Ted Chiang

Chiang was born in 1967 to a Taiwanese American family in Port Jefferson, New York. His Chinese name is Chiang Feng-nan (Chinese: 姜峯楠; pinyin: Jiāng Fēngnán). Both of his parents are Taiwanese waishengren who were born in mainland China, migrated to Taiwan with their families during the Great Retreat, then immigrated to the United States. His father, Fu-pen Chiang, is a distinguished professor of mechanical engineering at Stony Brook University. His mother (d. 2019) was a librarian. Chiang also has a sister who is a physician.

Chiang grew up on Long Island and, at age 15, began submitting science fiction stories to magazines. 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". In 1989, he graduated from Brown University with a Bachelor of Science after choosing to study computer science over physics. As an undergraduate, Chiang continued to write sci-fi stories, though they were ultimately unpublished.

After attending and graduating from the Clarion Workshop in 1989 Chiang 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.

As of July 2002, 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 as of 2019. 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.

Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke inspired Chiang when he first started writing, 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 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".

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".

Awards

Ted Chiang has won or been nominated for several awards for several of his works.

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.

Chiang was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2020. 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.

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

Short stories

• "Tower of Babylon", Omni, 1990
• "Division by Zero", Full Spectrum 3, 1991
• "Understand", Asimov's Science Fiction, 1991
• "Story of Your Life", Starlight 2, 1998
• "The Evolution of Human Science" (also known as "Catching Crumbs from the Table"), Nature, 2000
• "Seventy-Two Letters", Vanishing Acts, 2000
• "Hell Is the Absence of God", Starlight 3, 2001
• "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
• "Exhalation", Eclipse 2, 2008
• "The Lifecycle of Software Objects", Subterranean Press, July 2010
• "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
• "It's 2059, and the Rich Kids are Still Winning", New York Times, 2019

Collections

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

Non-fiction

• "Frankenstein's Daughter" by Maureen McHugh: An Appreciation, The Ellen Datlow/SCI FICTION Project, December 30, 2005
• The Problem of the Traveling Salesman, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet #23, November 2008
• Reasoning About the Body, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet #26, November 2010
• Introduction to "Particle Theory", Strange Horizons, October 31, 2011
• Bad Character, The New Yorker, May 9, 2016
• Silicon Valley Is Turning Into Its Own Worst Fear, BuzzFeed, December 18, 2017
• What If Parents Loved Strangers’ Children As Much As Their Own?, The New Yorker, December 31, 2017
• Why Computers Won’t Make Themselves Smarter, The New Yorker, March 30, 2021
• Foreword to The Art and Science of Arrival by Tanya Lapointe, 2022
• Foreword to The History of Science Fiction: A Graphic Novel Adventure by Xavier Dollo, 2022
• ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web, The New Yorker, February 9, 2023
• Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey?, The New Yorker, May 4, 2023
• Why A.I. Isn't Going to Make Art, The New Yorker, August 31, 2024
• No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious, The Atlantic, June 3, 2026

Lectures

• Ted Chiang on the Future, MoMA PS1, July 8, 2013
• Imaginary Science and Magic in Fiction, Notre Dame Technology Ethics Center, November 2020

Philosophy

• Friedell, David, ed. (2025). The Philosophy of Ted Chiang. doi:10.1007/978-3-031-81662-8. ISBN 978-3-031-81661-1.
  • "Book review: The Philosophy of Ted Chiang | Santa Fe Institute". June 23, 2025.

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.