
Interview with Ted Chiang - nreece
https://medium.com/learning-for-life/stories-of-ted-chiangs-life-and-others-694cb3c80d13
======
bbctol
I'm so glad that this movie is getting Ted Chiang more exposure. He's one of
the most interesting and creative science fiction authors out there, despite
and unbelievably small output (he has literally published fifteen stories over
almost 30 years, and picked up four Hugos, four Nebulas, and a ton of other
prestigious awards.) Maybe this will finally motivate him to quit his day job
and write more, or at least get more people reading his stuff.

~~~
ivraatiems
As a writer, I have a sneaking suspicion that Ted Chiang writes a lot more
than he publishes. You just don't get as good as he is without lots and lots
of practice. I have a feeling there are a lot of projects he scraps that we
never get to see, and many of them are probably pretty great.

Personally, I find him and his quality-over-quantity approach inspiring.

~~~
ctchocula
> Chiang turned down a Hugo nomination for his short story "Liking What You
> See: A Documentary" in 2003, on the grounds that the story was rushed due to
> editorial pressure and did not turn out as he had really wanted.

This seems to fit your theory.

------
daemonk
A great short story Ted Chiang wrote that have some themes similar to Arrival
(free will) is the one he wrote for Nature Futures:

[http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v436/n7047/full/436150a...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v436/n7047/full/436150a.html)

~~~
r00fus
This is an awesomely elegant little short story.

------
phmagic
"I can’t recommend technical writing as a day job for fiction writers, because
it’s going to be hard to write all day and then come home and write fiction.
Nowadays I work as a freelance writer, so I usually do contract technical
writing part of the year and then I take time off and do fiction writing the
rest of the year. It’s too difficult for me to do technical writing at the
same time as fiction writing — they draw on the same parts of my brain. " \-
Ted Chiang

Can this be a blocking factor for coding side projects as well? What if
companies offered a role where 11 months of the year, you do the company's
work, and one whole month you get to make whatever you want? Or a project-
based role that covers a year's expenses.

~~~
mrec
Oh, definitely. I've spent vastly less time on coding side projects since
coding became a full-time job. Not that I don't still enjoy coding; I do. It's
just that by the time I get home in the evening I'm pretty much coded out.
Which kind of sucks, because I haven't found anything anywhere near as
absorbing to replace it as a hobby.

See also: [http://www.theonion.com/blogpost/find-the-thing-youre-
most-p...](http://www.theonion.com/blogpost/find-the-thing-youre-most-
passionate-about-then-do-31742)

------
yolesaber
Ted Chiang is incredible. My personal favorite by him is "The Great Silence".
Touches on communication, the Fermi paradox and ecology from the point of view
of a parrot named Alex - [http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/authors/ted-
chiang/](http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/authors/ted-chiang/)

~~~
mrec
Ooh, thanks. I thought I'd read everything he's put out, but I missed that
one.

------
mikeash
Nice, I had no idea Arrival was adapted from a Ted Chiang story. Maybe I'll
have to check it out.

For those who aren't familiar with his work, I highly recommend _Stories of
Your Life and Others_. It's perhaps the most amazing collection of SF short
stories I've read. It's hard to describe it, but there's _something_ about his
work that makes it feel both simultaneously more real and more mind-bending
than other SF fare. I think it's the combination of his completely outlandish
premises (which I can't figure out how to describe without spoiling things)
and completely matter-of-fact, mundane way he writes about them.

~~~
msoucy
To elaborate, Arrival is based off of the story "Story of Your Life" from that
collection.

------
philh
The interviewer here rubbed me the wrong way. I felt like he had his own ideas
about the things Chiang explores, and used much of the interview as a way to
try to get Chiang to talk about those ideas, rather than talking about
Chiang's own exploration of them.

Did anyone else get this sense?

~~~
superbatfish
I felt the same way, but ultimately decided it's a good attribute for an
interviewer to have, even though it didn't work out this time.

A good interviewer should understand his interviewee's work, have ideas about
it, and then use those ideas to probe for deeper insights than surface details
like "who influences you as a writer?". But deep probes are a little risky --
you might not find anything in that direction.

In this case, more than one of the interviewer's probes was a little off-base,
but -- to his credit -- he didn't pursue those questions too far after
Chiang's responses came back somewhat tempered. Kudos for trying, and kudos
for letting it go.

Finally, kudos to Chiang himself for being clear about how he views his work.
When faced with an enthusiastic -- but incorrect -- interpretation of one's
writing, some authors would just "go with the flow", hesitant to dampen their
readers' enthusiasm (misguided as it might be). But Chiang gently shot down a
few of the interviewer's ideas, ultimately strengthening the original meaning
of his own work.

------
sandworm101
The greater the marketing hype before a film arrives in my town, the greater
the inevitable disappointment. Perhaps Arrival is great, but imho the truly
great ones don't invest in such a hype machine.

The "100% at rotten tomatoes" line in the commercials give me pause. I
checked. It's at 95, not 100. I can see why. Scores do change, but it's just
more evidence of heavy marketing. The best scifi, the really good stuff,
doesn't hit a home run with reviewers immediately. I'm suspicious and so will
probably go see this movie myself first rather than suggest a group of us go.

~~~
chroma
> The best scifi, the really good stuff, doesn't hit a home run with reviewers
> immediately.

Wait, so your expectations for the movie would be higher if the Rotten
Tomatoes score was _lower_?

~~~
BatFastard
I pay more attention to the user rating than the critics rating, critics are
either paid off, or what they like in a movie is different than most movie
goers.

