The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate by Ted Chiang

The idea of predestination is simultaneously an intellectual triumph and a spiritual dead-end - mind realising its own impotence and unimportance. Our ambitions, choices, and persistence are in vain.

It doesn’t matter what we know, our fate has already been fixed.

This is the inherent irony of the universe. The cost of awareness is the knowledge of inevitability, including the inevitability of death. He has never written a novel but is one of the most decorated science fiction writers currently working. His novelette 'The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate' was also published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.Īs of 2013, his short fiction has won four Nebula Awards, three Hugo Awards, the John W Campbell Award, three Locus Awards, the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, and the Sidewise Award. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1992, a Nebula Award and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for 'Story of Your Life' (1998), a Sidewise Award for 'Seventy-Two Letters' (2000), a Nebula Award, Locus Award and Hugo Award for his novelette 'Hell Is the Absence of God' (2002), a Nebula and Hugo Award for his novelette 'The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate' (2007), and a British Science Fiction Association Award, a Locus Award, and the Hugo Award for Best Short Story for 'Exhalation' (2009).Ĭhiang turned down a Hugo nomination for his short story 'Liking What You See: A Documentary' in 2003, on the grounds that the story was rushed due to editorial pressure and did not turn out as he had really wanted.Ĭhiang's first eight stories are collected in 'Stories of Your Life, and Others' (1st US hardcover ed: ISBN 0-7653-0418-X 1st US paperback ed.: ISBN 0-7653-0419-8). He is a graduate of the noted Clarion Writers Workshop (1989).Īlthough not a prolific author, having published only eleven short stories as of 2009, Chiang has to date won a string of prestigious speculative fiction awards for his works: a Nebula Award for 'Tower of Babylon' (1990), the John W.

He currently works as a technical writer in the software industry and resides in Bellevue, near Seattle, Washington. He graduated from Brown University with a Computer Science degree. Ted Chiang is an American speculative fiction writer.

The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate by Ted Chiang