A Scientist Who Helped Amy Adams Talk to Aliens in “Arrival” | Hacker News Reader

A Scientist Who Helped Amy Adams Talk to Aliens in “Arrival”

nautil.us

122 pointsdnetesn31 comments

I read "Stories of Your Life and Others" this year and it was for me the best fiction in a few years. Cognitive sci-fi, sometimes with religious themes (e.g. what if Kabbalah were a basis for the industrial revolution).

Also, quite a few stories by Ted Chiang are available online, see links in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Chiang.

EDIT: Freely accessible stories converted to mobi (the Kindle format): https://www.dropbox.com/s/wbhdyer9qfpexcm/Stories%20accessib...

'story of your life', the short story the film is based on, can be read online here: http://web.archive.org/web/20101206050220/http://guccipiggy....

I'm reading the The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate now. It's really great. It feels a bit like Borges, but conveniently deboned of the classical allusion a modern idiot like me can choke on.

For me, the ultimate trifecta of high-concept sci-fi authors is Ted Chiang, Charles Stross, and Greg Egan. Every time I read one of their books I'm left dropping a constant stream of "whoa"s.

If you liked his Kabbalah story, you will love http://unsongbook.com

edit: and the much shorter http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/03/the-study-of-anglophysi...

Seventy-Two Letters is a great story. I'd absolutely love to see a Zachtronics-esque take on it too.

I will second this, that book was fantastic. I hope the movie is as good as the story, but I don't think it will.

But you will go to the movie anyway, fully knowing that it will not meet your expectations... ;)

(Also, free will vs time seem to be one of his favourite themes - at least two other stories are about that.)

> But you will go to the movie anyway, fully knowing that it will not meet your expectations... ;)

Yes :( Same with the Martian. The movie was good, but the book was just fantastic.

It was a very in-joke (cf.: would you conceive a daughter if.. [spoiler]). Actually, I heard that the movie is good.

Oh, haha, I didn't catch it at first. Good one :)

Tangentially related:

In a conversation with a producer and a screenwriter after my first film consulting contract, I quickly learned how much more attractive realistic scripts can be to potential directors. The fact that the film industry is actively embracing subject matter experts not only for establishing overarching themes and very central elements to plots but also to accurately represent even the most minor details is a fascinating turn in the last twenty years of filmmaking.

Minor details in the case of this film might be things like deciphering written sentence structure and realistically assembling new sentences. Minor details in the case of e.g. the matrix might be the use of SSHNuke. It's just nice to see.

•••

As for Arrival, it was easily one of my favorites this year, if not one of my personal favorite film of the last five. You should see it it you haven't. It's easily one of the most emotionally complex films we've had in quite a while.

While Arrival is emotionally complex, it's also not very original or "sensical" with cliches and the overblown importance of Amy Adams' character - a couple other countries arrive at the same conversational point first with their linguists and the whole mahjong thread is both wrongly simplified (it's a game of win/lose) and impractical. The immersion in a language giving you superpowers? The reuse of the final shot of (the movie) Enemy midway in the film? The purpose of the other ships (oh, earth distraction?). The implication you can have the concept of weapon without the concept of tool...it's fundamentally broken storytelling. The attempt at realism (a la Close Encounters) but with a demonization of the military and mischaracterization of breaking quarantine rules (taking off the suit initially would have gotten her removed, obviously and limiting a word list wouldn't be a concern and is forgotten quickly as the herring it is). Just a sloppy movie that's a vehicle for an M Night Shyamalan trick. It might as well all have been a dream sequence and it's the exact same movie.

> weapon without the concept of tool...it's fundamentally broken storytelling.

You're actually objectively† wrong, at least about why it is broken storytelling (which I don't think it is).

For example, you're complaining about: the fact that there was a protagonist, the plausibility of the sci-fi premise, some minor self-plagiarism, a political slant you don't agree with, a misremembered plot point about why there were several ships, a debatable concern about medical protocol in an unprecedented situation, and other sundry things.

These things are all essentially irrelevant to well-crafted storytelling.

If the movie didn't work for you, the things you were noticing are more like symptoms of the problem. Which by the sound of it was that you were just bored by the aesthetic choices the movie made.

