Peculiarities of science fiction genre realization in short stories by Ted Chiang

Today, the study of the oeuvre of Ted Chiang is becoming increasingly relevant due to his high recognition in the field of modern science fiction literature. The purpose of this study is to identify the distinctive features of the science fiction world of Ted Chiang, using his short story collections “Stories of Your Life and Others” (2003) and “Exhalation: Stories” (2019). Within the framework of this study, it was identified that there is a combination of “hard” and “soft” science fiction and features of technorealism. Describing serious social, environmental and other public issues, Ted Chiang maintains an optimistic attitude and demonstrates his characters’ lifeaffirming attitude towards changes. The driving impulse of the plots is a person’s loyalty to their calling and their curiosity to understand the truth of existence, which is invariably accompanied by an awareness of their own place in the world and experiencing a global problem through a personal history. Despite the fact that Chiang’s works are based on scientific and philosophical concepts, the author’s task is to make knowledge accessible and understandable for the reader, therefore the texts contain detailed explanations of the functioning of fictional worlds. In addition, the analysis of the works made it possible to determine the originality of the “thought experiment” narrative model and the significance of the “conceptual breakthrough” as the structural and semantic center of the works, as well as to establish an important basis for the writer’s artistic world which is humanism.