At the top of the tower, Hillalum finds that the roof of the world is cold and smooth to the touch. It has the structure of a parable and an uncanny and uncompromising material concreteness. His first published story, “Tower of Babylon,” which appeared in 1990 and won a Nebula Award, follows Hillalum, a Babylonian stonecutter tasked with climbing to the top of the world and carving a doorway into its granite ceiling.
(It imagines using neuroscience to eliminate “lookism,” or the preference for beautiful faces.) Many of Chiang’s stories take place in the past, not the future. He has won twenty-seven major sci-fi awards he might have won a twenty-eighth if, a few years ago, he hadn’t declined a nomination because he felt that the nominated story, “Liking What You See: A Documentary,” was unfinished. By this means, he has become one of the most influential science-fiction writers of his generation. Since then, he has published fourteen short stories and a novella. He started writing science fiction in high school. Last year, “ Arrival” was released, an adaptation of “Story of Your Life,” in which Amy Adams plays a linguist who learns, decades in advance, that her daughter will die, as a young woman, of a terminal illness, but goes ahead with the pregnancy anyway.Ĭhiang is now forty-nine, with streaks of gray in his ponytail. It was around sixty pages long and won three major science-fiction prizes: the Nebula, the Theodore Sturgeon, and the Seiun, which is bestowed by the Federation of Science Fiction Fan Groups of Japan.
In 1998, he published “Story of Your Life,” in a science-fiction anthology series called Starlight. For five years, when he wasn’t working as a technical writer in the software industry, Chiang read books about linguistics. A linguist, Chiang thought, might learn such acceptance by deciphering the language of an alien race with a different conception of time. The idea for a story emerged, about accepting the arrival of the inevitable. Chiang thought back to certain physical principles he had learned about in high school, in Port Jefferson, New York, having to do with the nature of time. A little later, a friend had a baby and told Chiang about recognizing her son from his movements in the womb.
He attended a one-man show in Seattle, where he lives, about a woman’s death from cancer. In the early nineteen-nineties, a few occurrences sparked something in Ted Chiang’s mind.
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