When I ask Ted Chiang if he will sit down with me over lunch, his response — like the stories he writes — is succinct and precise: “I’d be happy to talk about the current moment in AI and how science fiction relates to it,” he writes back. “But I won’t talk about my personal life. If that’s OK with you, I’m available for lunch.”
It’s not Chiang’s personal life I’m interested in: it’s the worlds inside his head. The Chinese-American writer is one of the most lauded science-fiction writers of his generation, having won multiple major sci-fi awards for the mere 18 short stories he has written over 30-odd years. His novella Story of Your Life, about a linguist who learns to communicate with an alien species, was adapted into the Hollywood film Arrival.
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