Search Worlds Without End

Hugo and Nebula Award-nominated Novella

Quantum possibilities have been made reality in a device known as the "prism", the Plaga interworld signaling mechanism. Once activated, it connects to a parallel universe which gradually starts to diverge from that point on -- and people can talk to their "paraselves" in that other universe to see how things have gone differently for them in another life.

The story is included in the collection Exhalation: Stories (2019). A version of this story was published in The New York Times Magazine Fiction Supplement on April 28, 2019, under the title Better Versions of You.

Read this story for free at Medium.com.

...But in the normal course of life, our need for air is far from our thoughts, and indeed many would say that satisfying that need is the least important part of going to the filling stations. For the filling stations are the primary venue for social conversation, the places from which we draw emotional sustenance as well as physical. We all keep spare sets of full lungs in our homes, but when one is alone, the act of opening one's chest and replacing one's lungs can seem little better than a chore. In the company of others, however, it becomes a communal activity, a shared pleasure....

The story is included in the collection Exhalation: Stories (2019).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This much-anticipated second collection of stories is signature Ted Chiang, full of revelatory ideas and deeply sympathetic characters. In "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate," a portal through time forces a fabric seller in ancient Baghdad to grapple with past mistakes and the temptation of second chances. In the epistolary "Exhalation," an alien scientist makes a shocking discovery with ramifications not just for his own people, but for all of reality. And in "The Lifecycle of Software Objects," a woman cares for an artificial intelligence over twenty years, elevating a faddish digital pet into what might be a true living being. Also included are two brand-new stories: "Omphalos" and "Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom."

In this fantastical and elegant collection, Ted Chiang wrestles with the oldest questions on earth--What is the nature of the universe? What does it mean to be human?--and ones that no one else has even imagined. And, each in its own way, the stories prove that complex and thoughtful science fiction can rise to new heights of beauty, meaning, and compassion.

Table of Contents:

• "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" (2007) novelette
• "Exhalation" (2008) short story
• "What's Expected of Us" (2005) short story
• "The Lifecycle of Software Objects" (2010) novella
• "Dacey's Patent Automatic Nanny" (2011) short story
• "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling" (2013) novelette
• "The Great Silence" (2015) short story by Allora and Calzadilla and Ted Chiang
• "Omphalos" novelette
• "Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom" novella

Hugo, Nebula and Locus Award winning and Sturgeon Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in the anthology Starlight 3 (2001), edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden. The story can also be found in the anthologies Fantasy: The Best of 2001 (2002) edited by Robert Silverberg and Karen Haber, Year's Best Fantasy 2 (2002), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, The Locus Awards: Thirty Years of the Best in Science Fiction and Fantasy (2004), edited by Charles N. Brown and Jonathan Strahan and Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology (2006), edited by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel. It is included in the collection Stories of Your Life and Others (2002).

This story can be found in Stories of Your Life and Others.

Hugo Award-nominated Novelette

A religious archaeologist in an alternate universe where young-earth creationism has been confirmed by scientific evidence experiences a crisis-of-faith when confronted by the realization that human lives have no preordained purpose.

The story is included in the collection Exhalation: Stories (2019).

Sidewise Award winning and Hugo, Locus, Sturgeon and World Fantasy Award nominated novella. It originally appeared in the anthology Vanishing Acts (2000), edited by Ellen Datlow. It can also be found in the anthologies Year's Best SF 6 (2001), edited by David G. Hartwell and Steampunk (2008), edited by Jeff and Ann VanderMeer. It is included in the collection Stories of Your Life and Others (2002)

Stories of Your Life and Others presents characters who must confront sudden change--the inevitable rise of automatons or the appearance of aliens--while striving to maintain some sense of normalcy. In the amazing and much-lauded title story, a grieving mother copes with divorce and the death of her daughter by drawing on her knowledge of alien languages and non-linear memory recollection. A clever pastiche of news reports and interviews chronicles a college's initiative to "turn off" the human ability to recognize beauty in "Liking What You See: A Documentary." With sharp intelligence and humor, Chiang examines what it means to be alive in a world marked by uncertainty and constant change, and also by beauty and wonder.

The collection received the Locus Award and the stories have received the Hugo, Seiun, Nebula, and Sturgeon Awards.

