One guy who proves that literary genius and 'pleasing the market' are not mutually exclusive

When I first started publishing short stories, back in 2010, I was newly out of college, and my vision of the world was very much structured by institutions. I assumed that in order to access the good things in life, I needed to be accepted by the institutions that housed them. That's what college is like, you apply and if they think you're talented, you get in. In my mind, that's what (some) companies and professions were like: you proved yourself, and then you were inside.

My idea of what it meant to be a writer was formed by the science-fiction world, where everything was very clear. You had these seven or ten journals that paid 'professional rates' (at that time 6 cents per word), and once you started selling to these journals regularly then you were good enough, you were a professional. And if your stories were exciting enough, then you'd get nominated for a Hugo or a Nebula award and maybe become a star. These journals were the institutions I wanted to enter. And they offered an entry point to other institutions: fiction prizes and year's best anthologies.

Even at the time, I was not particularly interested in most of the fiction published by these journals. But I was interested in sci-fi short fiction as a whole, and I read a lot of story collections with genuine interest. Admittedly some of that interest was also self-interest, because I wanted to someday replace these writers. I wanted to be the next Maureen McHugh! I wanted to have a collection with Small Beer Press. That was my dream. I would've died for that.

It's so funny to write this, because it makes me wonder: where did my career take such a left turn? The things I'm saying are probably not even comprehensible to most of you! I mentioned Maureen McHugh to BDM recently, and she'd never heard of her. And I was taken back for a moment, but then I thought...who has heard of her? Who would know about her?¹

Even twenty years ago, Maureen McHugh was not famous, by the way, and I think even most of the sci-fi writers of my generation would've had no idea who she was. But to me, she was the tops. She was the peak. Her and Eileen Gunn and Robert Reed and Ted Chiang wrote cool, clear science-fiction. It was really not literary. It didn't read anything like what you'd see in the Best American Short Stories. The aim was to tell a story very cleanly, very precisely, but that precision turned into its own sort of style, which people like me could appreciate.

This kind of science fiction is essentially invisible in the non-sci-fi world. It does not break out. Ted Chiang is perhaps the sole exception, but even his broader penetration in the literary world is somewhat-limited. I don't know why these writers never break out. There's no particular reason why a literary reader couldn't enjoy something like Eileen Gunn's (insanely-classic) "Stable Strategies in Middle Management". I cannot count the number of times I saw this story anthologized. It was such a stand-by, along with Terry Bisson's "Bears Discover Fire". One time a reader was like have you heard of this Terry Bisson guy. And I was like oh my god...have I heard of him? You couldn't open an anthology in the 2000s without running into him! He's a great writer, but that's what makes it so funny. Within the science fiction world, he was highly-acclaimed, but outside it he was nobody.

Of course now the fashions have changed. So Terry Bisson or Maureen McHugh even today don't have much a reputation amongst science-fiction fans. Amongst these fans, there are new names, and perhaps the sole person who's continuously held the field's esteem from the early 1990s to today is Ted Chiang. He is the last man standing.

And he's also the only writer of this style of science fiction who might conceivably be read by a non-sci-fi person.

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When I entered an MFA program in 2012, it was very old-fashioned. For my professors, program fiction was the heir to the Western literary tradition. You know, the literary greats went from Henry James to Hemingway, and then Flannery O'Connor and Raymond Carver and John Cheever took over seamlessly. And they, at this program, worried that we, the younger generation, weren't paying enough attention to Raymond Carver. They worried Raymond Carver would be forgotten.

Into that world, it's so screamingly funny to try and explain that there's this other guy called Ted Chiang who's really good too.

What makes this even funnier is that over time I came to realize that the sci-fi tradition into which I was inculcated was itself a dying tradition. That science fiction is actually not that popular. And what's even less popular is science fiction which is written explicitly within that fandom literary tradition—starting with Isaac Asimov, moving through Bester, Clarke, Heinlein, etc, before terminating in Ted Chiang.

So it's not like I could really claim to be a woman of the people. Science fiction is not a literature of the people. It's a literature of a small subset of very committed enthusiasts who have formed a particular literary subculture. And I think that subculture was very good, because it gave rise to me.

