His works are definitely more philosophical, though I think that's always been an important part of sci-fi; Asimov never explained how a positronic brain worked, just explored the possibilities of a hypothetical world. Chiang takes philosophical writing right up to the point of Jorge Luis Borges, and if that's not your thing, that's reasonable. If you are looking for more world-building and detail, though, I do recommend his "Tower of Babylon," which describes the engineering challenges of building the Biblical Tower of Babel, assuming that the flat-Earth, solid sky model of Biblical cosmology was really true.