Ted Chiang

Ted Chiang (born 1967) is an American speculative fiction writer. He has won a string of prestigious speculative fiction awards for his works, including multiple Hugo and Nebula awards.

Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others (anthology), 2002, Tor, ISBN 0-765-30418-X

• Centuries of their labor would not reveal to them any more of Creation than they already knew. Yet through their endeavor, men would glimpse the unimaginable artistry of Yahweh's work, in seeing how ingeniously the world had been constructed. By this construction, Yahweh's work was indicated, and Yahweh's work was concealed.
  • Tower of Babylon; first appeared in Omni, 1990.

• The universe was a language with a perfectly ambiguous grammar. Every physical event was an utterance that could be parsed in two entirely different ways, one causal and the other teleological.
  • Story of Your Life; first appeared in Starlight 2, 1998.

• What made it possible for me to exercise freedom of choice also made it impossible to know the future. Conversely, now that I know the future, I would never act contrary to that future. [...] Those who've read the Book of Ages never admit to it.
  • Story of Your Life; first appeared in Starlight 2, 1998.

• God is not just, God is not kind, God is not merciful, and understanding that is essential to true devotion.
  • Hell Is the Absence of God; first appeared in Starlight 3, 2001.

• Just as seeing Heaven's light gave him an awareness of God's presence in all things in the mortal plane, so it has made him aware of God's absence in all things in Hell.
  • Hell Is the Absence of God; first appeared in Starlight 3, 2001.

• That wouldn’t be maturity; it would be letting an expert system make your decisions for you. Maturity means seeing the differences, but realizing they don’t matter. There’s no technological shortcut.
  • Liking What You See: A Documentary

• We can’t avoid these images and still live in the modern world. And that means we can’t kick this habit, because beauty is a drug that you can’t abstain from unless you literally keep your eyes closed all the time.
  • Liking What You See: A Documentary

• Technology is being used to manipulate us through our emotional reactions, so it’s only fair that we use it to protect ourselves too.
  • Liking What You See: A Documentary

• Anyone who says the calli movement is good for women is spreading the propaganda of all oppressors: the claim that subjugation is actually protection. Calli supporters want to demonize those women who possess beauty. Beauty can provide just as much pleasure for those who have it as for those who perceive it, but the calli movement makes women feel guilty about taking pleasure in their appearance. It’s yet another patriarchal strategy for suppressing female sexuality, and once again, too many women have bought into it.
  Of course beauty has been used as a tool of oppression, but eliminating beauty is not the answer; you can’t liberate people by narrowing the scope of their experiences. That’s positively Orwellian. What’s needed is a woman-centered concept of beauty, one that lets all women feel good about themselves instead of making most of them feel bad.
  • Liking What You See: A Documentary

• We’ve reached a point where we can begin to adjust our minds. The question is, when is it appropriate for us to do so? We shouldn’t automatically accept that natural is better, nor should we automatically presume that we can improve on nature. It’s up to us to decide which qualities we value, and what’s the best way to achieve those.
  • Liking What You See: A Documentary

Page numbers from the trade paperback edition, published by Vintage, ISBN 978-1-101-97208-3, 12th printing

See Ted Chiang's Internet Science Fiction Database page or the Wikipedia page for original publication details

• Four things do not come back: the spoken word, the sped arrow, the past life, and the neglected opportunity.
  • The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate (p. 29)

• Though I am long dead as you read this, explorer, I offer to you a valediction. Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so. I feel I have the right to tell you this because, as I am inscribing these words, I am doing the same.
  • Exhalation (p. 57)

• Every form of behavior is compatible with determinism.
  • What’s Expected of Us (p. 60)

• My message to you is this: pretend that you have free will. It’s essential that you behave as if your decisions matter, even though you know they don’t. The reality isn’t important: what’s important is your belief, and believing the lie is the only way to avoid a waking coma. Civilization now depends on self-deception. Perhaps it always has.
  • What’s Expected of Us (p. 60)

• The rewards will be purely intellectual, and over the long term, will that be enough?
  • The Lifecycle of Software Objects (p. 87)

• For him, the keyboard and screen are a miserable substitute for being there, as unsatisfying as a jungle video game would be to a chimpanzee taken from the Congo.
  • The Lifecycle of Software Objects (p. 128)

• Exponential regularly releases new versions, advertising each one as being a step closer to the consumer’s dream of AI: a butler that is utterly loyal and attentive from the moment it’s switched on. To Ana this upgrade sequence seems like a walk to the horizon, providing the illusion of progress while never actually getting any closer to the goal.
  • The Lifecycle of Software Objects (p. 158)

