UNLESS you read science-fiction magazines, you probably have not have heard of Ted Chiang. He is not terribly prolific. His longest works are novellas of about 50,000 words, and he publishes one or two short stories every few years. But when he writes, the results are profound. His stories are perennial winners of the Locus and Nebula Awards—top prizes for science fiction and fantasy works in America. His readers are few, but they are devoted. Mr Chiang's short story “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling”, available in the autumn issue of Subterranean Press Magazine, a genre-fiction quarterly, involves a journalist who investigates a futuristic gadget. Called "Remem", it is a tool that searches one's personal "lifelog" (a real-time account of one's life captured by a personal camera) and projects memories the moment they come to mind. It is like Google Glass, a continuous-filming camera and search engine rolled into one. Mr Chiang's narrator frets that having constant access to past events will take away his power to forget, and so to forgive.

A parallel strand in the story concerns the introduction of writing to the Tiv people of Nigeria. To document experience in writing also changes how memory works. “We don’t normally think of it as such, but writing is a technology,” Mr Chiang writes. A “literate person is someone whose thought processes are technologically mediated.” This subtle thread ties the two stories together. The moment of revelation feels powerful, as if the reader has suddenly understood something new.

Science fiction is a genre that often works well off the page. Spaceships and robots are just as thrilling on screen as in books. But Mr Chiang’s approach is irreplaceable. His stories mirror the process of scientific discovery: complex ideas emerge from the measured, methodical accumulation of information until epiphany strikes.

Hefty scientific principles buttress Mr Chiang’s works, yet he draws from them a startling humanism. "Story of Your Life" (1998), a tale about learning an alien language, came from thinking about Fermat's last theorem; "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" (2007) considers the nature of time. The laws of nature are fixed. But Mr Chiang's stories remind us that the world need not be as it is. Time did not have to be so that we experience it linearly. Consciousness need not have been possible. What we take for granted is often miraculous.

"Exhalation", a short story from 2008, describes a world of sentient mechanical beings. The pressure in their atmosphere allows air to pass through their brains; thoughts emerge from the whirls and patterns of these eddies. But the pressure of this universe is decreasing. When it is gone, consciousness will follow. "The universe began as an enormous breath being held," Mr Chiang writes. "I am glad that it did... until this great exhalation is finished, my thoughts live on."

Alas, Mr Chiang does not write convincing dialogue. Conversation is weighted with exposition, as stilted as in a "Star Trek" film ("Suppose I gave you an hour's worth of recordings; how long would it take you to determine if we need this sound spectrograph or not?"). The genre's typical weakness on this front—together with its reliance on invented realities and creatures—invites critics to scoff that science fiction is childish and un-literary. But this criticism misses the point. The best science fiction inspires awe for the natural properties of the universe; it renders the fundamentals of science poignant and affecting. Mr Chiang's writing manages all of this. He deserves to be more widely read.