Glenn Hauman: A View From Above

Ted Chiang. Ted F. Chiang. Damn, he can drive me nuts.

I just picked up the collection Stories Of Your Life (and others) and damn, he's good. This may be the only book I've ever seen on Amazon with a five star average rating, across the board. Yes, he's that good. Ted has the single best batting average in science fiction. He's had eight stories published in the last twelve years-- this collection reprints his complete professional fiction output. In that time, he won the Campbell New Writer Award in 1992, a Nebula Award and a Hugo nomination for his first published short "Tower of Babylon", another Nebula and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award and a Hugo nomination for "Story of Your Life", a Sidewise Award and another Hugo nomination for "Seventy-Two Letters", and this year's Locus and Hugo Award for "Hell Is the Absence of God". Everything the man's published has gotten nominated for something. His first six stories picked up over twenty award nominations and six wins. You might think I'd want to pay him the ultimate writer's compliment: "I hate him and I want him dead." Except that isn't true. I'd say I wish there was a way to get him to write slower so the rest of us would have a chance except A: I don't want to deprive myself of any of his stories, and B: I don't think it's possible for his output to be any slower than it is. Why is this bugging me? Because I know the guy, have for years. I went to Earl L. Vandermuelen High School in beautiful Port Jefferson, New York with him. We worked together on the school paper, the Purple Parrot, where we were part of a glorious revolution. The paper had run out of its budgeted money by December of that year, and had become a paper of pure apathy-- the last issue was two pages on a monthly schedule. Ted and I worked under the bundle of energy known as Eddie Chang (no relation) and by the end of the year we had raised money, resurrected the paper, gotten it on a bi-weekly schedule (the last issue was 14 pages, and if that sound puny, please remember that this was a year before Pagemaker) and the former newspaper advisor stepped down from his post amid allegations of kickbacks from the printer. Ted wrote at the time, "Things always work out oddly... how does the Parrot work? I really don't know; it always looks on the brink of death, and it always survives anyway. The Parrot's a very strange bird." But it was fun stuff. The next year, he was layout editor of the paper and I was assistant layout and graphics editor. We spent a certain amount of time at loggerheads-- no specific death threats-- but we still managed to put out some damn fine work. And at the end of the year, we still liked each other. He's the last signer in my yearbook for the year that he graduated. He wrote a regular science fiction review column for the paper the first year. The column was met with a certain amount of incredulity-- a review column of science fiction books? In a high school newspaper? Who reads this thing, and why is it taking up valuable space which could be used to run pictures of cheerleaders? Ted knew it was unexpected and made self-depreciating comments about the column in it all the time. Still, Ted persevered, with reviews of Spider Robinson's Stardance, the Niven/Pournelle Inferno, Asimov's Winds of Change, and even a review of I-Con III, where he proceeded to state that Harlan Ellison was only 5'2, thereby proving that Harlan does not in fact read everything ever published about him. And since this is appearing on the Internet, it's unlikely he'll read this either. Ted has a sense of humor so black it could have been used for set changes. I was reasonably sure that his Indian spirit animal was Eeyore. The next year, the sf review column was replaced by a more general criticism column, which read like H.L. Mencken's secret diary. Echoes of a lot of Ted's stories can be found in his high school years. "Tower of Babylon" maps very closely to a story he wrote for the high school literary magazine. "The Story of Your Life" discusses light refraction through glass, and the name of that column he wrote in high school was "The Critical Angle". I have probably had more face time with him than any of his editors. I also haven't seen him in fifteen years-- had I known he was going to be at Worldcon this year, I would have gone to San Jose to say hi. But I figured he'd wouldn't show up. Why? Because he's been incredibly quiet and isolated. He's almost become the science fiction equivalent of J.D. Salinger. Even though he attended the Hugo Awards ceremony this year, he didn't pick up his own award. This article may be the most biographical information anybody has ever written about him, and that's info that a decade and a half old. The phrase I heard used to describe him today was "shockingly humble". But I don't think it's just that. I think that Ted is still not ready to believe that he's standing in the ranks of people like Asimov and Clarke, Heinlein and Spider, Niven and Pournelle. And he lives in Washington, away from most SF pro enclaves, so he doesn't get as much support from other pros as he should. That's what's bugging me. After 18 years, this humility routine and belief that "nobody reads my stuff" is getting really tiresome. Take a bow, fella. You deserve it. And to steal your stealing of Shakespeare, "If we should meet again, why, we shall smile." By the way, Paul and Ed say hi, and please say hello to Michelle from me when you get a chance. And hey-- wanna write some media tie-in stuff? It's not so bad once you get used to it.