Speculative Visions (ft. Ted Chiang & Alice Sola Kim)

We're featuring one of the country’s most prominent science fiction writers, Ted Chiang, the winner of four Locus awards, four Nebula awards, four Hugo Awards, and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Junot Díaz wrote, “Ted Chiang is so exhilarating, so original, so stylish, he just leaves you speechless.” Chiang’s short story collection, Stories of Your Life and Others, includes the Nebula Award-winning story “Story of Your Life,” of which the 2016 Academy Award-nominated film Arrival was based. After he reads, he has a discussion with Whiting Award winner Alice Sola Kim, whose work has appeared in Tin House, McSweeney’s Literary Quarterly, Buzzfeed Books, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy. They discuss how each reprint of Stories of Your Life and Others affects Chiang, how his relationship with literary genre has evolved, and how expectations of race play into his fiction.