Ted Chiang on Seeing His Stories Adapted and the Ever-Expanding Popularity of SF
electricliterature.com
electricliterature.com
If I had read the novel first, I would have said it was impossible to adapt into a movie. But what the screenwriters did was take the protagonists of the novel and construct a completely new plot in which those characters could play the same basic roles. The resulting movie is faithful to the spirit of the novel even though it’s radically unfaithful to the text. That’s an approach that would never have occurred to me; I think I’d be too reverent of the original to adapt anything to film.
I think the challenges of adapting Story of Your Life to film were different, but it was certainly something I was thinking about when I walked into the theater. I personally think they did a pretty good job, but I suppose that depends on what you thought the essential part of Story of Your Life was.
Now that I think about it, the movie Ender's Game was pretty faithful to the source novel, but probably fell down as a movie because of it. It's interesting to think about how that movie might have been better if it had tried to be (as Chiang says of L.A. Confidential) "faithful to the spirit of the novel" while playing faster and looser with the actual source material.
Of course, it's tough in SF where there's always a loud contingent (of what is your most natural constituency) over pretty much any deviations from a beloved book. Yet, there are aspects to novels that don't translate well into film and, in most cases, films need to simplify--dropping characters and streamlining plots.
I've long been of the opinion that novella-length stories are the best match for movie length (2-ish hours) adaptations and that novels usually just have too much stuff for a faithful adaptation. The Ender's Game movie just happens to be a really good recent example.
Was that not what they did? Having read the novella but not the novel, I don't particularly remember any scenes I didn't recognise...
As to shorter stories being easier to adapt than longer ones, I have often thought the same - though I would strengthen that to "short stories" rather than "novellas", especially when it comes to sci-fi.
I felt the same way about Watchmen. The film is remarkably faithful (mostly), but I guess the flow/rhythm/pacing just doesn't work the same way on-screen as it does on-page.
Interestingly, there are examples of the book author also being the screenwriter and doing a fairly loose adaptation. The most prominent example that comes to mind is The Princess Bride; the book had a much darker and more cynical tone than the film.
I disagree entirely. In fact I would claim that the movie fails precisely because it deviates from the novel in exactly the way that makes the novel great.
Spoilers follow.
The whole point of Ender's Game as a novel is the way it leads you into a comfortable, safe zone. You think you're just reading another "child overcomes tough conditions, grows as an individual and succeeds at hard task" novel a la Heinlein. Oh no. Just when you are comfortable, when you've been set up to think, ah, at last, the war, let's watch him think circles around the bugs with his well trained superior brain... you get slapped in the face so hard with the plot twist it leaves you reeling and then the book ends and you can't stop thinking about it for weeks.
In the movie, the plot twist is pretty much revealed near the beginning. My memory is fuzzy but I remember Harrison Ford communicating with the army and exchanging status updates as the point where I "deduced" that they were at war and not travelling to it. It was very important that the novel be entirely from Ender's point of view as the military conspired to create the illusion that he was training, because the illusion was key to his being able to make the final decision of the war.
To reveal that the war was actually ongoing, and that there was no waiting time, was a major early spoiler, perhaps to allow the audience to digest the idea, trading the comfort of an hour and a bit of "training" for the tension of knowing something Ender doesn't (that it's not a game). This tension has much less of an emotional impact on the viewer than surprise would have had, especially since it is one of the most overused plot devices both in Hollywood and in print.
So you are left with (very) nice visuals, fairly good acting from heavyweights, and a typical Hollywood plot. A summer movie. So disappointing.
http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/exhalation/
http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2010/fiction_the_...
Do you have any more good links to free Chiang stories?
> A brilliant mathematician wrestles with the consequences of her earthshattering proof.
Understand: https://web.archive.org/web/20110527120639/http://www.infini...
> An experimental treatment bestows a regular person with superintelligence, propelling him into a dangerous series of mindgames.
Story of Your Life: http://web.archive.org/web/20101206050220/http://guccipiggy....
> A talented linguist reflects on her life as she struggles to grasp the meaning of an alien language. Nebula Award (Best Novella). [this is the story the recent film Arrival is based on]
Seventy-Two Letters: http://web.archive.org/web/20010802144026/http://www.tor.com...
