Stories of Your Life And Others
My purpose in reading this short story collection was to get to the title story --- "Story Of Your Life" --- which has just been remade into the film "Arrival".
As much as I have disdain for Amy Adams as an actress I will see this movie just to see if the director and actors can bring about a fraction of the emotion and human understanding that is captured in this outstanding short story. "Story Of Your Life" tells us two intertwining stories. Author Ted Chiang does a masterful job of overlaying a past and future event involving Linguist Louise Banks. In the past story she is called upon by the U.S. Government to help interpret communication between humans and an unknown alien race that has appeared throughout the planet in various locations.
The future story involves Louise's yet to be born daughter and this relationship is examined at different times in her lifeline. Invariably, the future story shows us how attempts at communication between parents and their children could ve
ry well resemble speaking with an alien race who you have no common lingual base with. The future story is eye-opening and heart-breaking and I hope the movie comes close to the feelings it extracts.
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Guest 6 years ago
boring i hate reading
Guest 6 years ago
dont waste your time reading
Guest 6 years ago
What Ted Chiang has managed to do is create a story that, while causing us to have one eye focused on the mystery of the aliens, explore what it is like to be human. The use of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, wherein your language determines your thought, bases the linguistics in something very human, while the issue of parenthood at the heart of the film is one of the most human things one can look at. As a great Science Fiction story should, Chiang manages to look at the unfamiliar and use it as a way of telling us something about ourselves. Profound and powerful, Denis Villeneuve's adaptation of this story, Arrival, is one of the few films I have seen that not only successfully transpose a piece of prose, and especially one as special as this, but actually manages to use the medium of film to its full capacity, managing to, I would argue, improve upon the original in the process. Love this story, adore the film.
Guest 7 years ago
Amazing idea and concept, reminds us we are not alone, also things are not what them seem on earth , or in the universe. Love was the biggest and powerful player. Love always is. Good one.
Guest 7 years ago
TBH I hate this book mainly because the characters are boring
Guest 6 years ago
Same
Guest 7 years ago
No, they're not. You're just dumb.
craftman444 7 years ago
eh????
windwolf 7 years ago
WATCHED the movie first...now I'll read the book. Here's my review of the movie:"Just finished watching "Arrival" with Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, and Forrest Whittaker.
Maybe I liked it so much because of its linguistic emphasis...or the sad, but beautiful mother-daughter relationship...the alien language was amazing too. "
Guest 7 years ago
The story is about connection and relationships. That was one of the gifts that the Heptapods related. The self realization of how we, as consious beings, relate to our world in a physical and spiritual relationship to our environment and other physical beings.
Guest 7 years ago
Go and have surgery mate
Guest 7 years ago
Beautiful
Guest 7 years ago
Like ur daughter
Guest 7 years ago
This inspired the film Arrival, written by Eric Heisserer. I love the deep messages that come from this. So thought provoking. Just like the movie.Write Review:
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