Ted Chiang is extremely recommended to anyone who enjoys inventive fiction. His work borders fantasy and science fiction, switching effortlessly from one topic to the next, with absolute mastery, being thought provoking, sophisticated, yet never stuffy or boring, with his only aim to tell a good story.
If you like Borges, Clarke, Stephenson and others you will love Mr. Chiang. Some of his writing is the best I've read in creative fiction in any genre.
Also strongly recommend Greg Egan, who I place in a similar bucket to Chiang.
Egan has some books that fall into an (afaik) completely unique sub-genre that I have heard described as "math-fi".
Some of his books are (credibly) described as a textbook wrapped in a narrative veneer. E.g. he has 3 books set in a universe with a ++++ metric tensor, and another book set in a ++-- universe. He painstakingly rederives many details of physics, chemistry, etc. to a level of detail that I've never seen even in physics textbooks, and then creates a story where characters in that universe discover its properties. The books are good even without paying too much attention to the math, but if you find that part interesting, he has detailed supplemental materials on his website.
Eactly, Eagan is "math-fi", and Borges is "philosophy-fi". And yeah, what Eagan does is absolutely mind blowing. He mathematically derives entire universes entirely unlike our own, determines what it would be like to live in them, and then writes about characters that do.
(And this isn't boring shit like "this world is four-dimensional, so its inhabitants need more legs, woah!", this is bizarre shit like "better clear the road so that we can rotate the museum down it, before the sun moves on".)
I've read something like 7 egan books now but my math isn't good enough to know if they're any of the four you described via metric tensor (cause the wiki page on it went over my head). Surely not Incandescence? Maybe Schild's Ladder? Curious which ones you mean, a list of names is fine if you don't want to spoil anyone.
Well the virtual pet story had two problems! The first is that it seemed to go on forever, and the second was that it ended before the story was complete.
Yeah, I think that one suffered from not really having a clear vision of how AI would work, so it lacked the backbone that most Chiang stories start with and couldn't figure out what to do with itself and so went on too long. I'd like to see Chiang revisit that topic soon with DL scaling in mind to sharpen the vision and boil it down to its essence. (Hopefully he's no longer dismissing LLMs as 'blurry JPGs of the Internet'...)
If you like Borges, Clarke, Stephenson and others you will love Mr. Chiang. Some of his writing is the best I've read in creative fiction in any genre.