Before any of that, a question: “Do you want to make a baby?” We understand this film language: fragmentary images, representing memories. Movies have a standard device for this sort of interweaving: we see flashbacks-newborn baby, four-year-old cowgirl, eight-year-old tucked into bed, twelve-year-old in hospital, eyes closed, head shaved. Are the visitors friend or foe? Is their arrival a threat or an opportunity? The other is the story of a mother and a daughter who dies. One is the alien visitation, a suspenseful narrative. In both the novella and the movie, two stories are interwoven. That is to say, it’s really a movie about time. It not only respects Chiang’s story but takes it further. Arrival is a movie of philosophy as much as adventure. But we soon see that something deeper is going on.

The earthlings are afraid, the military takes charge, fighter jets scramble nervously, and the hazmat suits come out. It’s being marketed as an alien-contact adventure: creatures arrive in giant ovoid spaceships, and drama ensues. The film is Arrival, written by Eric Heisserer and directed by Denis Villeneuve. It’s a remarkable work of imagination, original and cerebral, and, I would have thought, unfilmable. It’s not a time-travel story in any literal sense.

When I first read it, I meant to discuss it in the book I was writing about time travel, but I could never manage that. “So in the future, the sister of the past,” thinks young Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, “I may see myself as I sit here now but by reflection from that which then I shall be.” Twisty! What if you received knowledge of your own tragic future-as a gift, or perhaps a curse? What if your all-too-vivid sensation of free will is merely an illusion? These are the roads down which Chiang’s story leads us.

What if the future is as real as the past? Physicists have been suggesting as much since Einstein. As the Queen said to Alice, “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.” But something peculiar is happening in this story. Louise is addressing Hannah in memory, evidently. She is addressing her daughter, Hannah, who, we soon learn, has died at a young age. The narrator is Louise Banks in “Story of Your Life,” a 1998 novella by Ted Chiang. I remember once when we’ll be driving to the mall to buy some new clothes for you. It’ll be Sunday morning, and I’ll be scrambling some eggs…. I remember a conversation we’ll have when you’re in your junior year of high school.

A giant alien spaceship that has landed in Montana in Arrival, Denis Villeneuve’s film adaptation of a story by Ted Chiang

Ted chiang on arrival