Ted Chiang
In 2002, Ted Chiang published his first short story collection, Stories of Your Life and Others, gathering work that had already earned him recognition across the science fiction field. That debut collection, along with the years of fiction that preceded it, helped establish him as a distinctive voice in American science fiction writing.
Chiang was born on October 20, 1967, in Port Jefferson, New York, and later studied at Brown University. He has worked as both a writer and a computer scientist, bringing a technical background to his fiction without letting it overwhelm the human concerns at the center of his stories. His writing falls squarely within the science fiction genre, and he works in American English. Among his notable individual works are "Tower of Babylon," "Story of Your Life," and the pieces collected under his two major publications.
The awards Chiang has received over the course of his career are substantial in number and variety. He has taken home the Hugo Award for Best Novelette, the Nebula Award for Best Novelette, the Nebula Award for Best Novella, the Locus Award for Best Novelette, and the Locus Award for Best Collection. He has also received the Astounding Award for Best New Writer, the Theodore Sturgeon Award, and the Hayakawa Award. These honors span multiple organizations and span a range of short fiction categories, reflecting how consistently his work has been recognized within the field.
In 2019, Chiang published his second collection, Exhalation: Stories, more than seventeen years after his first. That long gap between collections — during which he continued to produce individual stories — did nothing to diminish the reception of the new book, which added the Locus Award for Best Collection to his already substantial list of accolades. The publication of Exhalation confirmed that Chiang's place among science fiction writers rests on a relatively small but carefully constructed body of work, with the 2019 collection standing as the most recent anchor of his published output.
Quotes by Ted Chiang
Ted Chiang's insights on:
Hillalum said nothing. For the first time, he knew night for what it was: the shadow of the earth itself, cast against the sky.
And I think I’ve found the real benefit of digital memory. The point is not to prove you were right; the point is to admit you were wrong.
It’ll be when you first learn to walk that I get daily demonstrations of the asymmetry in our relationship. You’ll be incessantly running off somewhere, and each time you walk into a door frame or scrape your knee, the pain feels like it’s my own. It’ll be like growing an errant limb, an extension of myself whose sensory nerves report pain just fine, but whose motor nerves don’t convey my commands at all. It’s so unfair: I’m going to give birth to an animated voodoo doll of myself.
When we speak, we use the breath in our lungs to give our thoughts a physical form. The sounds we make are simultaneously our intentions and our life force.
There have always been arguments showing that free will is an illusion, some based on hard physics, others based on pure logic. Most people agree these arguments are irrefutable, but no one ever really accepts the conclusion. The experience of having free will is too powerful for an argument to overrule.
I would be honored to relate everything I know of the future, if Your Majesty sees fit to ask, but for myself, the most precious knowledge I possess is this: Nothing erases the past. There is repentance, there is atonement, and there is forgiveness. That is all, but that is enough.
I will program my mind to forbid itself from moving beyond its own reprogramming range.
I’ve devoted my life to studying the wondrous mechanism that is the universe, and doing so has given me a sense of fulfillment. I’ve always assumed that this meant that I was acting in accordance with your will, Lord, and your reason for making me. But if it’s in fact true that you have no purpose in mind for me, then that sense of fulfillment has arisen solely from within myself. What that demonstrates to me is that we as humans are capable of creating meaning for our own lives.
Of course beauty has been used as a tool of oppression, but eliminating beauty is not the answer; you can’t liberate people by narrowing the scope of their experiences.
It was something I thought of when I was talking with my sister,” he says. Derek’s sister teaches children born with Down syndrome. “She mentioned that some parents don’t want to push their kids too much, because they’re afraid of exposing them to the possibility of failure. The parents mean well, but they’re keeping their kids from reaching their full potential when they coddle them.