Ted Chiang

Ted Chiang was born in 1967 to a Taiwanese American family in Port Jefferson, New York.^[3] His Chinese name is Chiang Feng-nan (姜峯楠; Jiāng Fēngnán).^[4] 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.^[5] His father, Fu-pen Chiang, is a distinguished professor of mechanical engineering at Stony Brook University.^[6] His mother (d. 2019) was a librarian.^[7] Chiang also has a sister who is a physician.^[7]

Chiang grew up in Long Island and, at age 15, began submitting science fiction stories to magazines.^[8] 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".^[7] In 1989, he graduated from Brown University with a Bachelor of Science (B.S.) degree after choosing to study computer science over physics.^[9][10] As an undergraduate, Chiang continued to write sci-fi stories, though they were ultimately unpublished.^[8]

As of 2016, Chiang lives in Bellevue, Washington, with his long-time partner, Marcia Glover,^[11] whom he met while they both were working at Microsoft. She worked as an interface designer and then a photographer.^[5]

After attending and graduating from the Clarion Workshop in 1989 Chiang sold his first story, "The Tower of Babylon", to Omni magazine,^[12] and was awarded a Nebula Award for it in 1990.^[5] 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.^[13][14]

As of July 2002^[update], Chiang was working as a technical writer in the software industry and resided in Bellevue, Washington, near Seattle.^[15] He was an instructor at the Clarion Workshop at UC San Diego in 2012 and 2016.^[16]

Chiang's second short story collection, Exhalation: Stories was published in May 2019 by Alfred A. Knopf.^[17] Chiang has published eighteen short stories, novelettes, and novellas as of 2019.^[update] In 2022, Chiang became a Miller Scholar in the Santa Fe Institute.^[18][19]

In 2023, Chiang was named one of Time's 100 most influential people in AI.^[20]

Chiang has said Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke inspired him when he was young,^[21] while the works of Gene Wolfe, John Crowley and Edward Bryant were his creative influences in college.^[22]

Chiang has said that one of the reasons science fiction writing interests him is that it allows him to make philosophical questions "storyable".^[22] 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".^[23]

Critic John Clute has written that Chiang's work has a "tight-hewn and lucid style... [which] has a magnetic effect on the reader".^[24] 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.^[25] 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."^[26]

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".^[27]

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.^[28]