Seattle, it’s been awhile since we’ve gathered together in celebration of books, authors, and all things wordy. That’s why Town Hall is thrilled
to invite you to the first chapter of something big: an annual Writers Festival that pays tribute to everything we love about the written word.
Welcome to Volume I: Humble Beginnings. September 16 and 17,
gather at Town Hall’s historic building for an extraordinary roster of fiction and non-fiction authors. Come and go as you please for book signings and tasty food, snag $10 featured titles from our friends at Third Place Books (Saturday only, while supplies last!), and surround yourself with the good company of curious readers just like yourself, here in our marvelous City of Literature.
Ted Chiang
“Magic and Imaginary Science in Fiction”
Ted Chiang explores our human curiosity about real and imaginary science, technology, and magic — and how they help us make sense of the world.
Magic and Imaginary Science in Fiction
Ted Chiang explores our human curiosity about real and imaginary science, technology, and magic — and how they help us make sense of the world.
A quiet luminary in the world of speculative fiction writing, Ted Chiang is known for bridging the gap between humanism and hard science with his short stories, novellas, and novelettes. The New Yorker calls him “one of the most influential science-fiction writers of his generation”— with a collection of 27 major literary prizes and writings that are regularly studied in college philosophy classes, it’s not difficult to see why.
Chiang joins us at Town Hall for a peek into his craft with a talk that sheds light on how magic and imaginary science shape how we understand the real world. Chiang also revisits his 2019 book, Exhalation, nudging audiences to consider morally complex worlds with characters and dilemmas that(in the words of Joyce Carol Oates) will “linger in the memory the way riddles may linger — teasing, tormenting, illuminating, thrilling.”
Ted Chiang is the winner of more than two dozen prizes, including four Hugo, four Nebula, and six Locus awards, and has been reprinted in the anthology The Best American Short Stories. His first collection, Stories of Your Life and Others, has been translated into twenty-one languages, and the title story was the basis for the Oscar-nominated film Arrival starring Amy Adams. His second collection Exhalation was chosen by The New York Times as one of the 10 Best Books of 2019.