Of course I also wanted respectability. I thought I was better than science fiction. I thought I was better than Clarkesworld Magazine, where I’d published my first science fiction stories. I was very impressed when I visited Johns Hopkins in 2012 by its endowed professorships and libraries and offices. These are not things that science fiction writers ever normally have access to! The Baltimore Science Fiction Society's clubhouse, where I also spent some time in 2012, was a windowless concrete box that was full of fifty thousand yellowing paperbacks. A very far cry from airy Gilman atrium at Johns Hopkins.

I thought, on some level, that I could convince the academic establishment that I was good.

That was not a crazy idea. Other people definitely did this. Kelly Link was our idol in this. She had an MFA. She had published all her initial stories in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and had gotten all the biggest sci-fi awards. Then, somehow, through some alchemy we didn't understand—people started taking her seriously! Real literary people!

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My understanding of what it means to be a writer is really shaped by this background. I was part of a wave of genre writers who entered MFA programs, and for a while one of the more popular posts on my blog was about precisely this process: about how you apply to residential MFA programs if you were a sci-fi writer.²

And the thing that was hard to explain was that...you couldn't get into these programs if you were too science-fictiony. The average sci-fi story wouldn't pass muster, because they often trafficked too heavily in tropes that would only be comprehensible to other sci-fi readers. In order to get into an MFA program, you had to write sci-fi as if you'd never read a sci-fi story before. You had to write it like you were inventing it for the first time, like Kazuo Ishiguro does. As if nobody before had ever told a story about these ideas, which you just happened to pick up and repurpose from popular culture.

And this imposture is something you learned to affect if you were going to get any traction in literary fiction circles. For some people, their work was genuinely so weird that it didn't feel like imposture at all. But for me, I do think it created a kind of uncanny valley, where my work was neither fish nor fowl. It could superficially pass as a literary story and as a science fiction story, but wasn't wholly pleasing to either audience.

And what's so frustrating to me is that it's very difficult to even describe this issue, because when you talk to science-fiction people they can't conceive of how little the literary world knows about their subculture. Even Ted Chiang is virtually unknown in literary circles. Maybe there'd be some dim awareness of his name, but very few literary people would've actually read his work.

Now if you're a sci-fi writer, can you imagine how obscure everyone at a sub-Ted-Chiang level must be? Like Ted Chiang is the absolute apex of this sci-fi culture I'm talking about, and he is utterly insignificant in the minds of most creative writing professors, NYRB reviewers—however you want to conceive of the literary establishment, even Ted Chiang barely exists within it.

Meanwhile, at the other end, if I want to even describe this conundrum to people, I have to go around explaining who Ted Chiang is! Which is insane! In the sci-fi community, you'd never need to do that. You'd never need to explain. It would be like explaining who Salman Rushdie is. Everyone in the literary world is at least somewhat familiar with the concept of Salman Rushdie; it's the same with literary sci-fi and Ted Chiang.³

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So the effort of even bringing these two worlds into communication with each other for the briefest possible second is too much. Like it's taken me 1500 words to even describe this situation to you, and now...where can I go? What else is there to say?

Ultimately the question is about literary merit. That's what is at stake. Genius. Reputation. Who gets to be accounted a place amongst the great 20th-century writers. Ted Chiang surely deserves to have a higher reputation than Lorrie Moore, Amy Hempel, or Ann Beattie. I mean is Ted Chiang really worse than Lorrie Moore? I feel like I'm one of the few people on Earth who is confidently able to state, mmm, no I think Ted Chiang might be better.

But that's the problem because who the fuck is Lorrie Moore? If I was to try and explain Lorrie Moore's existence to science fiction writers I would have difficulty. She is a well-known story-writer whose work is often taught as an example of the form. But...knowledge of her work is largely perpetuated by the MFA world. By this particular subculture of people devoted to the literary short story.

The lit-world's whole existence is predicated on the idea that keeping alive knowledge of Lorrie Moore somehow matters. That to keep Lorrie Moore alive means to keep literature alive. People with that outlook are not gonna be that receptive to the idea that actually the greatest living American story writer is somebody you've never heard of, who doesn't publish in your journals, and doesn't care about your opinion.

