Ted Chiang

Ted Chiang (born 1967) is an American science fiction writer. His Chinese name is Chiang Feng-nan (姜峯楠). His work has won four Nebula awards, four Hugo awards, the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and four Locus awards. His short story, "Story of Your Life", was the basis of the film Arrival (2016).

Chiang was born in Port Jefferson, New York.Both of his parents were born in China mainland and immigrated to Taiwan with their families during the Chinese Communist Revolution before immigrating to the United States.He graduated from Brown University with a computer science degree. He had been submitting stories to magazines since high school and after attending the Clarion Writers Workshop in 1989 he sold his first story, "The Tower Of Babylon" to the Omni science magazine.

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 Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop at UC San Diego in 2012 and 2016.

Critic John Clute has written that Chiang's work has a "tight-hewn and lucid style... [which] has a magnetic effect on the reader". 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. He has also commented on the lack of competition or regulation on some major tech companies.

Awards

Chiang has published seventeen short stories, novelettes, and novellas as of 2019, and has won numerous 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 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); and a Hugo Award and Locus Award for his novella "The Lifecycle of Software Objects" (2010).

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.

His novelette "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" (2007) was also published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. "The Great Silence" was included in The Best American Short Stories anthology for 2016, which is a rare honor for stories and authors that fall under the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres.

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

Collections

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

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.

Chiang lives in Washington with his partner, Marcia Glover.