Bucket 1, airport fiction lane: loved Dark Matter, Recursion, and Pines from Crouch (didn’t click with his others), plus Sakey’s Brilliance trilogy. High-concept, fast-paced sci-fi hooks, fast-paced sci-fi.
Bucket 2, on the other hand: Chiang / Ken Liu lane. Literary, idea-driven short fiction, philosophical, restrained, often melancholy.
Already familiar with Three-Body Problem and Le Guin, so looking outside those.
Random side-note, I also really like Ken Grim wood’s Replay.
Tried a bunch of Goodreads lists and nothing stuck. There have to be more writers working these lanes, just need help finding them.
by Firm-Bed-7218
1 Comment
for the airport lane you might dig Andy Weir’s stuff beyond just The Martian – Project Hail Mary has that same page-turner energy with solid science concepts. Also try Catherine Webb, her books have similar high concept hooks but maybe bit more character focused
the literary sci-fi side is trickier since you already know the heavy hitters. Jorge Luis Borges short stories might work if you haven’t gone down that rabbit hole yet – very philosophical and idea-heavy. Also Stanisław Lem has this weird contemplative style that fits in that bucket, though his pacing is definitely slower than Chiang
since you liked Replay, maybe check time loop/temporal stuff in general? there’s some good indie authors working those concepts but names escape me right now