~~~
Jtsummers
Hard to avoid spoilers this way, but the best way to consider critic reviews
is to focus on the negative ones.

If a movie gets 95% on Rotten Tomatoes, and the negative reviews are all
rather inane, you can be reasonably confident that it's actually a good movie.
But when they start making valid points, you can be confident it's merely
overhyped.

------
BatFastard
I truly enjoyed the movie Arrival! Highly recommended.

The least amount of "its a movie" was required of any movie I have seen in
years. I did not see where it was going, and I was thrilled when it got there.

------
cousin_it
Ted Chiang is cool. But I think "Story of your life" isn't his best work. If
you're going to read one story by Chiang, a good one is "Liking what you see":
[http://www.ibooksonline.com/88/Text/liking.html](http://www.ibooksonline.com/88/Text/liking.html)

~~~
superbatfish
That's interesting, because Chiang himself doesn't view "Liking What You See"
to be his best work. In fact, he turned down a Hugo nomination for it, "on the
grounds that the story was rushed due to editorial pressure and did not turn
out as he had really wanted".[1]

Personally, I think Story of Your Life is a master work. I found the strange
writing structure annoying at first, and then right at the end of the story
you get an "ah-ha" moment that changes everything. What I thought was awkward
writing turned out to be a masterful illustration about a theory of
consciousness. I was floored by Chiang's ambition to even write such a story.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Chiang](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Chiang)

~~~
macintux
I was a bit depressed that I didn't get to experience that revelation while
reading the story, but getting to experience it while watching the movie is
fair recompense.

------
schoen
(2014); the interview was conducted in 2010 and published here in 2014.

Earlier HN thread with a lot of Arrival discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12940364](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12940364)

------
jpm_sd
I have high hopes for this movie, but I don't enjoy Ted Chiang's writing. It
is too clever, the dialog is terrible, and there is an underlying smugness -
as if the writer is laughing about his poor, dumb characters and their
ignorance.

~~~
gamegoblin
Can you give an example of the too-clever writing and underlying smugness?

I haven't felt that way, but I have only read "Story of your life" and "The
Lifecycle of Software Objects", so my sample size is pretty small.

------
jotjotzzz8
I didn't know him until now. I will definitely check out his short stories.

I also love Ken Lu, his book "The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories" is one of
the best collection of short stories I have read.

~~~
rpearl
Ken Liu actually wrote a response to one of Ted Chiang's stories.

[http://kenliu.name/stories/single-bit-
error/](http://kenliu.name/stories/single-bit-error/) is a
response/exploration of the same world and ideas as Chiang's "Hell is the
Absence of God", in Stories of Your Life and Others.

I recommend reading the Chiang story first.

~~~
jotjotzzz8
Wow, thank you.

------
samfisher83
For a guy with as many awards as him I am surprised he needs a second job. He
doesn't write a lot, but given his quality I am surprised someone hasn't paid
him to just write.

~~~
runevault
Short fiction does not pay good money, and that I know of he doesn't publish
novels which is where it is POSSIBLE to make a decent to great wage (but
quality is no guarantee of making good money).

------
elorant
I’ve just finished reading “The story of your life” the other day and I can’t
say I’m impressed. Based on the comments I’ve read about the movie I expected
it to be mind boggling. The author claims that knowing the future affects free
will but he doesn’t bother explaining how could anyone know the future or why
would there be only one – quantum mechanics for example states that there
could be countless futures/universes. For my standards the story is too
swallow. I’m used to reading hard sci-fi where usually authors go into
excessive detail to describe their worlds. Chiang doesn’t do that. He just
presents a theory and lets it linger in your mind. It reads more like
philosophy rather than sci-fi.

~~~
gwern
I don't think it's nearly as good as "Understand" or "Exhalation" or "Hell is
the Absence of God" (all discussed in OP). Like "Life Cycle of Software
Objects", it seems seriously overrated. But "Story of Your Life" is definitely
one of the more confusing stories and I had to read it at least twice before I
thought I understood what sort of Chiang-style message Chiang was going for.

What I take him as suggesting is not that the aliens really are tapping into
quantum woo to see the future (this is what inferior SF authors might do and
maybe have in the movie which I haven't seen), any more than light rays see
into the future in order to take the shortest path, but doing something more
like Watts's _Blindsight_ in trying to explore different kinds of minds: that
given the reversibility of the laws of physics and the arrow of time, there is
no logical or privileged reason to have a conscious experience of the universe
as time unfolding sequentially and computationally according to a program
computing 1 planck-second at a time, rather than as an Einsteinian 4D block
universe in which the block universe is the optimal path between boundary
conditions and everything unfolds as it must and already has. This is similar
to points Drescher makes in _Good and Real_: a brain could try to understand
the universe by taking the present and extrapolating forward but it also takes
the present and extrapolate backward. You can 'remember' the future as easily
as the past.

The aliens could be doing this, and it is as valid a way of cognition as
anything else. And then the drama comes from the protagonist slowly adopting
this way of thinking herself to come to terms with her grief over her
daughter's death by adopting a timeless Lagrangian way of thinking and
explaining it to the reader who is still trapped in the algorithmic
perspective.

~~~
superbatfish
Yes yes yes. We read "Story of Your Life" in my Sci-fi reading club, and
several people came away with the misunderstanding that the aliens could see
the future or something like that. But your interpretation is correct (IMHO).
Chiang was making a point about the subjective nature of consciousness, or at
least one aspect of it.

