‘I’ve experienced snobbery for the majority of my career’

Ted Chiang, one of the most exciting writers in science fiction, tells Eleanor Halls about his fight to escape ‘the genre ghetto’

In March, Ted Chiang, whose 1998 science fiction novella “Story of Your Life” about alien communication became the basis of the Oscarnominated film Arrival, was sitting at his computer at home in Seattle, when he came across a news story that surprised him.

The story was about how Jibo, a manufacturer of artificially intelligent “companion” robots for the home, was now shutting down its servers, causing distress to Jibo owners who had come to think of their little robots as part of the family. Chiang had read this story before. In fact, he had written it. “The Lifecycle of Software Objects” – the novella-length centrepiece of a new short story collection, Exhalation, his first since his 2002 debut, Stories of Your Life and Others – details the efforts of a fictional company, Blue Gamma, to maintain socially conscious virtual “digients”, which owners “raise” for up to 20 years. When sales stall, Blue Gamma plans to shut down their servers, leaving digient owners distraught.

The Jibo story was a sharp example of life imitating art, and a reminder of why Chiang, who until very recently was a technical writer for Microsoft, is revered in the sci-fi community as one of the most exciting thinkers of his generation. More impressive still, the 51-year-old, who has won 27 major science fiction awards, wrote the story in 2010, a whole year before Apple launched Siri.

“It was an unexpected similarity,” the modest Chiang tells me over the phone, his precise sentences punctuated by long periods of considered silence. “I did not imagine these [technological] advancements would happen.” He explains that his story was a “thought experiment” taken to its logical conclusion, one that asks: “What happens when you develop an emotional connection to a product and the product is taken away?” and: “What is the business case for giving tech consciousness?” (There isn’t one, he says, although he believes it will happen regardless.)

The eight other thought experiments in Exhalation, all written during the past 17 years, are equally provocative future scenarios that tread high above the cliched dystopias of so much modern sci-fi. “Dacey’s Patent Automatic Nanny”, for instance, follows the crazed ambition of a mathematician who, frustrated with conventional childcare, invents a machine capable of raising his son. The title story, “Exhalation”, imagines humans breathing from metal lungs which they must constantly refill, until the “master lung” eventually runs out of air. “What’s Expected of Us” explores a world without free will, while “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” is set in the past and draws on Kip

Thorne’s theory of wormholes to reimagine time travel.

Although dark in premise, these parables – threaded through with references to ancient mythology and folklore – are filled with hope and humanism: a balm for anxious souls. “I hope that you were motivated by a desire for knowledge, a yearning to see what can arise from a universe’s exhalation… Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so,’’ reads a typical passage towards the end of “Exhalation”, striking a celebratory note that recalls Ray Bradbury. “I don’t know how anyone can look at the current political landscape and not be cynical about people’s motives,” says Chiang. “In my fiction, I try to resist pessimism and cynicism because I don’t want to spend more time in that frame of mind than I already do.”

The son of an engineering professor and a librarian who fled the Chinese Communist Revolution for Long Island, Chiang began writing about intergalactic war and space adventure at the age of 15. He’d grown up an atheist and an avid reader of physics and astronomy, as well as science fiction by his heroes Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke. But when he tried to emulate them, he struggled to finish his stories. His solution was to begin each new tale by