I met Ted over a decade ago, when I attended the Clarion West workshop in Seattle. In other words, if you want to be in on the secret of Chiang’s fiction, now is the time. The title story is currently being adapted into the film Arrival starring Jeremy Renner and Amy Adams. His collection Stories of Your Life and Others, originally published in 2002, has just been re-released by Vintage. That story, “Tower of Babylon,” also won him his first Nebula award, kicking off his remarkable career. He had been submitting to science fiction magazines since he was in high school, and after he attended the Clarion workshop in 1989, he sold his first story to the legendary Omni. No matter the genre, he’s one of the best and most dedicated short story writers working today.Ĭhiang was born in 1967 in Port Jefferson, New York, and received a computer science degree from Brown University. He manages to capture the human drama behind philosophical questions, in clear and spare prose that seduces with its simplicity. Each story is a carefully considered, masterfully constructed, profoundly moving, and occasionally dangerous machine. This is especially remarkable for a genre forged in the pulps, where top writers still regularly publish a raft of short stories and a novel or two yearly. He’s won four Nebula awards, four Hugo awards, and a staggering number of other honors, all for a body of work numbering about fifteen stories. Within the world of science fiction, Ted Chiang is legendary.

Stories of your life and others movie