I mean, I was totally transfixed and fascinated for almost the entire duration of the film. It might be that the contemplative mood, haunting music, deliberate editing, subtle acting, subdued lighting, etc. all provoked a kind of melancholic trance in me that made me insensitive to any story-telling deficiencies, it's hard to tell, but also, I don't care and the point is you're wrong.

† I justify the word objectively by claiming that the ensemble of extant human brains responds pretty predictably to these cultural artifacts we call stories. And there are people whose profession it is to understand how stories work and how to tell them. And I've grown up around several such people, and paid attention to what they have to say. And yeah I have the gall to think your post is just unbearably wrong.

Can you please mark your comment as containing spoilers?

Apparently Stephen Wolfram and his son were involved in the making of Arrival http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2016/11/quick-how-might-the-a...

I very much recommend the short story the movie is based on, The Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang. I can tell from the trailer they've built upon it but they'd certainly need to do so to make a feature length film.

Very much agree. The experience of reading it was interesting for me: on first reading I did not like it much, but the more I thought about the story and about how to interpret it, the more sense it made, and the more depth it gained in my view.

I should add I haven't seen the film yet but am looking forward to it. Has anyone who's read the story seen the film?

I did, just saw the film last night.

This is a rare case where the film has preserved the feeling and the central concept of the story fairly well, but the film changes the plot significantly in order to do it. I wasn't entirely able to predict the plot as it unfolded based on prior knowledge of the written version, unlike with The Martian.

I still like the written story better, but the movie stands on its own as a great movie, and I'm happy with their take on trying to tell the same story a different way.

I think what they did with the movie was great. It felt totally true to the story even though the plots aren't exactly the same. Even though I knew what I thought would be the twist they still got me.

For more "making of" information, there's a lot of material online about Eric Heisserer who wrote the script (based on Ted Chiang's story.)

Heisserer did a recent Reddit AMA: https://m.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5ay3h2/im_eric_heissere...

It's a bit unfortunate that Heisserer made the visual design choice of a circle as the basis of nonlinear writing. It's a little trite. Overall, I'm thinking that maybe this story didn't need to be visually realized, even if it's a good script. A radio play instead?

When I came back from watching "Arrival" I immediately looked Heisserer up, thinking "this guy did his job well, he must be behind some other interesting movies". Yeah. "Final Destination 5", "The Thing" remake.

Makes you wonder how many very talented people are stuck doing shitty things in any industry because things just didn't line up for them. At least they have for Heisserer, now. He's like the inverse of Lindelof, who turned out after all the hype to be a phony.

So much credit goes to Villeneuve, who elevates scripts that could easily go wrong into works of art. See Sicario if you haven't, for example—a script that would have been a pedestrian drug war film in lesser hands.

Hours (2013) with Paul Walker was quite good [1].

As far as I can tell, having followed this writer for a while, a lot comes down to opportunity and demonstrating talent within the spaces you are given opportunities.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hours_(2013_film)

I don't know what the alien script in the movie looked like, but in the book (if I remember correctly) they started out from a point and spread outwards, drawing connectedly on the entire page.

It's different, but it works. I think (pure speculation) they changed the visual process because watching it written the way it was done in the written story would have taken too long on film. In writing you can compress time easily. On film you really have to maximize usage of time.

It's similar in the movie, the writing is very beautiful and alien. Whoever invented it did a fantastic job.

Those interested in language in sci-fi could do worse than to read The Sparrow (Mary Doria Russell), about a Jesuit exploration mission to a foreign world discovered after a song signal captured by SETI efforts. The protagonist is a Jesuit linguist, and the story features a first encounter that I found quite moving.

Ted Chiang reads the introduction to his latest short story:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-ZtZZIyuJw&t=2m50s

[20 mins]

503 for me now, mirror: http://archive.is/tDOg9

Computational psycholinguistics is very interesting subject in AI. Language as a window into the brain. Recently interviewed an expert who works in the field. Made me aware of the famous "nun" study which was able to predict dementia 50 years prior based on the idea density of their entrance essays. https://soundcloud.com/user-925097294/michael-covington

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