‘Hell is the Absence of God’ by Ted Chiang

Although he’s known for his science more than anything, Ted Chiang delivers mind-bending ideas. ‘Hell is the Absence Of God’ interrogates suffering, religion, faith, selfishness, selflessness, irrationality, rationality, gratitude, ingratitude, devotion, virtue, morality, deity, the morality of deity, all punctuated by massive, impassive angels.

“Pilgrims took up residence all over the site, forming temporary villages with their tents and camper vans; they all made guesses as to what location would maximize their chances of seeing the angel while minimizing the risk of injury or death.”

First published in Starlight 3, 2001. Collected in Stories of Your Life and Others, Tor Books, 2002, and Picador, 2014

‘Hell Is the Absence of God’ by Ted Chiang

Of course, everyone knew that Heaven was incomparably superior, but to Neil it had always seemed too remote to consider, like wealth or fame or glamour. For people like him, Hell was where you went when you died, and he saw no point in restructuring his life in hopes of avoiding that. And since God hadn’t previously played a role in Neil’s life, he wasn’t afraid of being exiled from God. The prospect of living without interference, living in a world where windfalls and misfortunes were never by design, held no terror for him.

Another story about love, and a cosmic horror story. Chiang’s SF stories frequently involve fundamental metaphysical changes taken to their logical conclusion. In ‘Hell Is the Absence of God’, the Christian God is real and miracles happen. It turns out that unconditional love is incompatible with the idea that “everything happens for a reason”, and miracles aren’t necessarily good from a human perspective. I felt the bleakness for days.

First published in Starlight 3, 2001. Collected in Stories of Your Life and Others, 2002. Available in podcast form here

‘The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling’ by Ted Chiang

This is a perfect Ted Chiang story – speculative fiction about people and relationships, not really about technology. Chiang weaves two timelines together here. In the first, a journalist investigates a new technology called “Remem”, which provides perfect, searchable access to personal memories. In testing the technology, he learns that his memory of a pivotal event is wrong, which makes him doubt his own self-perception.

In the other, Chiang imagines an encounter between the Tiv people in the 1940s encountering the written word for the first time when the Europeans show up. The newcomers impress upon one of them how important accurate record-keeping is, but a conflict arises with the society’s oral traditions.

Taken together they call into question whether absolute truth in history is desirable, or if we as humans are wired to seek harmony over accuracy.

First published in Subterranean Magazine, 2013, collected in Exhalation: Stories, Alfred A. Knopf, 2019

‘Tower Of Babylon’ by Ted Chiang

Ted Chiang’s stories are extraordinary. I first read them when doing a deep dive into speculative short fiction to teach a class, and was blown away. Chiang doesn’t publish often, but when he does he scoops up just about every award going. He uses science fiction to grapple with some of the universal questions of the age, and while sometimes I find his stories research-heavy (I felt I needed a linguistics degree to grasp ‘Story Of Your Life’), they are always original and thought-provoking. I chose ‘Tower of Babylon’ because of how imaginatively Chiang retells this biblical myth. It’s beautiful.

In the story, the citizens of Babylon have spent centuries building a tower up to the sky. Hillalum, a miner from Egypt, has been hired to pierce through the final vault to get to Heaven on the other side. I was right there with him on his four month climb up the tower to the final point, where I was terrified that he was going to let loose another Flood to sweep away the world. Spoiler alert: the world and Hillalum survive, but what a journey.

First published in 1990 by Omni. It was collected in Chiang’s Stories of Your Life and Others, Orb Books, 2002

‘Story of Your Life’ by Ted Chiang

“Your father is about to ask me the question.”

‘Story of Your Life’ was filmed as Arrival, which is how I came to hear of Ted Chiang and his extraordinarily precise, unblinking science-fiction stories. His stories are sometimes almost clinical in their clarity, but there’s always emotion in them, and none more so in this deeply moving tale.

First published in Starlight 2, 1998. Collected in Stories of Your Life and Others, Tor Books 2002

‘Omphalos’ by Ted Chiang

Ted Chiang is an unclassifiable phenomenon. His second collection, Exhalation, is recommended by both Barack Obama and Alan Moore. How do you file someone who appeals to minds as different as those? His short stories are magnificent thought experiments, packed with precise erudition, as if Borges had written a series of Black Mirror.

The story I’ve chosen, ‘Omphalos’, asks what the pursuit of science would look like in a world where God was definitively, provably real; that the Creation could be dated, and evidence of it was everywhere. What would it mean to be a scientist in a world like that? Chiang makes this feel astonishingly vivid, and when doubt intrudes into the cosy scientific world he sets up it lands with frightening intensity. But the collection is full of moments like this. It is just beautifully done.

Collected in Exhalation, Picador, 2019

‘Story of Your Life’ by Ted Chiang

Technically a novella, ‘Story of Your Life’ may be better known as the film, Arrival,which was directed by Denis Villeneuve. Nominated for a number of Academy Awards, I’m not surprised by the success of its translation to the screen because first contact films always have a certain allure to them. We cannot help but be curious as to what aliens might look like if and when we ever get to meet them. But the novella is so much more than just a story about first contact. It is about motherhood and language and time, and the curiously static, though transformational, quality of free will.

First published in Starlight 2, 1998. Collected in Stories of Your Life and Others, Tor Books 2002

‘Exhalation’ by Ted Chiang

I wrote my university dissertation on George Saunders’ ‘Escape from Spiderhead’ and Jennifer Egan’s ‘Black Box’ and ever since have sought out sci-fi short stories. I struggle with sci-fi novels because of all the world-building and lengthy descriptions – but Chiang, my favourite sci-fi writers, cuts through all of that. His stories might be about Science with a capital S (‘Exhalation’ is about entropy, I think?…) but don’t let that put you off, they’re genuinely fun. Reading Chiang’s stories make me feel dumber and smarter at the same time, and always hit me in the feels.

First published in Lightspeed Magazine, April 2014 and collected in Exhalation, Picador 2020. Read online here