Abstract
In the 2016 movie Arrival, aliens with advanced technology appear on Earth in spaceships reminiscent of the black obelisk in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The film presents this arrival as a serious problem to be solved, with the future of human life and interplanetary relationships in the balance. The short story, “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang, on which the film was based, takes a different, amusing route that essentially depicts an ideal vision of the era of colonialism. To articulate this reading, this article will compare Chiang’s science fiction (SF) to the genre in general and will take Isiah Lavender III’s positionality of otherhood to reveal how Chiang’s work expresses a Chinese American secular faith in a moral universe. It will analyze the narrative form in Chiang’s collection, Stories of Your Life and Others, and will use it to compare the prose and film versions of “Story of Your Life.” It will also explain how Chiang may be using a nonlinear orthography and variational principles of physics to frame multileveled humor. It utilizes theories of humor by John Morreall and analyses of Chinese American secularity by Russell Jeung and concludes that Chiang’s work reflects concerns and trends of Asian Americans’ secularized religions.
Highlights
In the popular and beautiful 2016 movie Arrival (Villeneuve 2016), aliens with advanced technology appear on Earth in spaceships reminiscent of the black obelisk in 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick and Clarke 1968)
The film presents the arrival of aliens as a serious problem to be solved with the future of human life and interplanetary relationships held in the balance
I am proposing that one possible reading that concurs with an otherhood lens is that Chiang is utilizing a comedic narrative structure, which ends with the messiness and contradictions of life, and focuses not on flawed humans (B) with potentially disruptive technology (C) but on the astounding durability of a pillar of the moral universe (A)
Summary
In the popular and beautiful 2016 movie Arrival (Villeneuve 2016), aliens with advanced technology appear on Earth in spaceships reminiscent of the black obelisk in 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick and Clarke 1968). I am proposing that one possible reading that concurs with an otherhood lens is that Chiang is utilizing a comedic narrative structure, which ends with the messiness and contradictions of life, and focuses not on flawed humans (B) with potentially disruptive technology (C) but on the astounding durability of a pillar of the moral universe (A).
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