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Honestly, though, Ted Chiang will survive. He's been writing for thirty years—his reputation has already outlasted that of McHugh, Bisson, etc. This guy is amazing. What he does is so exemplary. It's really time to say it: he's certainly on par with all these great, muscular literary writers everyone bemoans don't exist anymore. Ted Chiang is Norman Mailer! Ted Chiang is Updike! Ted Chiang is the thing!

This guy is so good. You read one of his stories, you never forget it. Every Ted Chiang story is a chilly thought experiment wrapped up in the most sentimental story you can imagine, about, like, a mother whose child died. The stories are indescribable. They feel like they were written by a robot, and I mean that in the best possible way: Ted Chiang knows that you need pathos to keep people reading, and he delivers that pathos in such a skillful way, and then at the end the pathos and the thought experiment come together in this unforgettable ending that changes your life forever!

For instance, "Stories Of Your Life" is about a woman who can foresee the future, but doesn't prevent her own daughter's death because...why? Well it's hard to explain. There's a reason—he spends twenty thousand words explaining it to you. You definitely believe in the reason by the time the story is over, and that’s why this ending makes perfect sense:

From the beginning I knew my destination, and I chose my route accordingly. But am I working toward an extreme of joy, or of pain? Will I achieve a minimum, or a maximum?

These questions are in my mind when your father asks me, “Do you want to make a baby?” And I smile and answer, “Yes,” and I unwrap his arms from around me, and we hold hands as we walk inside to make love, to make you.

That's his genius. That's where it comes from. That you wholeheartedly are like gosh, wow, I guess that woman had to let her daughter die. Wow. Devastating.⁴

In "Division By Zero", a woman disproves one of the fundamental postulates of math, and as a result...her husband doesn't love her anymore! It sounds absurd when I say it, but that's the story. And it is fantastic! It is amazing that he can make this story work.

In “Hell Is The Absence of God”, a man’s wife is killed by an angel and goes to Heaven, and as a result the man grows to hate God, which is a problem, because that means he’ll never get to join his wife in Heaven, so he knows his only option now is to be killed by an angel himself, because that’s a get out of jail free card that sends you straight to Heaven. But in the end, something goes wrong, and he ends up in Hell, worse than ever, because now he loves God and is unable to reach him:

Neil still loves Sarah, and misses her as much as he ever did, and the knowledge that he came so close to rejoining her only makes it worse. He knows his being sent to Hell was not a result of anything he did; he knows there was no reason for it, no higher purpose being served. None of this diminishes his love for God. If there were a possibility that he could be admitted to Heaven and his suffering would end, he would not hope for it; such desires no longer occur to him.

Neil even knows that by being beyond God’s awareness, he is not loved by God in return. This doesn’t affect his feelings either, because unconditional love asks nothing, not even that it be returned.

And though it’s been many years that he has been in Hell, beyond the awareness of God, he loves Him still. That is the nature of true devotion.

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But there's a problem. If I was to describe Ted Chiang to a literary person, they might easily think, "But what you're describing sounds hackneyed and manipulative."

And it's true that in the culture of these sci-fi stories there was an extremely strong sentimental streak. The most successful stories amongst fans are often tear-jerkers. A classic example is "Flowers For Algernon", about a mentally-handicapped guy who gets a drug that makes him into a genius, and then slowly loses his intelligence. It's the saddest thing a nerd could think of, basically.

The sentimental streak in sci-fi stories arises because of the nature of the field. It's driven by fans and fan-interest. The major awards are popular-vote awards.⁵ To make a career, you need to get people talking. And people will only talk if your piece left them feeling something really big.

So ostensibly science-fiction writers are trying to write about the future and to explore ideas about the future, but...as a practical matter, if you're going to succeed in this marketplace you also need to deliver big emotional payoffs.

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And yet even to talk about 'success' or a 'marketplace' seems absurd when you're talking about Ted Chiang, who is impossibly uncommercial and completely divorced from anything approaching careerism.

