Octopus Buddhas and Aliens: The Story of Tako Yakushi

One of my favorite films about aliens is ArrivalĀ (2016), based onĀ Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life (1998). It portrays otherworldly visitors as enlightened extraterrestrials with a literally timeless grasp of language and causality. Aside from being spacefaring travellers and inhabiting spacecraft that leave no residue, traces, or pollution, the advanced creatures of Arrival perceive time […]