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166 points ohjeez | 4 comments | | HN request time: 0.395s | source
1. farmeroy ◴[] No.41853786[source]
I want an author who's work is completely unidentifiable from one release to the next. Or to find a dozen authors who have inconceivably and independently created identical manuscripts. Surely if there were a library with all possible books, we would find one of those two things...
replies(3): >>41853948 #>>41853955 #>>41854731 #
2. dsr_ ◴[] No.41853948[source]
Not exactly, but Walter Jon Williams keeps switching genres successfully:

- Napoleonic sea fighting

- early cyberpunk (Hardwired)

- middle cyberpunk around the Solar System (Voice of the Whirlwind)

- late cyberpunk post-scarcity space opera(Aristoi)

- transhuman space opera (Implied Spaces)

- New Mexican police procedural / thriller (Days of Atonement)

- near future thrillers (This Is Not A Game and sequelae)

- fantasy of city infrastructure (Metropolitan and City on Fire)

- comedy of manners (the Drake Maijstral trilogy)

- Fall of the Space Roman Empire (Dread Empire's Fall series)

- Medieval fantasy (Quillifer and sequelae)

and a Giant Disaster novel, a Zelaznyesque SF mystery, and a Star Wars work-for-hire.

There's enough there for five separate authors to make marks on the field.

3. npilk ◴[] No.41853955[source]
Sounds like you'd be interested in the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges - your comment brings Pierre Menard to mind.
4. drdeca ◴[] No.41854731[source]
> Or to find a dozen authors who have inconceivably and independently created identical manuscripts.

So, kind of like, or so it is said, the septaguint?