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NoCoPilot
Posts : 20310
Join date : 2013-01-16
Age : 70
Location : Seattle
| | Subject: Book: Stories of Your Life Fri Mar 10, 2017 6:14 pm | |
| Ted Chiang's 1998 short story, "Story of Your Life," formed the basis for the movie "Arrival." The author was interviewed extensively on the BD of "Arrival" and he's an intelligent, well-schooled person. I was mightily impressed -- and the story sounded well worth tracking down.
OF COURSE it's been re-released to coincide with the movie, in a compilation entitled "Stories of Your Life And Others." It's my next reading assignment.
Incidentally he lives somewhere here in Seattle. |
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NoCoPilot
Posts : 20310
Join date : 2013-01-16
Age : 70
Location : Seattle
| | Subject: Re: Book: Stories of Your Life Fri Mar 10, 2017 10:29 pm | |
| - Ted Chiang wrote:
- I practiced Heptapod B at every opportunity, both with the other linguists and by myself. The novelty of reading a semasiographic language made it compelling in a way that Heptapod A wasn't, and my improvement in writing it excited me. Instead of carefully trying to design a sentence before writing, I could simply begin putting down strokes immediately; my initial strokes almost always turned out to be compatible with an elegant rendition of what I was trying to say. I was developing a faculty like that of the heptapods.
More interesting was the fact that Heptapod B was changing the way I thought. I had a friend born of Deaf parents; he grew up using American Sign Language, and he told me that he often thought in ASL instead of English. I used to wonder what it was like to have one's thoughts manually encoded, to reason with an inner pair of hands instead of an inner voice.
With Heptapod B, I was experiencing something just as foreign: my thoughts were becoming graphically coded. As I grew more fluent, semagraphic designs would appear fully formed in my mind's eye, articulating complex ideas all at once. Instead of racing forward, my mind hung balanced on the symmetry underlying the semagrams. I found myself in a meditative state, contemplating the way in which premises and conclusions were interchangeable. There was no direction inherent in the way propositions were connected, no "train of thought" moving along a particular route; all the components in an act of reasoning were equally powerful, all having identical precedence. |
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NoCoPilot
Posts : 20310
Join date : 2013-01-16
Age : 70
Location : Seattle
| | Subject: Re: Book: Stories of Your Life Fri Mar 10, 2017 11:10 pm | |
| - Ted Chiang wrote:
- We walked past the section of kitchen utensils. My gaze wandered over the shelves--pepper mills, garlic presses, salad tongs--and stopped on a wooden salad bowl.
When you are three, you'll pull a dishtowel off the kitchen counter and bring that salad bowl down on top of you. I'll make a grab for it, but miss. The edge of the bowl will leave you with a cut, on the upper edge of your forehead, that will require a single stitch. Your father and I will hold you, sobbing and stained with Caesar dressing, as we wait in the emergency room for hours. I reached out and took the bowl from the shelf. The motion didn't feel like something I was forced to do. Instead it seemed just as urgent as my rushing to catch the bowl when it falls on you: an instinct that I felt right in following.
The heptapods are neither free nor bound as we understand those concepts; they don't act according to their will, nor are they helpless automatons. What distinguishes the heptapods mode of awareness is not just that their actions coincide with history's events; it is also that their motives coincide with history's purposes. They act to create the future, to enact chronology. |
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NoCoPilot
Posts : 20310
Join date : 2013-01-16
Age : 70
Location : Seattle
| | Subject: Re: Book: Stories of Your Life Sat Mar 11, 2017 7:29 am | |
| REMARKABLE piece of writing. Truly.
If I hadn't already learned the story from the movie, this story would've blown my mind. I can see why Villaneuve felt he needed to film it, although the original story is pretty much unfilmable. The changes they made to make it cinematic don't change the overall arc of the story, but they work to make it more movie-like. |
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NoCoPilot
Posts : 20310
Join date : 2013-01-16
Age : 70
Location : Seattle
| | Subject: Re: Book: Stories of Your Life Thu Mar 16, 2017 4:06 am | |
| The other stories in the collection vary wildly, hugely. Some are more successful than others IMO, but all are brave brave writing. The scope and depth of Chiang's writing here reminds me of John Varley's "The Ophiuchi Hotline," Connie Willis' "Impossible Things" or Grace Paley's "Enormous Changes at the Last Moment."
Truly an indication of monster talent. |
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NoCoPilot
Posts : 20310
Join date : 2013-01-16
Age : 70
Location : Seattle
| | Subject: Re: Book: Stories of Your Life Fri Jun 07, 2019 7:10 am | |
| Having re-read the collection, after finishing his new one "Exhalation," my initial impressions are reaffirmed -- a monster talent. Some stories are more audacious than others, and so take more flexibility from the reader to suspend her disbelief, but at their best these stories are masterful.
"The Story of Your Life" still takes my breath away. |
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