There is something very prescient and necessary about the ideas of co-operation and communication in Arrival, and about the importance of getting communication right the Chinese use Mahjong to communicate with the heptapods, pre-biasing their interpretation of the alien conversation to one of conflict. And of course, for the film, there needs to be a plot, something big at stake.

There has been a lot added to the story, there is military control of the alien contact in the original story, but nothing about how the rest of the world reacts, except one brief line near the beginning of the short story: “The government said next to nothing about them, while the tabloids said every possible thing.”īut it all makes sense of course there would be mass panic, of course there would be military and political machinations, of course there would be military grunts influenced by internet based right-wing shock-jocks. I love the way the aliens and their writing were actualised on screen making the heptapods vaguely squid-like creatures who appear to ‘swim’ through their heavily gaseous atmosphere, and their written language rendered in squirted ink, is brilliant, and builds on and augments the original descriptions in the short story. But, unusually for hard SF, ‘Story of Your Life’ is also fully engaged with human emotions, there is no ‘action’ in the short story at all.įilms have to be visual, hence the ‘looking glasses’ of the original are replaced with giant spaceships (and the visuals of these are stunning). His stories are what I think of when I say ‘hard SF’, where the ideas are central to the story most science fiction is merely adventure stories with an SF setting, and you could tell the same story in a fantasy or historical setting. Ted Chiang’s short stories contain more craft, more in the way of ideas, than most full-length novels. I want to see it again already, so I can just enjoy it, instead of constantly anticipating how well it does/does not match the short story.

The only downside to this is that I will never get to see the film fresh, unaware, I will never really know if it works on its own. I re-read ‘Story of Your Life’ before going to see Arrival (and I read it again to write this post) I wanted to make sure I really understood the original ideas before seeing the adaptation. I loved this film so much, I think it is a great film in its own right, and I think it is probably the best adaptation possible, even if it doesn’t manage to do the central concept of Chiang’s short story justice. SPOILER ALERT: I am writing about the film Arrival specifically as an adaptation of Ted Chiang’s short story ‘Story of Your Life’, so it will be spoiler heavy for both.

Story of your life arrival