> In a world where mystical scrolls impart animating power, a shocking discovery threatens to upend society.
Hell is the Absence of God: http://www.e-reading.club/bookreader.php/70896/Chiang_-_Hell...
> An unbeliever struggles with the question of faith when God is scientific fact and angels routinely visit the earth. Hugo, Locus, Nebula Awards (Best Novelette).
What's expected of us: http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/21st_century_science/lectures/w...
> A simple time machine undermines the concept of free will, with disastrous consequences.
The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate: http://web.archive.org/web/20120911120914/http://www.dregsto...
> An ancient alchemist introduces a traveling merchant to a mysterious time-traveling gateway. Hugo, Nebula Awards (Best Novelette).
[I looted these from here, fixing the broken links I could and excluding the ones I couldn't: http://www.metafilter.com/98974/This-isnt-your-grandfathers-... -- there are a few more links in there, including some essays.]
[1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/03/the-study-of-anglophysi... [2] https://www.unsongbook.com
I read the "Story of Your Life", which Arrival was based on. It was a very good read. I read it 2 hours in one breath. Here is a tongue-in-cheek review.
The aliens were using a declarative language. (The narrative calls it teleological, but I like the programming language analogy.) https://www.google.com/search?client=opera&q=imperative+lang...
The linguist uses imperative language. https://www.google.com/search?client=opera&q=imperative+lang...
At the end of the story, the linguistic sees the benefits of using declarative/functional language and becomes a convert ;-)
My interpretation of the duality was somewhat different. Human speech is sequantial and the signal is transmitted as a time-series. On the other hand, it seemed like the language used by the aliens was much more like a Wavelet transformed [1] version of the time-series signal, where: The structure is decomposed into coarse and fine details. The coarse details (forming the backbone of the message) do not have a particular location in the sequential representation. The finer details are placed at an appropriate position (the sequential part is important).
I now wonder if there is a link between what I thought and what you pointed out :-)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavelet_transform#Principle
http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/exhalation/
(Somewhere out there is an audio version crisply and cerebrally voiced by Tom Dheere.)
(With apologies to Mr Dheere. I haven't heard his rendition.)
Ray Sizemore reads it in a detached manner (reminiscent of the Emergency Medical Hologram in Star Trek Voyager) which is highly suited to the material.
Consider: A monologue. No relationships. No sex. No strikingly new ideas. Mostly expositional. Yet so darned good.
We shouldn't restrict this club to authors that provide citations, but he does satisfy that criterion as well.
The film is great. It adds a little side-plot to make it work better as a film, but it doesn't properly explain the core physical idea behind the short story (honestly, I can't imagine how it could, the story almost assumes its readers have some physics background, though it does try to explain).
Having read the story first, I almost found the film a little boring, which is such a shame because it's a truly beautifully shot, well-executed film. I suspect I'll enjoy it a lot more watching it a second time...
The movie basically cuts physics completely out of the story (no principle of least action, no diffraction), which makes the continuing presence of Ian awkward since he doesn't have much to do. I thought this was disappointing but inevitable; general audiences don't want a 20 minute physics lesson at the theater.
Less understandable for me was that the film also eliminated any of the functional interaction for how Louise (or any linguist) would go about learning a previously unknown language by interacting with a native speaker. All of the guess-and-check, experimental structure that goes into this lingual interaction is gone from the film. The humans and aliens talk/grunt to each other, look confused, and then Louise just periodically declares out loud that she's figured things out. In the book, laymen can at least get a hint of how a linguist (and physicist!) thinks and solves problems, but the audience learns nothing like this in the film.
Finally, the film has unambiguous communication backwards in time, violating the known laws of physics. I've talked to people say they saw this in the original short story, but I think a careful reading shows that, though the narrator adopts a framing of fatalism/predestination, none of the real-world events described by the narrator actually require retro-causation. In the film (spoiler!), Louise literally use memories of the future to figure out what telephone number to dial.
Also, the standard Hollywood tropes weren't as bad as they could be, but still distracting. Does every film featuring the military need a painfully one-dimensional rude hawkish general who inexplicably wants to attack the enemy in every situation?
Yikes, this was one of the more interesting parts of the story for me. Thanks for pointing this out.
