It has recently come to my attention that, to date, there does not exist a clear online ranking of every Ted Chiang story ever written.
You’ll find the occasional partially-ordered tier list, of course, or the passing Top 5 list, and some might even come close but no list that includes every story he has published, and orders them completely. Not only are currently existing rankings incomplete, but worse—many of them are (in my opinion) wildly incorrect. This seems, to me, a massive gap in the collective knowledge of humanity—and I’ve taken it upon myself to fill that gap. What follows, then, is the definitive ranked list of all of Ted Chiang’s stories, according to me.