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. 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 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. 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. , 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 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 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. 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

Collections

Non-fiction

Lectures

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.