Ted Chiang (born 1967 in Port Jefferson, New York) is an American writer of speculative fiction, best known for his short stories. The son of parents who were born in mainland China, moved to Taiwan and later settled in the United States, he grew up on Long Island and began sending stories to magazines at fifteen. He once planned to become a physicist, but he graduated from Brown University in computer science instead.
His first published story, "Tower of Babylon", appeared in Omni magazine and earned him a Nebula Award in 1990. Since then he has collected an unusually large number of prizes for a science fiction writer, including four Hugo Awards, four Nebulas and several Locus Awards. He has also worked for many years as a technical writer in the software industry, and he has kept his fiction output modest and carefully crafted.
Chiang tends to take a familiar device of the genre, such as time travel, a machine or an invented technology, and examine it with logical precision and a strong philosophical interest. His themes include free will, language, science and the relationship between minds and machines. His stories, gathered in Stories of Your Life and Others (2002) and Exhalation: Stories (2019), are known for their restrained, exact prose.
His best-known story, "Story of Your Life", became the basis for the film Arrival (2016), directed by Denis Villeneuve. He has also written essays on artificial intelligence and computing for The New Yorker. His legacy lies largely in how he has brought the short story of science fiction into serious philosophical debate, and in the attention he has drawn from readers who do not usually follow the genre.
Key works
- Tower of Babylon (1990), the story with which he debuted and which won his first Nebula.
- Story of Your Life (1998), about a linguist who learns an alien language whose structure changes her perception of time.
- Hell Is the Absence of God (2001), a story about real angels and human faith.
- Exhalation (2019), a collection of stories that includes the title piece.
Curiosities
A physics career set aside
As a child he intended to become a physicist, but he chose to study computer science at Brown University instead.
A declined Hugo nomination
In 2003 he turned down a Hugo nomination for "Liking What You See: A Documentary", because he felt it had been written in a rush under editorial pressure.
Original Filopedia text based on Wikipedia (es) and Wikipedia (en) and Wikidata.