To write this retelling of the Book of Job, in which one might predict an angel’s movements using a kind of meteorology, Chiang immersed himself in the literature of angels and the problem of innocent suffering he read C. S. (Other, luckier bystanders were cured of cancer or inspired by God’s love.) Attending a support group for people who have lost loved ones in similar circumstances, he finds that, although they are all angry at God, some still yearn to love him so that they can join their dead spouses and children in Heaven. Neil, the protagonist, had a wife who was killed during an angelic visitation-a curtain of flame surrounding the angel Nathanael shattered a café window, showering her with glass. “Hell Is the Absence of God” is set in a version of the present in which Old Testament religion is tangible, rather than imaginary: Hell is visible through cracks in the ground, angels appear amid lightning storms, and the souls of the good are plainly visible as they ascend to Heaven. He writes the science fiction that would have existed in an earlier era, had science existed then.Ĭhiang’s stories conjure a celestial feeling of atemporality.
The stonecutters are eager to find out what lies on the other side of the sky, but they are also afraid, and, in a prayer service, Chiang writes, “they gave thanks that they were permitted to see so much, and begged forgiveness for their desire to see more.” Chiang goes to great lengths to show how ancient stonecutting techniques might actually be used to breach the floor of Heaven. 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.