Ted Chiang is a famously exacting writer. He's written fewer than 20 stories in a career spanning more than thirty years, and he goes through many, many drafts of each story. He once refused an awards-nomination because he felt like the story wasn't up to his usual standards. He obviously has some sense of the internal integrity of each story, and what story requires.

This New Yorker profile captures Ted Chiang perfectly. He is so shy, so diffident, so soft-spoken. I really do not think he wants any kind of fame or to be a bigger writer than he is. He doesn't think about audience or about the reception of his stories at all. This New Yorker profile also notes how strange it is that his stories are so deeply-felt, when Ted Chiang in real life absolutely hates discussing any form of feelings!

The New Yorker writer finally sends him twenty-four questions, begging for some hint of a personal opinion, and here’s what Chiang sends back:

Do you have a favorite novel?
There isn’t one that I would want to single out as a favorite. I’m wary of the idea of a favorite anything.

You've spent many years living near the water. Do you like the sea?
Not particularly. I don't actually spend much time on the coast; it's just chance that I happened to move here.

What was the last work of art that made you cry?
Don't know.

Do you consider yourself a sensitive person?
Yes.

This guy won’t even admit to liking the ocean! Who doesn’t like the ocean? Oh my God, if you know anything about his fiction, these answers are so funny.
Even when he’s talking about his own fiction, Ted Chiang spares no time for feelings:

“I do want there to be a depth of human feeling in my work, but that’s not my primary goal as a writer,” he said, over lunch. “My primary goal has to do with engaging in philosophical questions and thought experiments, trying to work out the consequences of certain ideas.”

Like, the distance between how Ted Chiang talks about his fiction versus the actuality of that fiction is extreme! He'll be like "This story grew out of my interest in the variational principles of physics." And then you read the story and it is that...it's definitely got something or other to say about physics, but…it's also emotionally devastating.

When you hear Ted Chiang talk, it's clear he's mostly motivated by the ideas. Then people wonder, where did the emotions come from? Well...the fact is that the emotionality of his work is not special. The emotions are just what he learned from reading other sci-fi stories. His stories are emotional because that's what sci-fi stories are like. That's really not the special part. It's the ideas that make his stories special: the particular way he creates chains of logic and makes impossible things seem obvious and even intuitive.

But if it was just ideas...it wouldn't work. It'd be boring.

To me it's so clear that the market imperatives of the sci-fi short-story scene are written into Ted Chiang's fiction, and he even admits as much in an interview with The Believer (where he discusses another writer, Greg Egan):

Greg Egan’s stories become harder to understand because he often winds up pursuing ideas to a level of abstraction that most readers probably can’t follow. It’s like taking a class or listening to a lecture and the lecture builds on its initial ideas, so you’re following along but it becomes more taxing, and eventually it reaches a point where you sort of fall by the wayside and only a few people can understand what the lecturer is saying all the way up till the end.

Ted Chiang’s stories don’t fall into this trap. Most people don’t understand the ideas—I certainly doubt I understand them on the level he’d want me to. But we keep reading them, because we know there’s always gonna be big feelings at the end.

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I was a huge fan of Ted Chiang when I was in college. I remember buying a stand-alone issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction just so I could read "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate", which was his first new story in five years. Ted Chiang belongs to that category of sci-fi writer that I've read so many times that they are seared into my memory. In Ted Chiang's case, I came back to his work a few times as an adult and satisfied myself that actually...it held up. It was great. The reputation was well-deserved.

Usually when I write a piece like this, it's because I've recently re-read the author's work. In this case, however, it's mostly prompted by my attendance at the conference of the Association of Writing Programs. For a long time, it was very, very, very important to me to somehow explain to these two worlds—the MFA and the science fiction worlds—about each others' existence.

And that’s because this MFA world is defined by its unworldliness—by its insistence that the greatest writers are producing work only for its own sake, and that they only care about the aesthetic integrity of the work. That is our myth about the geniuses of the past: they are sui generis, defined by a singular vision, and this genius often wasn’t recognized in its own day.

It’s a true myth. Nobody exemplifies that myth more than Ted Chiang. This is a guy who spends years on a single story—a guy who doesn’t seek fame or attention—a guy who seems bewildered by his own popularity. But in the MFA world, it seems to me that adherence to this myth has led to a curious form of sterility: the production of thousands of stories that molder unread, because they’re not a crop that anyone really needs.

