Ted Chiang.
Ted F. Chiang.
Damn, he can drive me nuts.
I just picked up the collection Stories Of Your Life (and others)
and damn, he’s good. This may be the only book I’ve ever seen on Amazon
with a five star average rating, across the board. Yes, he’s that
good.
Ted has the single best batting average in science fiction. He’s had
eight stories published in the last twelve years– this collection
reprints his complete professional fiction output. In that time, he won
the Campbell New Writer Award in 1992, a Nebula Award and a Hugo
nomination for his first published short “Tower of Babylon”, another
Nebula and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award and a Hugo nomination
for “Story of Your Life”, a Sidewise Award and another Hugo nomination
for “Seventy-Two Letters”, and this year’s Locus and Hugo Award for
“Hell Is the Absence of God”. Everything the man’s published has gotten
nominated for something.
His first six stories picked up over twenty award nominations and six
wins.
You might think I’d want to pay him the ultimate writer’s compliment:
“I hate him and I want him dead.” Except that isn’t true. I’d say I
wish there was a way to get him to write slower so the rest of us would
have a chance except A: I don’t want to deprive myself of any of his
stories, and B: I don’t think it’s possible for his output to be any
slower than it is.
Why is this bugging me? Because I know the guy, have for years. I went
to Earl L. Vandermuelen High School in beautiful Port Jefferson, New
York with him. We worked together on the school paper, the Purple Parrot,
where we were part of a glorious revolution. The paper had run out of
its budgeted money by December of that year, and had become a paper of
pure apathy– the last issue was two pages on a monthly schedule. Ted
and I worked under the bundle of energy known as Eddie Chang (no
relation) and by the end of the year we had raised money, resurrected
the paper, gotten it on a bi-weekly schedule (the last issue was 14
pages, and if that sound puny, please remember that this was a year
before Pagemaker) and the former newspaper advisor stepped down from
his post amid allegations of kickbacks from the printer.
Ted wrote at the time, “Things always work out oddly… how does the
Parrot work? I really don’t know; it always looks on the brink of
death, and it always survives anyway. The Parrot’s a very strange
bird.” But it was fun stuff.
The next year, he was layout editor of the paper and I was assistant
layout and graphics editor. We spent a certain amount of time at
loggerheads– no specific death threats– but we still managed to put
out some damn fine work. And at the end of the year, we still liked
each other. He’s the last signer in my yearbook for the year that he
graduated.
He wrote a regular science fiction review column for the paper the
first year. The column was met with a certain amount of incredulity– a
review column of science fiction books? In a high school newspaper? Who
reads this thing, and why is it taking up valuable space which could be
used to run pictures of cheerleaders? Ted knew it was unexpected and
made self-depreciating comments about the column in it all the time.
Still, Ted persevered, with reviews of Spider Robinson’s Stardance, the Niven/Pournelle Inferno, Asimov’s Winds of Change, and even a review of I-Con III,
where he proceeded to state that Harlan Ellison was only 5’2, thereby
proving that Harlan does not in fact read everything ever published
about him. And since this is appearing on the Internet, it’s unlikely
he’ll read this either.
Ted has a sense of humor so black it could have been used for set
changes. I was reasonably sure that his Indian spirit animal was
Eeyore. The next year, the sf review column was replaced by a more
general criticism column, which read like H.L. Mencken’s secret diary.
Echoes of a lot of Ted’s stories can be found in his high school years.
“Tower of Babylon” maps very closely to a story he wrote for the high
school literary magazine. “The Story of Your Life” discusses light
refraction through glass, and the name of that column he wrote in high
school was “The Critical Angle”.
I have probably had more face time with him than any of his editors. I
also haven’t seen him in fifteen years– had I known he was going to be
at Worldcon this year, I would have gone to San Jose to say hi.
But I figured he’d wouldn’t show up. Why? Because he’s been incredibly
quiet and isolated. He’s almost become the science fiction equivalent
of J.D. Salinger. Even though he attended the Hugo Awards ceremony this
year, he didn’t pick up his own award. This article may be the most
biographical information anybody has ever written about him, and that’s
info that a decade and a half old. The phrase I heard used to describe
him today was “shockingly humble”. But I don’t think it’s just that.
I think that Ted is still not ready to believe that he’s standing in
the ranks of people like Asimov and Clarke, Heinlein and Spider, Niven
and Pournelle. And he lives in Washington, away from most SF pro
enclaves, so he doesn’t get as much support from other pros as he
should.
That’s what’s bugging me. After 18 years, this humility routine and
belief that “nobody reads my stuff” is getting really tiresome.
Take a bow, fella. You deserve it. And to steal your stealing of
Shakespeare, “If we should meet again, why, we shall smile.”
By the way, Paul and Ed say hi, and please say hello to Michelle from
me when you get a chance. And hey– wanna write some media tie-in
stuff? It’s not so bad once you get used to it.