ABSTRACT
With its vertical tower-like spaceships and its linguistics-based plot, Arrival is a brilliant retelling of the biblical Tower of Babel story, with allusions to the Moses story thrown in for good measure. But Arrival approaches its theme with unusual attention to the mechanics of translation and the process of code-breaking that allows cross-species communication to occur. And it adds an unusual twist. The conversation that is established with aliens has important effects not only for continued life on the planet, but also for the personal existence of the translator. Cracking the alien code turns out to have life-changing consequences. The person who ascends to the space of translation is not the same as the one who comes down.
