government to work alongside physicist Dr. Louise Banks, a linguist appointed by the U.S. Award, and Best Novella at the Nebula Awards. It received three distinguished sci-fi literary accolades in 1999: the Sturgeon Award, the James Tiptree Jr. “Story of Your Life” first appeared in the 1998 anthology Starlight 2, and is now available in Chiang’s Stories of Your Life and Others collection. It takes its inspiration from Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life,” an acclaimed novella with an inventiveness and poignancy that make it not only a stand-alone work of disarming power, but a fascinating companion piece to its cinematic counterpart. Equal parts haunting, touching, and terrifying, it’s a drama about the fundamental role language plays in connecting us to each other, and to our pasts, presents, and futures. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is 'so it goes.Arrival is the best big-budget sci-fi film in years, thanks in large part to Denis Villeneuve’s ominous yet lyrical direction, and Amy Adams’ captivating performance as a linguist trying to find a way to communicate with mysterious alien visitors. When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. I particularly loved this this passage from the book, where Vonnegut is describing an alien species that does not perceive time as linear:

Both Arrival and Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughter-House Five raise very interesting questions about our perception of time.

Arrival and story of your life