Stories for Life Book Club

To celebrate Valentine's Day, or rather the day after, let's talk about choosing love. Arrival and the short story "Story of Your Life" are beautiful, moving odes to not only the bittersweetness of love but also to such ideas as language shaping perception, commitment to decisions and experiences despite the known outcomes, how "others" are perceived as threats, and the possible non-sequentiality of time. We'll follow the linguist Louise Banks as she carries out her task to learn the language of the alien "Heptapods" for the US Army but discovers much more about herself and her inner strength along the way.

Please note, we'll discuss both the film and the short story.
Arrival (2016, director Denis Villeneuve) and "Story of Your Life" (2002, author Ted Chiang in his short story collection Stories of Your Life)

No Country for Old Men (2007, directors the Coen brothers) and No Country for Old Men (2005, author Cormac McCarthy)
We'll be discussing both the film and the book.

Writer Cormac McCarthy has been heralded by literary critic Harald Bloom as an American author whose works will enter the Western literary canon. Let's find out whether we agree! He originally wrote No Country for Old Men as a screenplay instead of as a novel; does this make for a better adaptation? Do you find that novels written in the age of TV and films emphasize dialog over traditional narrative description? This neo-Western thriller is set in a Mexican-Texan borderland, propelled into its action by a drug deal gone wrong. The movie adaptation won the Academy Award for Best Picture, among other awards.

*Blade Runner: Final Cut (*1982, director Ridley Scott) and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968, author Philip K. Dick)
We'll be discussing both the film and the book.

The artificial general intelligence (AGI) community is currently defining what would be the capabilities by which we would know whether AGI has been achieved in an AI system. Planning towards a goal, knowledge representation, reasoning, identifying/reacting to hazards, manipulating/navigating a physical 3D environment, and learning are among these capabilities; yet how limited are we in any of these processes without feelings, empathy, or a sense of self? Let's revisit these questions after reading about bounty hunter Rick Deckard hunting and "retiring" six Nexus-6 android fugitives who are being aided by below-average IQ John Isidore in a dystopian, post-nuclear San Francisco.

Although Philip K. Dick never saw Ridley Scott's adaptation in its entirety, he was still pleased after an initial bout of skepticism. In a 1981 interview, he said "‘After I finished reading the screenplay, I got the novel out and looked through it. The two reinforce each other, so that someone who started with the novel would enjoy the movie and someone who started with the movie would enjoy the novel. I was amazed that Peoples could get some of those scenes to work. It taught me things about writing that I didn’t know." Philip K. Dick also was optimistic that Blade Runner would revolutionize science fiction as it was known then, and upon seeing footage, he said “How is this possible? How can this be? Those are not the exact images, but the texture and tone of the images I saw in my head when I was writing the original book! The environment is exactly as how I’d imagined it! How’d you guys do that? How did you know what I was feeling and thinking?’

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1976, director Milos Forman) and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962, author Ken Kesey)
We'll be discussing both the film and the book.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest curiously is included on many best-loved lists from Time magazine to the BBC, yet also has been subject to at least seven bans in US public schools. Set in an Oregon psychiatric hospital, both the film and the book critique institutional processes to control people and the possible dangers of psychology in pathologizing human individuality and range of experiences as illnesses. The film version is one of only three films to have won the so-called "Big Five" Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director, and Best Screenplay. While Ken Kesey hated the film, director Akita Kurosawa listed it as one of his hundred favorite films.