Ted Chiang (Chinese: 姜峯楠; pinyin: Jiāng Fēngnán; 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. He has published the short story collections Stories of Your Life and Others (2002) and Exhalation: Stories (2019). 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 from 2020 to 2021. Chiang is also a frequent non-fiction contributor to the New Yorker, where he writes on topics related to computing such as artificial intelligence.
Early life and education
Ted Chiang was born in 1967 to a Taiwanese American family in Port Jefferson, New York. His Chinese name is Chiang Feng-nan (姜峯楠; Jiāng Fēngnán). Both of his parents are Taiwanese waishengren who were born in mainland China and migrated to Taiwan with their families during the retreat of the government of the Republic of China to Taiwan before immigrating to the United States. His father, Fu-pen Chiang, is a distinguished professor of mechanical engineering at Stony Brook University. His mother (d. 2019) was a librarian. Chiang also has a sister who is a physician.
Chiang grew up in Long Island and, at age 15, began submitting science fiction stories to magazines. He later recalled, "When I was a kid, my intention was to become a physicist. That was a perfectly respectable career choice for the son of an engineer. I figured I would be a fiction writer on the side, and that, I think, is perfectly acceptable to Asian parents". In 1989, he graduated from Brown University with a Bachelor of Science (B.S.) degree after choosing to study computer science over physics. As an undergraduate, Chiang continued to write sci-fi stories, though they were ultimately unpublished.
Personal life
As of 2016, Chiang lives in Bellevue, Washington, with his long-time partner, Marcia Glover, whom he met while they both were working at Microsoft. She worked as an interface designer and then a photographer.
Career
After attending and graduating from the Clarion Workshop in 1989 Chiang 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. Chiang's first short story collection, Stories of Your Life and Others (2002) was published in 2002 by Tor Books and comprises his first eight stories. The collection was reprinted in 2016 as Arrival to coincide with the adaptation of "Story of Your Life" as the film Arrival.
As of July 2002, Chiang was working as a technical writer in the software industry and resided in Bellevue, Washington, near Seattle. He was an instructor at the Clarion Workshop at UC San Diego in 2012 and 2016.
Chiang's second short story collection, Exhalation: Stories was published in May 2019 by Alfred A. Knopf. Chiang has published eighteen short stories, novelettes, and novellas as of 2019. In 2022, Chiang became a Miller Scholar in the Santa Fe Institute.
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 explanatory story notes by authors, and includes them in his own 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
Ted Chiang has won or been nominated for several awards for several of his works.
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.
Chiang was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2020. In 2024, Chiang won the PEN/Malamud Award for "excellence in the art of the short story" and the American Humanist Association's Inquiry and Innovation Award.
Works
Short stories
- "Tower of Babylon", Omni, 1990
- "Division by Zero", Full Spectrum 3, 1991
- "Understand", Asimov's Science Fiction, 1991
- "Story of Your Life", Starlight 2, 1998
- "The Evolution of Human Science" (also known as "Catching Crumbs from the Table"), Nature, 2000
- "Seventy-Two Letters", Vanishing Acts, 2000
- "Hell Is the Absence of God", Starlight 3, 2001
- "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
- "Exhalation", Eclipse 2, 2008
- "The Lifecycle of Software Objects", Subterranean Press, July 2010
- "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; 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
- Why A.I. Isn't Going to Make Art, The New Yorker, August 31, 2024
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.
References
External links
- Interview conducted by Avi Solomon
- 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
