Tuesday, November 22, 2016

Ted Chiag's $900 Book: Stories of Your Life and Others

And (1) I saw it listed for even higher prices on AbeBooks; (2) I just checked it out from the public library. (Or, as Mick Ronson's sister said in the middle of David Bowie's "All the Madmen": "He followed me home. Can I keep him?")

BTW . . . Stories of Your Life and Others is due back at the library (because someone else wants it, so that's good), so I put aside Cixin Liu's The Dark Forest and went back to re-read "Story of Your Life." And it was an illuminating re-read. For one thing, it allowed me to clearly see the differences between the movie version and the short story, and to really appreciate what a great job Eric Heisserer did on the screenplay . . . and that Denis Villeneuve did in directing the movie. They really didn't substantially alter anything in the short story . . . not even the ending. (After I'd first finished the short story and before I'd seen the movie I thought, "There is no way in hell they will allow the movie to end that way. Audiences would riot.") And what they added to the movie . . . from the squid-ink-squirty way the heptapods wrote to the design of the heptapod ships and many other things . . . was really great. That doesn't happen very often in my book / movie experience. 

I think I may need to own this Stories of Your Life and Others book, though. I'm seeing lots of different covers (clearly the American hardback is out of the question), all of which are pretty cool. My favorite one is a hardback copy, but it is in Chinese, alas. 

No comments: