I certainly don't think every discussion about any fictional work needs to be turned into some Simpsons comic book guy analysis of the most minute of flaws. Mo

I certainly don't think every discussion about any fictional work needs to be turned into some Simpsons comic book guy analysis of the most minute of flaws. Most sci-fi or fantasy works have some "gimme" that you just have to accept, because it furthers the story. Fine, anti-gravity, time travel or whatever exists. Nobody's expected to explain how it works. What makes for lazy writing is introducing some world changing concept that you base your entire story on, and then just conveniently leaving it out in the very next scene for dramatic effect. That goes beyond having a gimme, you're just assuming your audience is dumb at that point. I think the book "Story of Your Life" is just fine. It's consistent with its premise. As my comment indicates it's the lazy movie adoption I have a problem with. They depart from the book by making the character capable of changing the future based on her prescience, she's no longer just a puppet playing out future events. She's got a choice. Okey, fine, let's run with that. But then she can see a future where here young daughter dies from some incurable disease at a young age, but decides to have her anyway. Her partner then leaves her because she went through with that without telling him. I'd love to be a fly on the wall in the universe of the movie when they had that conversation. He was probably yelling at her that they could have just spent a couple of thousand dollars on sperm sorting & IVF and say had a boy instead of instead of having their young daughter die at an early age from some statistically improbable disease.