Stories of Your Life and Others

I’m just reviewing the story that arrival was based on, for a book club that a member who will go unnamed has turned into a movie club featuring occasional book. Anyway.

This story was going for profound and landed on clever, which I won’t hold against it. I enjoyed the book, but found it to be shallow.

The author explores humans penchant for cause and effect and does so by introducing an alien species whose customs differ from our own, in particular their language and approach to representing physics. He overlays that on a story about the protagonist (linguist) telling her daughter some vignettes of a life she will have after the events of the story.

Whaaaaat?

Well that’s the hook.

The aliens experience the world teleologically, which the author narrowly suggests means that they perceive not a sequence of events linked by cause and effect but all events simultaneously as part of a connected whole. This tendency displays itself in their physics (eg they treat as elementary equations the tendency of for instance light to minimize or maximize the time required to arrive at its destination) and their writing (eg whole ideas are blended together into single complex symbols with the components modified to show relationships). The author is at pains to have us understand that our causal relationship to the world and the aliens teleological one are both equally valid ways to interpret the same sensory phenomenon.

This has implications. The aliens, rather than living their life in anticipation of whatever they are working toward, have a more detached, maybe even relaxed, view of things. They see life and all of its attendant actions as a stage upon which to perform that which they already know will arrive and that they cannot alter. And they would not think of altering that outcome. That is not how they think. And that’s a big shift, if you think about it. But not so different from the experience eastern spiritual folks have. Or any Calvinist that really felt predestination. Or maybe even virtually every pre agricultural tribes-person? To me this was as much a self conscious thought experiment to imagine how real human beings have actually lived as it was an attempt to imagine something only an alien species could do. I wonder if that’s what the author intended?

So where does that leave our mother/daughter story? Well, the daughter that has not yet been conceived will die tragically at twenty five (she falls off the face of a mountain at a national park. Seriously. That’s how he wrote it. I imagine he leaned back from the old typewriter and smiled a real sense of authorial gravitas after tossing that one off). The protagonist knows her kid dies young and still goes through every step of conceiving, raising, and ultimately burying this kid. This despite her awareness of her daughters early and no-doubt-the-author-intended-tragic-and-not-bizarrely-unseriously-written-death. No, the protagonist conceived her child in some sense because of that outcome. Performing the activities is what gives them value, not creating them and certainly not optimizing them, whatever that could mean. How exactly does that work or feel? What would it be like to live in that word? Any sane person immediately wonders. And the author? Completely silent. This the same author who won’t stop inserting interesting but distracting scientific minutia into every other paragraph. But as to like the main point of the story, not going to bog us down in that.

It’s a fascinating idea and it’s fun to think about. But I think the author has taken an important idea and given it an superficial treatment.

The author does not help us understand how an honest to god human being would make this transformation. What it would feel like. What she would struggle with as she learned to conceive of time and events differently. There is no understanding of humanity here. The author wrote a clever premise and a then tells us the logical end point that results from it. Ironically, he flattens a potentially broad and multifaceted experience and chooses to relate only cause and effect. He literally falls subject to the same bias he describes in the story.

I hope that his readers take the premise and do more with it than he did. Maybe that’s how this sort of story is supposed to work.

Three stars. Something here, but ultimately the author is writing about humans that are so remote from the ones I know that it might as well be a story about two alien species.


PS. Good lord this author cannot write dialogue in general and in particular anything romantic. Twelve year old doing a first draft that got a D- in remedial language arts terrible. Can someone just go back and fix these sections now that the story is famous? I feel like decent stories with glaring weaknesses should get a free intervention from a writer with differing skills.

Fascinating. Thought-provoking. Diverse. This collection of short stories is quite simply brilliant. They are each so different from the others and all well crafted and intriguing. From the opening "Tower of Babylon" which reads like a parable, to "The Story of your life" which is the basis for the movie _Arrival_, to a period piece that feels like HG Wells "72 letters", to a futuristic, slightly dystopic examination of self worth and love in "Liking what you see." Not a single one disappoints. And I've never before read a short story that had more depth than the movie it inspired, but this one is it. So. much. more. My only quibble with the book is the very odd and sloppy biology in '72 letters' but the setting and dynamics of the story make it ignorable.

- read bc of Arrival (dir. Dennis Villenueve)
- amazing & thought-provoking reads
- my favorite was The Story of Your Life, but i honestly would recommend all of them

I read this collection because I found it for $1 and then I fell in love with the title story. Only later did I realize that the title story has been made into a movie. I'm afraid to watch the movie though in case it's more upsetting than the story.

Whew, this was painful to finish. After getting through the first couple of stories with obnoxious narrators, I was hoping the short story format meant new chances for character development to improve. Alas, it never did, dialogue never got less gratuitously technical, and I had to force myself not to DNF all the way to the end.