I know I’m arriving very late at the party on this one, but only recently discovered Ted Chiang, a celebrated science fiction short story writer who’s been publishing since the early 1990s. His collection “Stories of Your Life” gathered up his work as of 2002, and it’s pretty great stuff.
I think my favorite was “Story of Your Life” which concerns attempts to establish communications with an alien race. The main idea is that there can be completely different ways of looking at the universe, and these viewpoints could result in very different linguistic approaches (as well as different ways of behaving). This makes the story sound very abstract, and while I suppose in some ways it is, it’s also very readable and easy to approach (as are just about all the stories).
Mediated 