Ted Chiang
Reading a bunch of Ted Chiang, who writes a kind of story I'm usually not that into, the pursuit of a Big Idea to its logical conclusions often at the expense of some other things you can do with prose. When he does it, though, I can't not be excited about it. It's not even that the concepts he's working with are all that surprising in isolation--it's the way he coolly maneuvers them into contact like epistemic billiard balls, and does so with the understanding that science and technology are made of cultural assumptions and limited communication systems like anything else we do. Maybe Chiang doesn't need much introduction at this point, except in that he's a committed short story writer in a field that highly values novels, but at the very least I'm here to drop my vote in the box. The dude has got it.