• Every quality that made a person more valuable than a database was a product of experience.
  • The Lifecycle of Software Objects (p. 163)

• If she’s learned anything raising Jax, it’s that there are no shortcuts; if you want to create the common sense that comes from twenty years of being in the world, you need to devote twenty years to the task. You can’t assemble an equivalent collection of heuristics in less time; experience is algorithmically incompressible.
  • The Lifecycle of Software Objects (p. 163)

• When the public interest is involved, finding out what actually happened is important; justice is an essential part of the social contract, and you can’t have justice until you know the truth.
  • The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling (pp. 190-191)

• Anyone who has wasted hours surfing the Internet knows that technology can encourage bad habits.
  • The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling (p. 194)

• “Forgive and forget” goes the expression, and for our idealized magnanimous selves, that was all you needed. But for our actual selves the relationship between those two actions isn’t so straightforward. In most cases we have to forget a little bit before we can forgive; when we no longer experienced the pain as fresh, the insult is easier to forgive, which in turn makes it less memorable, and so on. It’s this psychological feedback loop that makes initially infuriating offenses seem pardonable in the mirror of hindsight.
  • The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling (p. 198)

• Before a culture adopts the use of writing, when its knowledge is transmitted exclusively through oral means, it can very easily revise its history. It’s not intentional, but it is inevitable; throughout the world, bards and griots have adapted their material to their audiences and thus gradually adjusted the past to suit the needs of the present. The idea that accounts of the past shouldn’t change is a product of literate cultures’ reverence for the written word. Anthropologists will tell you that oral cultures understand the past differently; for them, their histories don’t need to be accurate so much as they need to validate the community’s understanding of itself. So it wouldn’t be correct to say that their histories are unreliable; their histories do what they need to do.
  • The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling (pp. 226-227)

• One proposed solution to the Fermi Paradox is that intelligent species actively try to conceal their presence, to avoid being targeted by hostile invaders.
  Speaking as a member of a species that has been driven nearly to extinction by humans, I can attest that this is a wise strategy.
  • The Great Silence (p. 231)

• Humans have lived alongside parrots for thousands of years, and only recently have they considered the possibility that we might be intelligent.
  I suppose I can’t blame them. We parrots used to think humans weren’t very bright. It’s hard to make sense of behavior that’s so different from your own.
  • The Great Silence (pp. 233-234)

• Let me always be inquisitive, but never be suspicious.
  • Omphalos (p. 249)

• But the church as an institution has always been able to derive strength from the evidence when it’s useful and ignore it when it’s not.
  • Omphalos (p. 264)

• Even if humanity is not the reason for which the universe was made, I still wish to understand the way it operates. We human beings may not be the answer to the question why, but I will keep looking for the answer to how.
  • Omphalos (p. 269)

• He was in no position to judge these people. So what if they felt sorry for themselves? Better to wallow in self-pity over nothing than to have actually screwed up your life.
  • Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom (p. 297)

• “But I still feel like it’s my fault.”
  Dana nodded. “We like the idea that there’s always someone responsible for any given event, because that helps us make sense of the world. We like that so much that sometimes we blame ourselves, just so that there’s someone to blame. But not everything is under our control, or even anyone’s control.”
  • Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom (p. 299)

• Sex isn’t what makes a relationship real; the willingness to expend effort maintaining it is. Some lovers break up with each other the first time they have a big argument; some parents do as little for their children as they can get away with; some pet owners ignore their pets whenever they become inconvenient. In all of those cases the people are unwilling to make an effort. Having a real relationship, whether with a lover or a child or a pet, requires that you be willing to balance the other party’s wants and needs with your own.
  • Story Notes to The Lifecycle of Software Objects (p. 344)

• What we now call young-earth creationism used to be common sense; up until the 1600s, it was widely assumed that the world was of recent origin. But as naturalists began looking at their environment more closely, they found clues that called this assumption into question, and over the last four hundred years, those clues have multiplied and interlocked to form the most definitive rebuttal imaginable. Story Notes to Omphalos (p. 348)

• Much of modern astronomy is promised on the Copernican principle, the idea that we are not at the center of the universe and are not observing it from a privileged position; this is pretty much the opposite of young-earth creationism.
  • Story Notes to Omphalos (p. 348)

• (about Exhalation) If there’s an overarching theme, it’s that we should take time to appreciate the miracle of existence and cherish the free will we have to pursue our destinies — while we still can.
  • James Lovegrove^[1][2]