The science, the fiction, the thought: An interview with Ted Chiang

A few days ago, we covered the Celsius 232 festival in Avilés, Asturias, Spain, where we conducted 22 interviews and brought you insights from its many panels. It was the 15th edition of the prestigious international gathering for fiction writers, but the first for both Gamereactor and today's interviewee, acclaimed sci-fi short story writer Ted Chiang.

As we soaked up the festival's unique atmosphere, the wealth of knowledge shared by authors and artists, and the contagious enthusiasm of readers and fans alike, we had the privilege of sitting down for a thoughtful conversation with one of the most influential science-fiction writers of the past two decades.

In the following interview, we discuss adaptations, interactive storytelling, generative AI, the writing process, and the enduring value of fiction as a way of thinking.

★ Gamereactor: Many of your stories begin with a scientific or philosophical concept, yet what readers often remember most is their emotional impact. When you start writing, do the people come first or the idea?

Ted Chiang: For me, the concept is what comes first.

I think science-fiction is a good way of dramatising philosophical questions. When philosophers discuss philosophical questions, it can be very abstract. If you're not a philosopher, it can be easy to wonder why anyone should care about this question.

What science fiction does is allow you to imagine a world where that question is no longer abstract, where it has practical significance.

You create characters who live in that world, and the answers to those questions have real significance in their lives.

If you can make your readers empathise with those characters, they'll have a more visceral appreciation for why that philosophical question is interesting.

So when I write fiction, I start with the idea, but I'm always looking for a way to give it a more emotional dimension.

★ I guess to sort of land those ideas in the reader's hearts. Story of Your Life was adapted into Arrival. Did that experience change your perception of adaptations and of stories that seem impossible to film?

When they first approached me about adapting it into a film, my first thought was, "Are you sure you're thinking of the right story?"

Obviously, the story is very internal. Most of it takes place inside the protagonist's head. I would have said it was not a good candidate for being adapted into film.

But having seen it adapted into a really good movie, I now realise that I'm not a good judge of what makes a good candidate for adaptation. That's kind of the job of screenwriters.

What screenwriters are good at is seeing something that isn't obvious; certainly not obvious to me. It's very easy to imagine a literal adaptation, and if that's your approach, then no one would have picked Story of Your Life.

Some screenwriters have a real gift for seeing something that isn't immediately apparent, seeing some potential within a story that could make it a movie. I do not have that (laughs).

★ Story of Your Life became Arrival, but many readers consider your other stories even harder to adapt. Are there any you believe should remain exclusively literary, or do you think every idea can eventually find the right cinematic language? Perhaps it's their job to find out?

Like I said, I'm not the right person to ask this question (laughs). I didn't think Story of Your Life could be adapted, so this isn't my call to make.

I will say that whenever you're working in any given medium, whether it's prose fiction, film, animation instead of live-action, or even video games, or comic books, you should be thinking about the unique strengths of that medium. What are the things that medium allows you to do that you either can't do, or are much harder to do, in other media?

I think the trick with adaptation is to take a work that's using the strengths of its original medium and then finding some way to convey that same basic story or idea using the strengths of another medium. At some level, that's the challenge of adaptation.

Because some people write novels almost with the intent of them becoming movies. They're imagining a movie in their head while they're writing. Those are probably very easy to adapt. But at some level those writers are also not making full use of prose as a medium, because they're thinking about a different medium.

When it comes to works that were written for the medium (fiction that is written to be fiction, without an eye toward adaptation) that poses a much more difficult adaptation challenge. That's why you need the adapter to have a certain skill or imagination, someone who can translate between one medium and another.

★ Speaking of media, and not adaptations but each medium's own strengths, are video games, interactive storytelling (or even adaptive storytelling), something that attracts you? Do you find it exciting to imagine stories that change according to the player's agency?

I am a gamer. I do play video games. But I don't think I would know how to write for a video game.

Something I often say, because people sometimes ask whether I'd be interested in writing for film, is that I think film is a language that I understand but cannot speak in. Film is a medium that I appreciate, but I don't know how to express myself in it.

