One thing Ted Chiang does that Arrival can't

It's not the movie's fault. It does a decent job of evoking Ted Chiang's time-fluid aliens and the human linguist whose perception of time is completely rearranged by them; but in "Story of Your Life," form follows function in a way that only prose can pull off. The idea of time being fluid is integrated into the narrative timeline and even the grammar of Chiang's story, so that in any given sentence you get verbs in various tenses...and it totally works! While I greatly admired the mind behind Chiang's story collection, "Story of Your Life" is more than a cool idea: it's a story I'm just plain jealous of.