Frederik Pohl said "A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam." Chiang's stories are good SF stories in thi

Frederik Pohl said "A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam." Chiang's stories are good SF stories in this vein -- even the stories with magic. He considers the consequences of his What-If hypotheticals in depth, whether they are plausible according to known physics or operate on fantasy suppositions. Consider his story [1] "Liking What You See: A Documentary." It's about a world in which people can have their perceptions of human beauty suppressed as an anti-discrimination measure. In some authors' voices this would be a strident sermon about a dystopian Equality Gone Too Far, or in others, about the new Utopia that arises when people are judged on their actions instead of their appearance. But Chiang doesn't preach to any choir. He plausibly represents how people would react to this hypothetical technological development without putting his thumb on the scale to tell readers how to feel about it. Most ideas are not as clearly bad as the Torment Nexus [2], nor as clearly beneficial as the polio vaccine. I love that Chiang can write about ideas that might as well be a pitch for a Black Mirror episode but with much more consideration than Black Mirror would treat it. His slow writing pace probably helps too. [1] https://waldyrious.neocities.org/ted_chiang/liking-what-you-see-a-documentary https://waldyrious.neocities.org/ted_chiang/liking-what-you-... [2] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/torment-nexus https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/torment-nexus