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”
