minnca

This is how you lose the time war is unlike any other book I've read! I thought it was super disorienting – and I loved that.

Ken Liu has some excellent short stories. His collection The Paper Menagerie from a few years ago was particularly great. (The titular short story won a Hugo.) He also translated the first and third books in the Three-Body Problem series.

Ted Chiang is another great SF short story writer.

Definitely Maybe by the Strugatsky brother is excellent – though it was published in the 70s so maybe not "modern."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitely_Maybe_(novel)

I think The Beginning Place is an underrated Le Guin book that didn't make the list! It's definitely not science fiction or even futuristic – more like fantasy plus magical realism – but I found the plot so unique and engaging.

I'm a big Le Guin fan and I consider her books to be sort of like "anthropological science fiction," as in they're focused on the societies and people of science fictional societies and less so on the science behind those societies.

Google has some pretty good introductory writing resources for developers: https://developers.google.com/tech-writing/one

That being said, Microsoft and Google have decent, publicly-available tech writing style guides: -Microsoft: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/style-guide/acronyms -Google: https://developers.google.com/style

I've also found that it's more useful to use a good doc as an outline for your own documentation than to start from scratch + style guide. Using a good doc as a guide can help you develop your own documentation style – you can figure out what works and doesn't work for you.

Style guides can be great in the right context, but I think focusing on them too much can take away from the most important part of documentation – the content.

The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin

I'd say a first step is to start building a body of writing samples. You can do this in a lot of different ways, but two suggestions are 1. adding or improving documentation for an open source project and 2. writing technical blog posts/articles/how-tos on topics that interest you and posting them on a personal website. Starting to build this body of work can also help you discern whether you even like technical writing. Then, I'd say the next step is to just start applying to technical writing jobs. (Maybe contract ones, if you'd like to just try it out first.) Since you have coding experience, I'd suggest targeting tech writing jobs that require proficiency with languages you're familiar with or deal with technologies in domains you're interested/have experience in.

Have you ever considered technical writing? If you're a good writer with CS/engineering, you'd have a definite leg up over other applicants (even if you don't have direct tech writing experience). I'm a tech writer (English + CS background) and I love my job. I know quite a few tech writers who dabble in docs-related automation/process improvement projects.

Not sure about MOST thought-provoking, but "The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species" and "State Change" (both by Ken Liu) are two good ones I read recently and think a lot about.