Ted Chiang is the greatest living science fiction short story writer I'm aware of, and ranks highly on my all time list.
I have only read a few stories by Ted Chiang, but I concur, they were all fantastic.
I second this. Exhalation for some reason really resonates with me.
His short story "Understand" is just... amazing.
It wasn't until I discovered I was on the spectrum that I realized why it clicked so much. >.< I'm masking all the time, running conversational simulations to anticipate the societally-expected response to any given situation (and am high on the IQ spectrum).
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