Three of Chiang's 15 published short stories have been optioned for possible adaptation. There is something that's very counter-cultural about him that I think is important."Īnd apparently, so does Hollywood. And then you have someone like Ted who just sits and thinks very carefully about what he's doing, and then he does it. And you've got to think about your brand. "Because the more your name is out there, the more every book is an ad for yourself. "Right now as a writer, what you're told is: the best way to be successful is to be insanely prolific," he says. In any case, author Grady Hendrix says such meticulous attention to the details in short fiction feels rare today. Sign language is not used by the aliens of Arrival but better not to divulge such spoilers. And it is pretty much impossible to do a sort of word-by-word translation into English."Ĭhiang arrives at the Los Angeles premiere of Arrival on Nov.
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"It uses velocity as a way of inflecting. "It has a sort of three-dimensional grammar," he says. That line of thinking led Chiang to sign language. "Those aliens would not be speaking from the same orifice we eat and breath out of." "I wanted an alien that was as different from us as those life forms are," he says. But that is not the only body plan available." "And that is the basic body plan we see in most aliens. "That is the basic body plan for all vertebrae on Earth," he says. Chiang was not interested in a being that eats and makes noise with its mouth. One of the challenges in both the screenplay for Arrival and the original source material,"Story of Your Life," was creating a language for creatures who do not remotely resemble people. "We actually have a character saying 'non-linear orthography,' " he adds. We actually have a character saying 'non-linear orthography.' I didn't think I would see the day. Screenwriter Eric Heisserer estimates he received 100 rejections when pitching Arrival to producers. Nor did it help that the story features a female main character, who happens to be an academic, rather than a male action hero. The drama of deciphering alien syntax did not make Arrival particularly easy to adapt.
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Well, how would we communicate? Well, we'd have to make sure they understood what communication was, what an individual was, that we even perceive time in the same way so that we can communicate about things in the past, present and future." "It's a first contact story so what would happen first?," Hendrix explains. "We really like to get to the dramatic parts of our story, right? So if we're going to write a story about first contact with aliens, we're going to want to skip to the exciting parts."īut not Chiang - he's more interested in beautiful explanations. " observes Grady Hendrix, himself an author of speculative fiction. "Ted does something that not a lot of other writers do. And I tend to think of my stories in terms of sentences." "Never," he replies, politely suppressing a snort. Given Chiang's tendency toward exactitude and intellectual rigor, I wondered whether his imagination led him to see stories like movies in his head as he wrote. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Stories of Your Life and Others Author Ted Chiang