The Arrival

Oh, The Arrival by Sean Tan. A wonderful book. It looks sort of like a kid's storybook, sort of like a Chris Van Alsberg beautifully illustrated silent story which is a kind of surrealistic meditation on what it's like to be an immigrant in a strange new place.

It's really terrific to approach comics without words, to pick something without words for your first encounter because then you have to recognize the degree to which pictures are text, pictures are meaning. They're not just illustrations. The pictures do the talking.

If there are other dimensions of time that we somehow can't perceive but other creatures can perceive and as a result, the universe's causality proceeds differently from what we see, then you build up those cool science fiction ideas like Arrival, for example, which that was the A.B. Adams movie a few years back, I think.

Yeah, not the Charlie Sheen Arrival from decades ago, but the one where they have the linguist and the physicist instead of the astrobiologist and the cryptographer.

Yes, that one. Where the premise was, if you know your future, would you want to experience it anyway?

Now, I am reading both Arrival and this book. I'm reading two different books at the same time. I may have gotten them confused. I think I fucked it up. It sounds totally plausible though.