Ted Chiang

Ted Chiang (born 1967) is an American science fiction writer. His work has won four Nebula awards, four Hugo awards, the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and six Locus awards. His short story "Story of Your Life" was the basis of the film Arrival (2016). He was an artist in residence at the University of Notre Dame in 2020–2021. Chiang is also a frequent non-fiction contributor to the New Yorker Magazine, most recently on topics related to computer technology, such as artificial intelligence.

Biography

Early life, family and education

Ted Chiang was born in 1967 in Port Jefferson, New York. His Chinese name is Chiang Feng-nan (姜峯楠; Jiāng Fēngnán). Both of his parents were born in Mainland China and immigrated to Taiwan with their families during the Chinese Communist Revolution before immigrating to the United States. His father, Fu-pen Chiang, is a distinguished professor of mechanical engineering at Stony Brook University. His mother was a librarian.

Chiang graduated from Brown University in 1989 with a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science.

Career

Chiang began submitting stories to magazines in high school. After attending the Clarion Workshop in 1989 he sold his first story, "The Tower of Babylon", to Omni magazine, and was awarded a Nebula Award for it in 1990. His later stories have won numerous other awards, making him one of the most-honored writers in contemporary science fiction.

As of July 2002, he was working as a technical writer in the software industry and resided in Bellevue, Washington, near Seattle. Chiang was an instructor at the Clarion Workshop at UC San Diego in 2012 and 2016. In 2022, Chiang became a Miller Scholar in the Santa Fe Institute.

Chiang has published eighteen short stories, novelettes, and novellas as of 2019.

In 2023, Chiang was named one of Time's 100 most influential people in AI.

Writing style and influences

Chiang has said Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke inspired him when he was young, while the works of Gene Wolfe, John Crowley and Edward Bryant were his creative influences in college.

Chiang has said that one of the reasons science fiction writing interests him is that it allows him to make philosophical questions "storyable". He enjoys reading story notes by authors, and himself includes them with his short story collections. He considers these not the "precise response to 'How did you get the idea?,' but it's a way to answer the reader if they knew what the best question to ask [about the story] was".

Reception

Critic John Clute has written that Chiang's work has a "tight-hewn and lucid style... [which] has a magnetic effect on the reader". Critic and poet Joyce Carol Oates wrote that Chiang explores "conventional tropes of science fiction in highly unconventional ways" in "teasing, tormenting, illuminating, thrilling" fashion, comparing him favorably to Philip K. Dick, James Tiptree Jr. and Jorge Luis Borges. Writer Peter Watts has praised Chiang's work, writing: "We share a secret prayer, we writers of short SF. We utter it whenever one of our stories is about to appear in public, and it goes like this: Please, Lord. Please, if it be Thy will, don’t let Ted Chiang publish a story this year."

Former US president Barack Obama included Chiang's short story collection Exhalation in his 2019 reading list, praising it as the "best kind of science fiction".

Chiang has commented on "metacognition, or thinking about one’s own thinking" being something most humans, but neither animals nor current AI, are capable of, and that capitalism erodes the capacity for this insight, especially for tech company executives.

Awards

Chiang has won the following science fiction awards for his works: a Nebula Award for "Tower of Babylon" (1990); the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1992; a Nebula Award and the Theodore Sturgeon Award for "Story of Your Life" (1998); a Sidewise Award for "Seventy-Two Letters" (2000); a Nebula Award, Locus Award, and Hugo Award for his novelette "Hell Is the Absence of God" (2002); a Locus Award for his short story collection Stories of Your Life and Others (2003); a Nebula and Hugo Award for his novelette "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" (2007); a British Science Fiction Association Award, a Locus Award, and the Hugo Award for Best Short Story for "Exhalation" (2009); a Hugo Award and Locus Award for his novella "The Lifecycle of Software Objects" (2010); a Locus Award for his short story collection Exhalation: Stories (2020); and a Locus Award for his novelette "Omphalos" (2020).

Chiang turned down a Hugo nomination for his short story "Liking What You See: A Documentary" in 2003, on the grounds that the story was rushed due to editorial pressure and did not turn out as he had really wanted.

