Arrival: where to start reading
Adapts Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang. Say how far you watched, and pick the book up exactly there.
at Story of Your Life.
Arrival (2016) adapts Ted Chiang's novella "Story of Your Life" in full, not an excerpt. The novella isn't sold on its own: it's the fourth of eight stories in Chiang's collection Stories of Your Life and Others, reissued in 2016 with the film's title and art. The other seven stories are unrelated science fiction and are not touched by this film.
The movie draws on this book. Read the full story:
Stories of Your Life and Others
What the movies changed here
- ChangedIn the novella the heptapods stay in orbit, linked to Earth by 112 relay devices called looking glasses (nine of them in the U.S.); the film has twelve ships appear at sites worldwide.
- ChangedThe physicist is Gary Donnelly in the novella; the film renames him Ian Donnelly, played by Jeremy Renner.
- InventedThe film invents a geopolitical-thriller subplot -- rising international tension involving several countries' response to the visitors -- that has no equivalent in the novella.
Denis Villeneuve's 2016 film adapts Ted Chiang's 1998 novella "Story of Your Life" in full, keeping its central premise -- a linguist learning to communicate with newly arrived alien visitors -- intact while adding a geopolitical-thriller subplot with no equivalent in the novella. The novella itself is far shorter than the film's runtime suggests, so don't go in expecting the same scale or pacing. It isn't sold on its own: it is the fourth of eight stories in Chiang's collection Stories of Your Life and Others, reissued in 2016 with the film's title and art.
Rate it from where you are. No account, and nothing here says a word about what happens next.
