“If it pleases your Majesty,” he offers, “I will recount it here.”įuwaad’s loquacious introduction is the perfect beginning for “The Merchant,” which loops tales within tales and riffs on the intricate narrative structure of 1001 Arabian Nights. 'The fact that the movie turned out as well as it did, I think, is almost literally a miracle.'Ĭhiang's Story of Your Life is part of a short story collection, recently republished under the title Arrival.“The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” the first story in Ted Chiang’s luminous new collection Exhalation, opens with a benediction: “O mighty caliph and commander of the faithful, I am humbled to be in the splendor of your presence.” Our narrator, Fuwaad ibn Abbas, informs us that he was born “here in Baghdad, City of Peace,” and that he has spent his life as a “purveyor of fine fabrics…silk from Damascus and linen from Egypt and scarves from Morocco that are embroidered with gold.” Now, he stands in attendance before the caliph “without a single dirham in my purse,” but with a strange and winding story to tell.

'I don't think any number of novels feature linguist protangonists will have the same impact as a major motion picture with a linguist as a protagonist,' explains Chiang, who studied linguistics for five years in order to write the role of Louise Banks, played by Amy Adams.

And while the extraterrestrial fit into the sci-fi mould, having a linguist as the protagonist is a bit more rare. Story of Your Life tells the story of a linguist who is given the task of communicating with aliens who appear on Earth out of nowhere. 'Most of the action of the story is people sitting in a room, talking it's not something I could see being made into film.' 'The story is not what most people would consider a likely candidate for adaptation into film,' he says. When Ted Chiang found out that movie producers were interested in adapting his short story, Story of Your Life, into a big budget film, he thought: 'They were not trying to make a conventional Hollywood film.'Īlthough there are no shortage of sci-fi films out there, Chiang's story was different.

Arrival short story ted chiang