One of the great pleasures of fiction (to my mind anyway) is that moment when your jaw drops at the sheer inventiveness / audacity / unexpectedness (delete as appropriate) of the author's ideas.   Here are some suggestions for stories and novels that fit the bill. Greg Egan I've always thought that Greg Egan's short stories are something of a mixed bag.   It's usually fairly obvious that each story has been constructed to explore some particularly intriguing idea (from quantum physics or Daniel Dennett's theory of mind, for example), and this can make some of them a bit clunky or preachy (for my taste, at least).   But in his best stories the sheer imaginative intensity of what you're reading is such that you no longer care. He's had two anthologies published in the UK: Axiomatic (containing stories from 1989 to 1992) and Luminous (containing stories from 1993 to 1998). Both are recommended, but the second is better (in my view).   Here are some particularly recommended stories: The Infinite Assassin (in Axiomatic) is a head-spinning take on the many-worlds theory of quantum mechanics, in which certain individuals cause the different parallel universes to start intefering with each other in undesirable ways.   Unfortunately the problem can't be solved by assassinating the trouble-maker in any one world: they have to be assassinated in uncountably many universes simultaneously, and the assassins involved have no way of communicating with each other! A theme touched on in many of his stories (and one which annoys some people) is the inadequacy of traditional (literary, pysychological or religious) ways of understanding the human condition (as opposed to his own brand of Dennett-inspired computational psychology).   Here he is (for example) debunking the idea of Jungian archetypes in The Planck Dive, an excellent story which appears in Luminous, and is also available on-line on his own website: "Do you have any idea what archetypal narratives are? They're the product of a few chance attractors in [human] neurophysiology. Whenever a more complex story was disseminated through an oral culture, it would eventually degenerate into an archetypal narrative ... If all of antiquity's greatest statues had been dropped into a glacier, they would have been reduced to a predictable spectrum of spheriodal pebbles by now; that does not make the spheriodal pebble the pinnacle of the artform." Chaff (also in Luminous) explores a similar theme, and is highly recommended. Luminous is the title story of his second anthology, and manages the almost unprecedented feat of turning the philosophy of pure mathematics into a gripping science fiction story.   Neatly inverting the conventional relationship between maths and physics, it starts with the idea that the fundamental axioms of mathematics might be determined by the physical behaviour of the universe (rather than vice versa), and could therefore be changed by a sufficiently unscrupulous corporation, undermining the arithmetical basis of all the world's financial transaction.   But that's just the first of the surprises in store - you'll have to read it to find out the rest! Other Writers Coming soon to this page: Robert Sheckley, Michael Frayn, J.G. Ballard, Jorge Luis Borges ...