It's been a long time since I've read the short story, but to me the alien contact part of the story wasn't really the primary point, it was primarily a tool to tell the actual story.
However, in the movie adaptation, the alien contact story has been elevated in importance to be co-equal with the, umm, other part of the story. I think that's a reasonable thing for the movie adaptation to do.
The downside of the alien contact plot in the movie, is, as you say pretty trope-y, but if you think of it as a plot device to get to the real meat of the story, then maybe that's not such a big deal.
I assume it's at least partially because the movie is intended for a global audience, like most blockbusters these days. Some things get lost in translation :-)
There were many good things about the film but as you said the Hollywood tropes are out of control. It turns me off from visiting the cinema.
I enjoyed Machina Ex, I think I didn't sense them as much.
The 'military is composed of boneheads' is annoying (and wrong) but the thing that irritated me the most was the emotional take Hollywood injects into everything.
Why is Hollywood so emotional? Are Americans more emotional than Europeans? Maybe in L.A?
It doesn't match human experience at all.
Take a funeral scene. I don't know how it is in the United States, but having everybody wearing black (okay everybody wears dark colours, but the Hollywood scene is as if they went and bought uniforms), women with hat-veil things, many people sobbing and being tearful.
That doesn't describe any funeral I've been to. And we have very large funerals, with many hundreds of people. The occasional person emits a sob but nothing like the water feature I see on the screen. This breaks immersion. It's too heavy handed.
I'm beginning to suspect the reason why somebody would 'act out' in the scenarios Hollywood is known for, is because they are conditioned by Hollywood.
With rant complete, my favorite part was the sense of immersion with the 'things'. Reminded me of Half Life.
tldr; Give the prizes to the things. People are just bags of salt water.
Doesn’t it only matter if the film is worthwhile (however you may define that)? And why would that be defined by its closeness to the short story? That should be wholly irrelevant.
If you know something that is adapted in a movie then you might want certain ideas/words/characters/etc. to make it into the movie because you thought them to be quite worthwhile … but if you don’t know it?
I’m strongly in favor of viewing adaptions wholly independently from the source material. (Even if you like ideas/words/characters/etc. in the source material and those didn’t make it to the adaption. Oh well, then you can only hope for something else to pick those up. But that in itself is not a reason to dislike the adaption. The lone exception to this I can see is incoherent adaption, but incoherentness is usually something negative irrespective of whether something is adapted or not.)
That said, the central idea of the short story, the crux of the story, was very successfully adapted with this movie. I think that was excellently pulled off.
I think the story is more successful, especially at jumping between the process of science and the grief-filled flashbacks; the film has to show the character's reaction to the flashbacks, which complicates the unfolding of the story. But I enjoyed the movie a great deal as well.
It's worth seeing just for the cinematography (and support of Sci-Fi movies!). I was not familiar with the story before seeing the movie and thought that the sequence leading up to "first contact" was very well done - I had no idea of whether the interaction was going to be like a scene from Contact or from Aliens. It was tense, atmospheric, and caused an audible reaction from the audience at times.
I think the movie did a very good job capturing the essence of the short story, but it's enough different that I think it's worth watching in its own right. It's not as special-effects dependent as your typical science fiction blockbuster, but I'm glad I saw it in the theater rather than waiting to watch it on video.
[SMALL SPOILERS AHEAD]
The short story is a very cerebral take on how language can (theoretically) change one's perception of the world and how learning a new language can make someone see the world differently. By the end of the short story Chiang has you, just a little bit, thinking in Heptapod B. Or at least trying to think about what that might be like.
The movie, illogically in my view, treats learning Heptapod B like acquiring a superpower that lets you see the future. Having acquired this super power Louise (the main character) makes a difficult choice(1) in her personal life knowing full well both the positive and negative consequences of that choice. As a newish parent I found this deeply moving and it had me thinking a lot. The experience and cinematography of the move are also great and it's enjoyable for that alone if you're into movies as a sensory experience.
(1) Some will say that it wasn't really a choice but this is my interpretation of the movie as different from the short story.
If all the vampire/werewolf/zombie/paranormal/magic stuff was pulled out of the SF section, SF would be much smaller. (More of that is in "Teen Paranormal Romance", which at peak had six cases at the local Borders.) It's not that SF is more popular, it's that its definition has broadened.