I really enjoyed Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival which led me to tracking down the source material, a short story titled Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang. This was originally published in 1998 in Starlight 2 and then again as the titular short story in a collection of eight short stories by Chiang in 2002. It begins strongly with Tower of Babylon, about building a tower to reach the heavens that has an interesting philosophical bent. This is followed by another intriguing story titled Understand, detailing the progress of […]
The Black Mirror vibes are strong with this one
”Stories of your life and others” by Ted Chiang is a collection of fictional short stories about such diverse topics as the tower of Babylon, superintelligence, and automata. It also includes the story that the movie ”Arrival” was based on, so add ”aliens” to this list of topics. Considering how wide the thematic spectrum of the book is, it comes as no surprise that the language and tone varies. Some of the stories are so horrifyingly dystopian that they could be easily turned into […]
Thought-provoking and … kind of freaky
I purchased Story of Your Life and Others after I saw Arrival in theaters, which rocked me to my core, and I wanted to see just how it translated from the page to the screen. The answer? Very differently. For one, Chiang is a lot more technical in his descriptions, and I really appreciate the sparse-ness of his language. He does not use wordy descriptions to manipulate emotions out of his readers; he simply lets the readers draw the parallels between the science-y concepts he talking about […]
Great Collection of Short Stories for the Most Part
Please note that I gave this book 4.5 stars and rounded it up to 5 here on Cannonball Read 9. So I got this book via the library and boy was there a long wait. I think the movie “Arrival” is the main reason why this one took so long to get via Overdrive. I saw Arrival right after the elections and seriously, that was the movie I needed to see at that point. In a big theater with several hundred people getting to watch […]