I think something similar is true for video games. I enjoy them as a player, but I don't think I have the affinity for the medium that would make it the medium in which I want to express myself. I think it's a very interesting medium because of the interactive element, and it differs from other media in that regard.

As I was saying, ideally you'd be trying to tell a story for which the medium of video games is the ideal medium to convey that story. I think you need to have a real affinity for the medium in order to do that, and I don't know that I do.

★ Many of your works explore intelligence and consciousness. Given the recent boom in generative AI, have you changed the questions you feel are worth asking nowadays?

For much of the history of science-fiction, the idea of thinking machines or artificial intelligence has been a very common one, and people have revisited it regularly.

I think there have always been many interesting philosophical questions surrounding that topic.

But what we've seen over the last five years or so, with the rise of generative AI, is nothing like what science-fiction was talking about. The questions science-fiction was interested in aren't really applicable to the situation we have now.

Here's one way to think about it.

In the past, science-fiction might ask: Should you turn your decision-making over to a machine?

I think that's an interesting philosophical question because the idea of a machine that makes decisions better than humans (or simply differently from humans) raises legitimate arguments both for and against trusting it.

Nowadays, though, the question is more like: Should you turn your decision-making over to Amazon?

I don't think that's an interesting philosophical question. I think the answer is clearly "no, you should not". I don't think there's a good philosophical argument for turning your decision-making over to Amazon.

What I mean is that generative AI (the software that's currently being described as AI) is not a thinking machine. It's basically a tool of corporate power.

I don't think there's a good philosophical argument for simply rolling over in the face of corporate power.

Corporations benefit by trying to evoke these questions about thinking machines and suggesting that perhaps they're thinking in a way that's better than you.

But that's not what we have right now. That is not the situation we're facing.

Whenever they talk about those ideas, it's just a smokescreen because they're interested in increasing their power over individuals.

So I think it's really important to have some clarity about the situation we're actually in. The situation we're in today is not the one science-fiction was previously interested in. The situation we're in is about resisting corporate power.

★ Your books (and your answers today) rarely offer simple answers. Do you think fiction should leave readers with conclusions or with better questions?

I think fiction can do both.

At some level, the author probably has something they believe in, some position they hold, and oftentimes the fiction they write is a way of making a case for that position.

It's not a requirement that, in a successful work of fiction, readers change their mind to that position, but if they at least understand it, that may well be something the author is trying to achieve.

Some works of fiction are, in that sense, making an argument. They're not necessarily saying this is the answer, but they are making a case for something.

At the same time, an author might be raising questions by making several different arguments: arguing both for something and against it.

For many questions, there are good arguments on both sides. A work of fiction can advance both of those arguments, and by articulating them, it helps readers think about the question more clearly.

Readers may then arrive at their own answer, or at least have a better sense of why they feel the way they do.

So yes, fiction can do both. It may not offer answers, but it can make arguments.

★ Finally, during yesterday's panel you mentioned the Clarion Writers' Workshop and how much it changed you. How did it shape you as an author, and what would you say was the key ingredient it added to your creative process?

There were several ways in which Clarion shaped me.

One was that it confirmed science-fiction writing was what I ought to be doing, what I should be pursuing. Before that, I'd begun having doubts about whether it was the right path for me.

Clarion also put me in touch with the community of other science-fiction writers, which was immensely valuable to me. In a similar sense, it helped crystallise my identity by showing me what community I was really part of.

One of the things I said on the panel was that, during the workshop, you'll hear many readers explain their interpretation of a story. They'll tell you what they got out of it.

Hearing a bunch of writers explain their thought processes about how fiction works is immensely useful because it teaches you that there are so many different ways to read a story.

If you're working by yourself, you'll probably focus on a single way of reading a story: your own. But people read stories in countless different ways.

When you're in a workshop with other writers in a workshop, you're surrounded by readers who can articulate how they're interpreting a work in a way that readers who aren't writers might not be able to.

That helps you understand all the different ways readers interpret fiction, and, in turn, all the different ways fiction itself can work as a medium.

For that reason, Clarion was immensely helpful.

No new work has been officially announced, but if this conversation is any indication, Ted Chiang's curiosity about storytelling, technology, and philosophy remains as sharp as ever.