[farmeroy]

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...

[dsr_]

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.

[npilk]

Sounds like you'd be interested in the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges - your comment brings Pierre Menard to mind.

[drdeca]

> 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?