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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 ve

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.

stavros 2y ago
The anthology "Stories of your Life and Others" was the best scifi anthology I've read.
- bognition 2y ago
  Personally I love "Exhalation" a lot more
  - stavros 2y ago
    That's up there too, maybe it's because I read SOYLAO first. I really liked both, though.
  - marshray 2y ago
    Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate 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. Such an amazing writer.
  - ACS_Solver 2y ago
    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
    - adgjlsfhk1 2y ago
      I understand that it's not really a story, but The Great Silence is also excellent.
      - MandieD 2y ago
        It’s my favorite Ted Chiang story (it’s a story to me).
    - m_fayer 2y ago
      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.
- marshray 2y ago
  Tower of Babylon, man. Just wow.
  - pfdietz 2y ago
    Science fiction as if it had been written 4000 years ago.
    - marshray 2y ago
      Right?! It makes me want a time machine just to go back and share it just to see the reaction.
JadeNB 2y ago
> 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.)
- paxys 2y ago
  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.
ericol 2y ago
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)
- Fellshard 2y ago
  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.
  - hehdhdjehehegwv 2y ago
    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.
    - Fellshard 2y ago
      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.
chillee 2y ago
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 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.
- why_at 2y ago
  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.
  - travismark 2y ago
    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
    - why_at 2y ago
      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.
      - 2y ago

stavros 2y ago

The anthology "Stories of your Life and Others" was the best scifi anthology I've read.

bognition 2y ago
Personally I love "Exhalation" a lot more
- stavros 2y ago
  That's up there too, maybe it's because I read SOYLAO first. I really liked both, though.
- marshray 2y ago
  Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate 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. Such an amazing writer.
- ACS_Solver 2y ago
  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
  - adgjlsfhk1 2y ago
    I understand that it's not really a story, but The Great Silence is also excellent.
    - MandieD 2y ago
      It’s my favorite Ted Chiang story (it’s a story to me).
  - m_fayer 2y ago
    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.
marshray 2y ago
Tower of Babylon, man. Just wow.
- pfdietz 2y ago
  Science fiction as if it had been written 4000 years ago.
  - marshray 2y ago
    Right?! It makes me want a time machine just to go back and share it just to see the reaction.

JadeNB 2y ago

> 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.)

paxys 2y ago
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.

ericol 2y ago

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)

Fellshard 2y ago
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.
- hehdhdjehehegwv 2y ago
  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.
  - Fellshard 2y ago
    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.

chillee 2y ago

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 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.

why_at 2y ago
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.
- travismark 2y ago
  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
  - why_at 2y ago
    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.
    - 2y ago