Ted Chiang is an American science fiction writer. He is best known for his short story collections, Stories of Your Life and Others (2002) and Exhalation: Stories (2019). His work has won numerous awards, including four Nebula and four Hugo Awards. His novella, Story of Your Life, inspired the 2016 film, Arrival.
Ted Chiang was born in Port Jefferson, New York, into a Taiwanese-American family. His parents emigrated from Taiwan, originally from mainland China. His father, Fu-pen Chiang, is a professor of mechanical engineering, and his mother was a librarian. Chiang grew up on Long Island. He began submitting science fiction stories at the age of 15.
Chiang later said, 'When I was a kid, I wanted to become a physicist. That was a perfectly respectable career choice for the son of an engineer.' Chiang graduated from Brown University in 1989 with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science.
After completing the Clarion Workshop in the same year, he sold his first story, 'The Tower of Babylon', to Omni magazine. This won the Nebula Award the following year. His subsequent works have received numerous accolades, including the Hugo, Locus and John W. Campbell awards. Chiang is known for his careful, slow writing process.
He states, "I can't claim any moral high ground or deliberate strategy. It's mostly just that I'm a very slow writer.'
His first collection, Stories of Your Life and Others, published in 2002 by Tor Books, brings together his first eight stories. It was reissued as Arrival in 2016 to coincide with the film adaptation of Story of Your Life. The stories combine speculative science fiction with philosophical themes.
The New York Times noted that the collection "raises questions about the nature of reality and what it is to be human". They often explore how characters respond to radical change with a sense of normality, examining the human condition with intelligence and subtle humour.
By 2002, Chiang was working as a technical writer in the software industry near Seattle. He taught at the Clarion Workshop in both 2012 and 2016. His second collection, Exhalation: Stories, was published in 2019. In 2020, he was an artist-in-residence at the University of Notre Dame. In 2022, he became a Miller Scholar at the Santa Fe Institute. In 2023, Time magazine named him among the 100 most influential people in AI.
Chiang has said that he starts writing a story when he has a "big question" on his mind for months or years. He aims to dramatise philosophical thought experiments in an accessible way. He has also written non-fiction essays on artificial intelligence for The New Yorker, critiquing popular depictions of AI.
His work has been praised for its lucid style. Joyce Carol Oates has drawn favourable comparisons between his work and that of Philip K. Dick and Jorge Luis Borges. Former US President Obama included Exhalation in his 2019 reading list, calling it 'the best kind of science fiction'. In 2024, Chiang won the PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in short story writing.
