The Cyberiad by Stanisław Lem
This was a series of robotic space opera stories, focused around the exploits and recountings of a frienemy pair of "constructor" robots. The tales use a nested frame structure and veer between fairytale, farce, and philosophical pondering.
I'm not sure which later writers were directly influenced by this work. But both 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' and 'Futurama' have aspects that strongly remind me of it.
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