Arrival

#174 at the time of writing.

Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang is my absolute favourite science fiction short story collection, with the possible exception of The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem. In fact those two are probably my favourite short story collections of any type. (And I'm a big fan of short stories.)

I hugely enjoyed the film Limitless, in part because it may as well have been an adaptation of Ted Chiang's short story Understand, but I never expected an actual Ted Chiang story adaptation - least of all one of the "unfilmable" ones.

But no, someone actually made a film about trying to interpret an alien language. The director of Sicario, no less. So, yeah, I was pretty excited.

And despite the inevitable Hollywoodization (the world will end if we don't crack the code in ten seconds!) it's good. Not best-ever good, but thoroughly satisfying. And smart.

Mind you, having been familiar with the story, I had zero sense of whether the twist worked. I knew it was coming, so I might have missed out on some of the impact!

Alright, now do Division by Zero.