There’s a searching emotion, a sense of puzzlement. Still, something kept me reading – a sense of exploration, in themes of time, development and change. Indeed, for some readers it might veer perilously close to the navel-gazing kind of literary story where nothing appears to happen. While the aliens and humans evaluate each other, the narrator is retracing the times with her daughter. The story’s interest is smaller scale, an unravelling process of study. We’re not directed to wonder what the aliens want and there aren’t any secrets to learn about the daughter and her fate. The focus isn’t on revelations or startling events. One moment we see her as an infant the next, her mother is travelling to identify her dead body. The other, the story of the daughter, has a more haphazard order. One of the narrative threads is linear – the process of decoding the language. This narrative is intercut with another story – a letter to her daughter, who, we soon learn, has died. The narrator is a language expert who is called in to help establish contact. They seem to be windows into a spacecraft. Story of Your Life opens as alien artefacts appear on Earth. Spoilers follow if that’s a problem, toodle-pip and see you next time. I haven’t yet seen the movie – but before I do, I want to post about the prose story because it pulls off a trick that seems impossible in the literal and external medium of film. 'The fact that the movie turned out as well as it did, I think, is almost literally a miracle.'Ĭhiang's Story of Your Life is part of a short story collection, recently republished under the title Arrival.Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang is probably better known as its movie adaptation, Arrival. 'I don't think any number of novels feature linguist protangonists will have the same impact as a major motion picture with a linguist as a protagonist,' explains Chiang, who studied linguistics for five years in order to write the role of Louise Banks, played by Amy Adams. And while the extraterrestrial fit into the sci-fi mould, having a linguist as the protagonist is a bit more rare.

Story of Your Life tells the story of a linguist who is given the task of communicating with aliens who appear on Earth out of nowhere.

'Most of the action of the story is people sitting in a room, talking it's not something I could see being made into film.' 'The story is not what most people would consider a likely candidate for adaptation into film,' he says. When Ted Chiang found out that movie producers were interested in adapting his short story, Story of Your Life, into a big budget film, he thought: 'They were not trying to make a conventional Hollywood film.'Īlthough there are no shortage of sci-fi films out there, Chiang's story was different.

Arrival by Ted Chiang