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A review by lauramac95
Arrival (Originally published as Stories of Your Life and Others) by Ted Chiang
5.0
I'm going to ramble for a bit. I saw "Arrival" back in March, in the airplane on my way to Scotland. (Matt was watching it and I got sucked in -- put it on my own screen, but then I was seeing things several seconds after he saw them. Weird, but never mind.) Previously I had gotten an answer right on a Learned League question, from having seen "Stories of Your Life" listed on Amazon a few hours before I opened up the day's quiz. Then a couple weeks ago (early June 2017) I saw my friend Deb's review & thought "that book sounds great and oh right, I've wanted to read it." So one library e-book loan later, here we are.
I was impressed with the way Ted Chiang is able to tell-not-show his worlds into existence. He talks matter-of-factly about golems & homunculi, and here we are in a version of Earth where those things are real. Same thing with angels, and with extraterrestrials, and with whatever else he wants to create.
And now for the meat of it, and I guess I should put a spoiler tag in, even though I don't get the spoiler thing myself (I reread books a lot and sometimes even on a first read I'll read the end before I get there; I read movie synopses before I see the movie; I generally don't care, even though I like it when birthday presents, etc. are surprises) and even though "NO SPOILERZ" goes pretty much against the whole rest of this.
There are very, very few movies-from-books that I think are as good as the book. [b:The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure|118229|The Princess Bride S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure|William Goldman|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1274412756s/118229.jpg|992628] is one. "Stand By Me", from "The Body" in [b:Different Seasons|39662|Different Seasons|Stephen King|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1329662611s/39662.jpg|2248680] is... if not another, then very, very close. But in my mind, "Arrival" is not only as good as "Story of Your Life" -- the one needs the other.
In the movie, if I understood this & remember it correctly, the heptapods gave Dr. Banks (Louise) their style of consciousness as a gift; at one point they showed her how to experience life-out-of-time, if that makes sense. The movie, though its narrative presented episodes in Louise's life nonsequentially, still presented them in such a way as to create a linear unfolding of Louise learning the heptapods' languages, learning a nontemporal way to understand the world, and choosing to experience her life even though she knew what pain it would hold.
The story is made of the same narrative -- but just as the movie shows Louise learning to remember her whole life all at once, compressed to a single point, the story compresses the movie to a single point. It begins and ends at the point where Dr. Banks chooses to conceive a child -- a daughter who she knows will outlive her (Louise's) marriage, a daughter she knows she will outlive. In the middle, it unfolds Louise's work with the heptapods, and how the act of learning Heptapod B itself trained her brain to see events the heptapod way, independent of time. (It makes total sense, by the way! Different written languages, with their different structures and symbols, work different points in the brain; spoken language is different too. I learned this from a speaker at a library conference some years ago. THIS IS SO COOL.) In the book we truly experience her seeing everything all at once.
I guess all this is to say that the movie spun the story out human-style, and the book told it heptapod-style.
I am so, so glad that I saw the movie and then read the short story. The movie was made more by reading the story; the story was better because I had seen the movie; and encountering them in the opposite order wouldn't (to me) have been as good.
I was impressed with the way Ted Chiang is able to tell-not-show his worlds into existence. He talks matter-of-factly about golems & homunculi, and here we are in a version of Earth where those things are real. Same thing with angels, and with extraterrestrials, and with whatever else he wants to create.
- - "Division by Zero": in his story notes, Chiang says that learning that mathematics is fundamentally inconsistent (essentially 1=2 and nothing is provable, in so many words) would be just about the worst thing that could happen to a person. I agree.
- - "Seventy-Two Words": oh *man* do I hate the homunculus model of reproduction, not least because it is what too many ignorant people with too much political power seem to actually believe (sperm contains a fully-formed human; egg is the soil where it grows; woman is a walking flowerpot). Despite this annoyance, it's a really cool story.
- - "Hell is the Absence of God": as Deb said, brutal. (My taste in dystopian afterlife runs to Robert Olen Butler's [b:Hell|6354310|Hell|Robert Olen Butler|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1328823965s/6354310.jpg|6540916], but this one is an interesting vision too.)
- - "Tower of Babylon" and Borges' [b:The Library of Babel|172366|The Library of Babel|Jorge Luis Borges|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1213638002s/172366.jpg|2235183] are friends somehow, in my mind.
And now for the meat of it, and I guess I should put a spoiler tag in, even though I don't get the spoiler thing myself (I reread books a lot and sometimes even on a first read I'll read the end before I get there; I read movie synopses before I see the movie; I generally don't care, even though I like it when birthday presents, etc. are surprises) and even though "NO SPOILERZ" goes pretty much against the whole rest of this.
There are very, very few movies-from-books that I think are as good as the book. [b:The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure|118229|The Princess Bride S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure|William Goldman|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1274412756s/118229.jpg|992628] is one. "Stand By Me", from "The Body" in [b:Different Seasons|39662|Different Seasons|Stephen King|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1329662611s/39662.jpg|2248680] is... if not another, then very, very close. But in my mind, "Arrival" is not only as good as "Story of Your Life" -- the one needs the other.
In the movie, if I understood this & remember it correctly, the heptapods gave Dr. Banks (Louise) their style of consciousness as a gift; at one point they showed her how to experience life-out-of-time, if that makes sense. The movie, though its narrative presented episodes in Louise's life nonsequentially, still presented them in such a way as to create a linear unfolding of Louise learning the heptapods' languages, learning a nontemporal way to understand the world, and choosing to experience her life even though she knew what pain it would hold.
The story is made of the same narrative -- but just as the movie shows Louise learning to remember her whole life all at once, compressed to a single point, the story compresses the movie to a single point. It begins and ends at the point where Dr. Banks chooses to conceive a child -- a daughter who she knows will outlive her (Louise's) marriage, a daughter she knows she will outlive. In the middle, it unfolds Louise's work with the heptapods, and how the act of learning Heptapod B itself trained her brain to see events the heptapod way, independent of time. (It makes total sense, by the way! Different written languages, with their different structures and symbols, work different points in the brain; spoken language is different too. I learned this from a speaker at a library conference some years ago. THIS IS SO COOL.) In the book we truly experience her seeing everything all at once.
I guess all this is to say that the movie spun the story out human-style, and the book told it heptapod-style.
I am so, so glad that I saw the movie and then read the short story. The movie was made more by reading the story; the story was better because I had seen the movie; and encountering them in the opposite order wouldn't (to me) have been as good.