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."
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.
Yeah that's a big part of her thing right. She was raised by anthropologists I think? It's very present in a lot of her books and Always Coming Home is like 1/3 straight fictional ethnography.
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.
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.
May I ask how you get started with technical writing? I've basically come to the conclusion I don't want to work in academia but have fairly advanced coding and writing skills. It seems like it's possibly a good fit for me but I have no idea how or where to start.
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.
> May I ask how you get started with technical writing?
The easiest way is to apply to huge companies like Amazon, Apple, Google, or Microsoft. These companies may have ridiculous expectations from software engineers, but the tech writing screening process is much easier.
Yes. With HN's character limit, I didn't have space to mention everything. In addition to the steps I mentioned above, lately I've been applying to positions in technical writing and customer success/support engineering. I think you're right that TW could be a good fit for me.
OP wrote that "Translator positions ask for native Mandarin and good English, not the other way around." Do you have specific opportunities in mind where that wouldn't be the case?
I don't know about Mandarin, but I know that this is also true of Japanese translation, but not Japanese technical translation. There is a fair amount of work for technical people who are native English speakers because the work is from Japanese to English. I'd be surprised if there wasn't contract work for translating documents for Chinese companies.
I would guess that there are translation agencies in China that specifically hire native English speakers. Maybe ask around in online expat communities?
Dnh44 and mikechar, thank you both for responding. I've looked for Chinese->English contract positions and found little, but Dnh44's suggestion prompted me to think perhaps I hadn't looked in the right places. I'll reach out to my connections in China scholarship one more time.
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.
>Your former employer is giving out your contact information so you can help them recruit(?)
I think a lot of women would view a request like this as helping other women, rather than helping the company. Plus, as Nabors points out, the company would presumably ask the ex-employee permission before giving out contact info.