Ted Chiang’s genius, in contrast, has been fertilized by the needs of the market. The demands of the field in which he works—short-form science-fiction—are written all over his work, and his ability to internalize those market imperatives has been a key to his success. Moreover, we only know his name because he was recognized for his genius by the critical marketplace. If Ted Chiang hadn’t won four Hugos and four Nebulas and six Locus awards, nobody would know his name. And he won those awards precisely because he wrote the type of stories that win Hugos and Nebulas.

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We all write for an audience. Our work can only succeed if it resonates with that audience. And Ted Chiang gives me hope that if you learn how to truly satisfy your audience, in a way that's honest and heartfelt, then maybe that effort can be written into the work itself, so that it continues, year after year, to produce its own audience even after the original audience has long-passed.

Ted Chiang writes a very particular kind of story, and he writes for a distinct marketplace that caters to people who generally like this kind of story. In part, Ted Chiang has come to define this genre of story, but if we're being honest, he doesn't really have any true imitators, because he is the form itself. To imitate Ted Chiang would be to just...write a great science fiction story.

And if it's possible for anyone who's not a sci-fi person to learn how to love this kind of story, you'll learn by reading the work of Ted Chiang.

All the stories I wrote about in this post are in Chiang’s first collection, which is his best, I think..

Elsewhere on the internet

• I sat for a discussion a while back with Matthew Buckley Smith, a poetry writer who I know from my MFA days. Back then, he was a lot more mysterious and imposing to me than he is now. We used to be like…what is the deal with this guy who just looms and broods? It turns out he's really nice and fun to talk to. I do not remember at all what we discussed, but judging from the podcast page, we had a very wide-ranging talk.

• A months ago, I reached out to

  Daniel Oppenheimer
  to give him some trouble. I still feel a bit bad about this, but I felt like he was the only anti-woke guy I knew who’d actually return my calls, so I texted him being like surely it’s time to be done with this. He invited me to a broad-ranging discussion, which will be shared in parts. The first section posted yesterday. As Oppenheimer puts it:

  After my recent podcast conversation with Bill Deresiewicz, you sent me a short DM that said: “Your show spends a lot of time discussing woke people. Do you ever think...maybe you should have a woke person on?”

  It’s been a good talk. I’ve definitely enjoyed it, though you can judge for yourself whether we’ve actually managed to find common ground (future parts are forthcoming on Wednesday and Friday I believe).

1. This led to

BDM

’s excellent post about McHugh’s short fiction, by the way. She perfectly describes this style of fiction, by the way. Basically, in sci-fi at this point in time, there was no structural incentive towards overt, show’y prose. You wrote well by writing plainly, but this plain style was, in fact, its own sort of style, which could be done more and less well. McHugh did it better than anyone—better even than Chiang, in fact.

I found that McHugh’s goodness kind of snuck up on me as I was reading—at first I felt like there was a kind of basic quality to her prose, i.e. fine but nothing special, but then at some point I fell into her rhythm and now even when I go back to the first stories I read I can’t pick out a passage that clearly explains why I had my initial reaction

2. If you want a Naomi deep cut, you can read this series of four posts here: 1, 2, 3, and 4.

3. If anyone wants a snapshot of Chiang-awareness amongst the highly-literate public, they can look at my Substack poll, which I didn’t tabulate. But out of 50-some responses, at least 2/3rds knew of him, and probably at least 20 were fans. Which is pretty good! A lot better than Poe did.

4. This story is also the basis for the movie Arrival. Essentially, these heptapods have a language that relies on a simultaneous knowledge of all possible events. Learning this language gives you that that knowledge, but knowing this language also means committing to simultaneous living, which means that you’re not able to change any other moment of your life. If she chose to alter her daughter’s future, then she wouldn’t be able to learn this language, which means she wouldn’t have the knowledge of the future and wouldn’t be able to alter her daughter’s future. Very mind-bending.

5. I wrote about the difference between sci-fi and literary awards in an article last year for Arc.