Ted Chiang

Ted Chiang is one of those authors who doesn't publish much - so far, just a bunch of short stories, recently collected in Stories of Your Life and Others - but what he does write tends to be very good indeed. Pretty much every story he's published has been nominated for some award or other; his first, 'Tower of Babylon', won the Nebula, and his most recent, 'Hell Is The Absence Of God', won a Hugo. His work is an interesting mix of genres; conceptually, several of them are straight-up fantasy, but they are written with a rigorousness or logical progression more reminiscent of Hard SF (which is probably where the comparisons with Greg Egan come from).

• isfdb:Author/Ted_Chiang
• google:Ted-Chiang (oh ye of little faith!)

There's a very rich seam of SF meta-thought to be mined in asking How Hard Is Ted Chiang? It might even involve coining the term Hard F? ...

You can read his story 'Understand' online: <http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/under.htm>.

Rating the stories!

• Tower of Babylon [5 -- NH][4 -- MF]
• Understand [4 -- NH][3 -- MF]
• Division by Zero [3 -- NH][3 -- MF]
• The Evolution of Human Science [4 -- NH][3 -- MF]
• 72 Letters [5 -- NH]
• Story of Your Life [5 -- NH][4 -- MF]
• Hell is the Absence of God [5 -- NH][5 -- MF]
• Liking What You See: A Documentary [4 -- NH][4 -- MF]

Category Author