In 2013, his collection of translated stories Die Hölle ist die Abwesenheit Gottes won the German Kurd-Laßwitz-Preis for best foreign science fiction.

Works

Short stories

• "Tower of Babylon", Omni, 1990 (Nebula Award winner)
• "Division by Zero", Full Spectrum 3, 1991
• "Understand", Asimov's Science Fiction, 1991
• "Story of Your Life", Starlight 2, 1998 (Nebula Award, Theodore Sturgeon Award and Seiun Award winner)
• "The Evolution of Human Science" (also known as "Catching Crumbs from the Table"), Nature, 2000
• "Seventy-Two Letters", Vanishing Acts, 2000 (Sidewise Award winner)
• "Hell Is the Absence of God", Starlight 3, 2001 (Hugo Award, Locus Award, Nebula Award and Seiun Award winner)
• "Liking What You See: A Documentary", Stories of Your Life and Others, 2002
• "What's Expected of Us", Nature, 2005
• "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate", Subterranean Press, 2007 and F&SF, September 2007 (Nebula Award, Hugo Award and Seiun Award winner)
• "Exhalation", Eclipse 2, 2008 (BSFA, Locus Award, and Hugo Award winner)
• "The Lifecycle of Software Objects", Subterranean Press, July 2010 (Locus Award, Hugo Award and Seiun Award winner)
• "Dacey's Patent Automatic Nanny", The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities (edited by Jeff VanderMeer and Ann VanderMeer) June 2011
• "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling", Subterranean Press Magazine, August 2013
• "The Great Silence", e-flux Journal, May 2015 (included in The Best American Short Stories, 2016)
• "Omphalos", Exhalation: Stories, 2019
• "Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom", Exhalation: Stories, 2019
• "It's 2059, and the Rich Kids are Still Winning", New York Times, 2019

Collections

• Stories of Your Life and Others (Tor, 2002; Locus Award for Best Collection), republished as Arrival (Picador, 2016)
• Exhalation: Stories (Knopf, May 2019)

Non-fiction

• "Frankenstein's Daughter" by Maureen McHugh: An Appreciation, The Ellen Datlow/SCI FICTION Project, December 30, 2005
• The Problem of the Traveling Salesman, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet #23, November 2008
• Reasoning About the Body, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet #26, November 2010
• Introduction to "Particle Theory", Strange Horizons, October 31, 2011
• Bad Character, The New Yorker, May 9, 2016
• Silicon Valley Is Turning Into Its Own Worst Fear, Buzzfeed, December 18, 2017
• What If Parents Loved Strangers’ Children As Much As Their Own?, The New Yorker, December 31, 2017
• Why Computers Won’t Make Themselves Smarter, The New Yorker, March 30, 2021
• Foreword to The Art and Science of Arrival by Tanya Lapointe, 2022
• Foreword to The History of Science Fiction: A Graphic Novel Adventure by Xavier Dollo, 2022
• ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web, The New Yorker, February 9, 2023
• Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey?, The New Yorker, May 4, 2023

Lectures

• Ted Chiang on the Future, MoMA PS1, July 8, 2013
• Imaginary Science and Magic in Fiction, Notre Dame Technology Ethics Center, November 2020

Film

The screenwriter Eric Heisserer adapted Chiang's story "Story of Your Life" into the 2016 film Arrival. Directed by Denis Villeneuve, the film stars Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner.

Personal life

As of 2016, Chiang lives in Bellevue, Washington with his long-time partner, Marcia Glover, whom he met while both were working at Microsoft. She worked as an interface designer and then a photographer. Chiang goes to the gym three times per week and enjoys video games.

References

External links

• Stories of Ted Chiang’s Life and Others Ted Chiang Interview
• Ted Chiang on the Future Video of a speech by Ted Chiang
• Interview conducted by Al Robertson
• Interview conducted by Lou Anders
• Interview conducted by Gavin J. Grant
• Interview conducted by James Yeh
• Ted Chiang at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Ted Chiang's online fiction at Free Speculative Fiction Online
• Ted Chiang at IMDb
• Ted Chiang at Library of Congress, with 3 library catalog records