5 ms·

Stories of your life and others has got to be one of my favorite collections of science fiction short stories. Any other recommendations?

• dottedmag 10y ago
  His newer short stories.
• rndmize 10y ago
  "The Hard SF Renaissance" is one of my favorites and usually sits on my coffee table when I don't have it loaned out to friends.
• imh 10y ago
  The Lifecycle of Software Objects is one of my all time favorites. Exhalation is really great too.
  • panglott 10y ago
    The prices for print copies of this on Amazon are just out of control, hundred of dollars. Fortunately they are available online. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Chiang#Works https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Chiang#Works
• nyolfen 10y ago
  chiang got me into borges, and i can't recommend him enough if you're a fan of the former. i love chiang but borges has become my favorite fiction author. borges also seems quite popular among programmers.
  • mercer 10y ago
    "The Library Of Babel" by Borges was great. As was "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote."
  • ryanplant-au 10y ago
    Borges' one-paragraph story "On Exactitude in Science": "... In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography."
• thisone 10y ago
  Redemolished, which is a collection of short stories and articles by Alfred Bester. You'll need to like, or be open to, 50s-60s style sci-fi, however.
• blacksmith_tb 10y ago
  David Marusek[1] is sadly under-appreciated, he's written some great short fiction, and a couple of pretty mind-boggling novels too. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Marusek https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Marusek
• nicjm 10y ago
  The Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu -- read this after finishing 'Stories of Your Life' and I enjoyed it thoroughly.
• lz400 10y ago
  Greg Egan. If you like solid science there's just nobody at that level. Chiang would be if he wrote more.
• a_bonobo 10y ago
  Stanislaw Lem, and the Strugatsky Brothers - I think that Soviet-era SF really asked the 'big' questions and is far away from today's 'SF but actually just an action movie with lasers instead of bullets' standard. For Lem, try Solaris, or His Master's Voice. He often dealt with how alien intelligence is impossible to understand (compare Wittgenstein: if a lion could speak we would not understand him). He also wrote many satires (Pilot Pirx / Fables for Robots). The English translations of the Strugatsky Brothers you commonly get aren't good as they're translated from (I think) German, not Russian, but the new direct translations from Olena Bormashenko are MUCH better, they flow so much better. Stay away from the old ones. Get Hard To Be A God, or maybe Stalker. Also seconding Borges, and perhaps Umberto Eco, and Hesse's The Glass Bead Game.