While he’s very much unique, the one writer he brings to my mind is Borges, just a bit more humane and steeped in real technology and theory.

Chiang writes science-fiction, Egan writes physics-fiction, and Borges wrote philosophy-fiction.

Ted Chiang and Greg Egan are my absolutely favourite authors. Do you know about other similar writers?

Exurb1a is also worth reading. He's better known for his YouTube video essays (which vary between bleak and profound, usually within the same video), but he has published several books. I got about halfway through Fifth Science before leaving it on a plane (yesterday); I plan to rebuy it so that I can finish it.

Here's one of his stories: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKouPOhh_9I

Some stories by Ted Chiang share similarities with those of Borges.

Love Borges.

In the sci-fi space I'd argue that Ursula K. Le Guin is another must read. She was heavily influenced by taoism (and eastern philosophy). When you approach her work with that in mind, it adds a whole new layer of depth to everything.

Could you share some tips where to start with him?

The most classical book is certainly "Fictions": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ficciones. One of the most known stories in it is "The library of Babel": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel

I’ve never encountered anything like Egan before. I’ve heard Stanislaw Lem mentioned in conversations about him though. But I can’t vouch for the comparison myself as I’ve never read Lem.

Both are fresh voices and well worth reading, but I don't think Lem comes anywhere near Egan's diamond-hard sci-fi. Egan knows, and does, real math; you can sometimes find him at the n-category Café. My impression is that Lem's beautiful philosophical ideas were not accompanied by comparable math or physics knowledge.

Lem is humanist. The sci-fi part is only a vehicle to make you think (eh, if you want to), and while things are written in 1950-80... they are not outdated, because humans are essentially same, for millenias. Just read "Stories of commandor Pirx". Somewhere in the middle of them, you may notice something like the current frenzy around LLMs and ethics. But he goes further..

A bit “harder” sci-fi but incredible world building - Alastair Reynolds.

I recommend his short stories first - Galactic North is a good start. Or Beyond the Aquila Rift.

House of Suns is a good first novel.

The last time I responded to a similar comment by suggesting asking an AI, I was downvoted to hell. I won't do it again. I will note, though, that the list generated was excellent and provided rewarding information.

I've tried but it has provided pretty generic authors I've known and are great, but are not at all that similar to those two. https://gist.github.com/jansuchomel/b3da1f8e2588e13ba9fc0059...

Any ideas for a better prompt?

As a fan of both I highly recommend Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Time_(novel)) for something deeply imaginative, empathetic, and technically plausible.

I also really enjoyed Chiang’s “Exhalation” anthology.

There are some great short stories in both collections.

I recommend the story Hell is the Absence of God in the book you mentioned; as someone non-religious, it was quite interesting to see how people generally feel about deities and their awesome power, from this short story [0].

[0] https://static1.squarespace.com/static/50e08e65e4b0c2f497697...

I think of this as “humanist” sci-fi; which has heavy overlap with “golden era” SF.

Other authors I’d put in this category are Gene Roddenberry (TOS and TNG, particularly), Asimov, PKD, Vonnegut and Theodore Sturgeon.

Personally - fantasy stories are “and-then” stories, SF are “what-if”. Humanist sci-fi is then asking “what-if” about very human things, as opposed to technological things, although the two are always related.

However, practically speaking, literature vs sci-fi vs fantasy (vs young adult!) are more marketing cohorts than anything else; what kind of people buy what kind of books?