Table of Contents:

• "Tower of Babylon" (originally published in Omni) (Nebula Award winner)
• "Division by Zero" (originally published in Full Spectrum 3)
• "Understand" (originally published in Asimov's)
• "Story of Your Life" (originally published in Starlight 2) (Nebula Award and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award winner)
• "The Evolution of Human Science" (a.k.a. "Catching Crumbs from the Table") (originally published in Nature)
• "Seventy-Two Letters" (originally published in Vanishing Acts) (Sidewise Award winner)
• "Hell Is the Absence of God" (originally published in Starlight 3) (Hugo Award, Locus Award and Nebula Award winner)
• "Liking What You See: A Documentary"

This novella originally appeared in the anthology Starlight 2, (1998), edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, December 2012. It can also be found in the anthologies:

• The Year's Best Science Fiction: Sixteenth Annual Collection (1999), edited by Gardner Dozois
• Year's Best SF 4 (1999), edited by David G. Hartwell
• Nebula Awards Showcase 2001, edited by Robert Silverberg
• Best of the Best: 20 Years of the Year's Best Science Fiction (2005), edited by Gardner Dozois
• The Big Book of Science Fiction (2016), edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer

The story is included in the collection Stories of Your Life and Others.

Adapted into the movie The Arrival in 2016.

"Ted Chiang’s very short story, 'The Great Silence' adds another set of questions to the Fermi Paradox speculations. Why, he asks, are we so interested in finding intelligence in the stars and so deaf to the many species who manifest it here on earth? And also: why have we demanded that, as proof of intelligence, non-human animals communicate to us in human language, and then dismissed those creatures that actually do so?" - Karen Joy Fowler

Hugo-winning and Nebula-nominated Novella

What's the best way to create artificial intelligence? In 1950, Alan Turing wrote, 'Many people think that a very abstract activity, like the playing of chess, would be best. It can also be maintained that it is best to provide the machine with the best sense organs that money can buy, and then teach it to understand and speak English. This process could follow the normal teaching of a child. Things would be pointed out and named, etc. Again I do not know what the right answer is, but I think both approaches should be tried.'

The first approach has been tried many times in both science fiction and reality. In this new novella, at over 30,000 words, his longest work to date, Ted Chiang offers a detailed imagining of how the second approach might work within the contemporary landscape of startup companies, massively-multiplayer online gaming, and open-source software. It's a story of two people and the artificial intelligences they helped create, following them for more than a decade as they deal with the upgrades and obsolescence that are inevitable in the world of software. At the same time, it's an examination of the difference between processing power and intelligence, and of what it means to have a real relationship with an artificial entity.

Read this story online for free at Subterranean Press.

Hugo- and Nebula-winning Novelette

The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate is a fantasy novelette by Ted Chiang originally published in 2007 by Subterranean Press and reprinted in the September 2007 issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction. It won the 2008 Hugo Award for Best Novelette and the 2008 Nebula Award for Best Novelette.

This curious time-travel novella from Hugo-winner Chiang is a gracefully told lesson about accepting fate—or, as better suits this medieval Arabian setting, the will of Allah. A Baghdad merchant discovers an alchemical device that can send a traveler back in time 20 years. Despite the alchemist's warning that "what is made cannot be unmade," and three illustrative tales about others' attempts to alter the past, the merchant is determined to return to an earlier time to save his long-dead wife. Half lyrical Arabian Nights legend and half old school cautionary SF tale, this skillfully written story and its theme of insurmountable fate may comfort as many readers as it makes uncomfortable.

Hugo Award nominated novelette. Originally published in Subterranean Press Magazine, Fall 2013. It has been antologized in The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year: Volume Eight (2014), edited by Jonathan Strahan, and The Best of Subterranean (2017), edited by William Schafer.

Read the full story for free at Subterranean.

Nebula Award winning and Hugo Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in Omni, November 1990. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighth Annual Collection (1991), edited by Gardner Dozois, Nebula Awards 26 (1992), edited by James Morrow and The Fantasy Hall of Fame (1998), edited by Robert Silverberg. It is included in the collection Stories of Your Life and Others (2002).

Hugo Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, August 1991. The story can also be found in the anthologies Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future (2002), edited by Gardner Dozois and The Hard SF Renaissance (2002), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. It is included in the collection Stories of Your Life and Others (2002).

This short story originally appeared in Nature, July 7, 2005. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 11 (2006), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. The story is included in the collection Exhalation: Stories (2019).

Read the full story for free at Nature.