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Comment by godelmachine | Hacker News Reader

This is a very important comment.

Will start watching the movie right away if you say it’s good enough?

Edit - is this the movie? -> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_(1997_American_film)

Yes, that’s the movie, and I think it’s worth watching. To compare it to a more modern movie, I think Arrival was inspired a fair bit by Contact. If Arrival is up your alley, you’ll probably like Contact too.

> To compare it to a more modern movie, I think Arrival was inspired a fair bit by Contact.

Do you think Chiang's story was based on Contact (movie or book), or only that the movie was? Neither of those seems likely to me—more just a case of two authors independently writing about similar themes than of direct inspiration—but I haven't seen Contact for some time, and never read the book.

I’ve only seen the movies, but my understanding is that they reasonably closely reflect the books, at least in terms of major themes and plot points. Based on timelines, my guess is that Chiang’s novella was inspired by Sagan’s novel. The stories are far from identical, but there are lots of similar themes - aliens sharing knowledge with us, the challenges of deciphering their language, world governments and extremists acting somewhat as antagonists, the interleaving of the protagonist’s personal life/family with all this.

I could easily be wrong too, but I certainly got Contact vibes when watching Arrival.

> I’ve only seen the movies, but my understanding is that they reasonably closely reflect the books, at least in terms of major themes and plot points.

Arrival is a good movie, but it's radically different from Story of your life, which is an intensely interior novel. It also substitutes a familiar time-travel plot for the, to me, radically novel linguistic approach to (not really but, for want of a better word) time travel that the novel creates.

> The stories are far from identical, but there are lots of similar themes - aliens sharing knowledge with us, the challenges of deciphering their language, world governments and extremists acting somewhat as antagonists, the interleaving of the protagonist’s personal life/family with all this.

I agree that these points are in common (although I'd argue that the role of world governments, while still important, is more peripheral in Story of your life), but they seem like quite common sci-fi tropes to me. Perhaps Contact is the ur-text for the trope after all ….

> [...] Story of your life, which is an intensely interior novel.

SoYL and Hell is the Absence of God both really broke me. Even after reading SoYL I genuinely wasn't prepared for how HitAoG made me feel.

Edit: FWIW, I think this is a good thing, just in case it doesn't come across that way.

Yeah, I think those themes are all individually common in sci-fi, it’s more the combo of all of them together that made me feel there was significant inspiration. But as I said, I’ve only seen the movies, and am going on 2nd hand accounts that they’re based fairly closely on the books. I could very well have a different opinion after reading the books (have added both to my list!).

Read the book! It’s different and, imho, better, although the movie is very good as well.

For some reason, my mind went to the Charlie Sheen movie 'The Arrival', which as a 15 year old, I actually liked - but for 10 seconds, your comment confused me :-)

Both the movie and the original book are, IMO, great. The science in the book is possibly more consistent and is a 'better' story. I rewatch the movie about once every couple of years on average.

It's very good.

It's a little long, but entertaining and interesting. They could have told the same story in 45 less minutes though.

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