somewhere fascinating. With very few exceptions, his stories don't have real characters - they're just named tools to express ideas - but that works well with the kind of stories he writes.
Highlights for me from Exhalation:
The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate - beautifully written story in the style of Arabic literature
The Lifecycle of Software Objects - resonated strongly with me due to its criticism of the software industry, and raises great ethical questions about AIs
The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling - I was intrigued by the Tiv tribe's concepts of truth, and blown away when I later found out that "mimi" and "vough" are real concepts and not Chiang's imagination
Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom - a great and plausibly seeming examination of the psychological and social effects of communicating with alternate realities
Funny the last 3 are also among my highlights, but I would venture that they’re specifically good examples of Chiang’s ability to do character work. In various ways, they give a marvelously detailed and lyrical picture of people evolving over time, dealing with and coming to peace with circumstances and adversity.
> The movie isn't a literal adaption of the short story, but IMHO it is very true to the original.
I think it depends on what you mean. It takes the literal plot in a different direction—I think necessarily, because it'd be very hard to convey on film the important parts of the story without something like very heavy-handed voice-over. But I could go for the argument that it is true to the spirit and mood of the story. (Personally, I enjoyed it—it's by far my favorite Villeneuve's movies—and, as a huge Ted Chiang fan, I didn't feel cheated, but neither did I feel that I'd seen a very faithful adaptation.)
It wasn't a different direction. Everything in the story is in the movie as well. The movie just contains a ton of more plot and details because of course you can't just translate a handful of pages of a sci-fi concept to the big screen.
Since all of Chiang's stories are short stories or novellas, they've very approachable. You're not committing to a full novel, you can easily read these stories in a single sitting.
Ted Chiang is one of my favorite writers. I don't think I've read a single story of his that I didn't find interesting, and a lot of the ideas raise profound deeply engaging questions.