Ted Chiang

Ted Chiang has never published a novel. Since 1990 his output has run to two collections and a few uncollected pieces, and it has taken four Nebula and four Hugo awards. Stories of Your Life and Others, 2002, gathers his first eight stories, among them Tower of Babylon, Understand, Division by Zero and the title piece, in which a linguist deciphering an alien written language starts to experience time the way its speakers do. Eric Heisserer adapted that one into Arrival, the 2016 film directed by Denis Villeneuve. He was born in Port Jefferson, New York, in 1967 to a Taiwanese American family, took a computer science degree at Brown in 1989, and earns his living as a technical writer for software companies near Seattle.