KEN LIU
here is his website
Saga Press
$26.00 hardcover, available now
First look at Pantheon, the AMC+ series based on these stories.
Rating: 4.5* of five
The Publisher Says: From award-winning author Ken Liu comes his much anticipated second volume of short stories.
Ken Liu is one of the most lauded short story writers of our time. This collection includes a selection of his science fiction and fantasy stories from the last five years — sixteen of his best — plus a new novelette.
In addition to these seventeen selections, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories also features an excerpt from the forthcoming book three in the Dandelion Dynasty series, The Veiled Throne.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM SAGA PRESS VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: Ken Liu is a busy, busy man. He is practically the sole engine behind Chinese SF being translated into English, and that's a major feat right there, especially while he was also being a lawyer and a software engineer...and also writing his own fiction. Thankfully the fact that his story "Good Hunting" was made into an episode of the first season of Love, Death + Robots for Netflix, and two seasons of a series called Pantheon is being made for AMC from these post-Singularity interconnected stories means that he's now a full-time toiler in the vineyards of literature.
There is, I suppose inevitably, quite a lot of focus on names, naming, descritpive labeling, and other methods of identifying unique points in the information flow-chart of the Universe. There are entities with graphic and mathematical-symbol augmented (or even composed) names; there are subtle jokes scattered around having to do with the sounds and definitions of the component parts of the names; it all feels playful, and is in part that. But think...a Chinese-American man, by the fact that this label is applied to him, becomes supremely sensitive to the power of names and naming. The power to create, destroy, invent, reinvent, control and rebel is in the power of naming. What better way to use that power, inherent in storytelling, than to signpost one's purpose without having to bash the reader with Messages.
A hefty proportion (possibly even all?) of the stories in this collection are set in that Uploaded (as opposed to Artificial) Intelligence/post-Singularity world. Liu takes his time exploring the inevitable losses of the end of the Anthropocene, making the coming of UI (that is, formerly human personalities freed of our slow wetware by insertion into quantum computers) "gods" inevitable. Then, as only Author Liu can, parsing out the ways humanity, freed of bodies, might optimize Life, the Universe, and Everything. These have the overarching feel of a novel that just wouldn't *quite* take shape. The key scenes are here...but there simply wasn't enough *oomph* to launch the project with a reasonable chance of success. But they're absolutely perfect cloth to shape a sixteen-episode TV series into!
I shall, in time-honored tradition, use the Bryce Method of story-by-story rating and explaining my reasoning for the ratings I've assigned them.
Ghost Days (2013) is a simple morality tale of memory's role in resisting Entropy.
Digging in the earth was a promise to the future as well as an acknowledgement of the past.
–and–
Which is authentic? he thought. The World or the Word? The truth or understanding?
This was a very interesting, though patchily pasted together, exploration of colonial memory syndrome: The old you is authentic, better, but the new you is what will enable you to survive. Squeaks to 4 stars
Maxwell's Demon (2012) revisits two low points in the world's history: The Japanese Internments and the atomic bombings. Takako, Okinawan-Japanese Nisei internee, is coerced into "serving her country" as a spy, does her job, solves a centuries-old physics thought experiment, and even gets to go home. Not quite the way she expected in any of these cases. Injustice towards women is the way of war, disproportionately of the world. 3.5 stars
The Reborn (2014) does a wonderful job of imagining the consequences of truly alien aliens with antithetical ideas about selfhood rollin' up on Earth, settin' up shop, and lettin' it rip. Superior technology, developed over functionally infinite lifespans, leads to very, very strange bedfellows when dealing with Humans.
Made much more poignant, then repugnant, by the first-person narrator's position in the new hierarchy. The fact is the aliens are correct, if not right, in their assessment of Humanity's deeply toxic relationship to Memory. It's the first 5 star story!
Thoughts and Prayers (2019) parses the coming Singularity and its inevitable role in grieving, virtue signaling, politicking, and trolling...because none of those human behaviors are goin' anywhere.
We prize "freedom to" so much more than "freedom from." People must be free to own guns, so the only solution is to teach small children to hide in closets and wear ballistic backpacks. People must be free to post and say what they like, so the only solution is to tell their targets to put on armor.
Possibly the wisest words this very wise man has written. A chilled, grateful-I'm-old 4.5 stars
Byzantine Empathy (2018) starts out written in the awful, chest-pokey second person. Then it goes into the Blockchaining of Charity. There wasn't a lot of hope for me and this story by then...the weaponization of empathy? Shall we call time of death?
I understand how she thinks, but she doesn't understand how I think. I understand her language, but she doesn't understand mine—or care to. That's how power works in this world.
Both heartbreaking and honest, completely unsparing and without self-pity; the true power of empathy is in clarity, simplicity, singleness of purpose. A rare thing in reality. Second 5 star story!
The Gods Will Not Be Chained (2014) posits the Singularity will come with far more human-derived baggage than one is accustomed to it wagging in fiction. A bit on the simplistic side, though I'm delighted by the author's plumping for the e'er-contentious holonomic brain theory, dividing roboticists and AI folk since 1946. 4 stars, though I expect it'd be more if I understood it better
Staying Behind (2011) tells us the story of The Singularity by way of Aldiss's Greybeard out of St. John Mandel's Station Eleven, only compressed into a short story. A lot has changed in the ten years since it was published. I don't hear much about human consciousness being uploaded these days. Folk are freaked out enough by the guaranteed-to-happen rise of some species of AI! This one didn't convince me it needed a place in the collection. 3 stars because he did it before everyone was on the bus
Real Artists (2011) failed to excite me. A woman gets her dream interview at
The Gods Will Not Be Slain (2014) wasn't quite what I expected...sequel to "The Gods Will Not Be Chained", prequel to "Staying Behind", and an altogether more exciting end of the story, of what clearly wanted to be a novel but didn't quite make the last hill before the torrent of plot would've taken it to the sea of Published Novels. Maddie and her mom and Grandma are going to remain in the suspend file, but no one is wise to bet against three women who can survive apocalyptic awfulness...they'll be back if they want to. 4 stars
Altogether Elsewhere, Vast Herds of Reindeer (2011) moved me in several ways...the love of an older parent for a final child, the deep and abiding sadness of losing someone you will always love, the careful way digital child..."god" in the parlance of the earlier stories set in this universe...Renée's mother (one of the Ancients, who remembers what it was like to have a "body") prepares her for the darkness that is always the future but we hope our kids won't live to see up close...well, the survival and even resurgence of the physical world is worth the price. I think.
"I miss you," Dad thinks to himself. He does not know that I'm still awake. "When Renée was born, I put the < star > in her name because I knew one day you would go to the stars. I'm good at making people's dreams come true. But that is one dream that I can't create for you. Have a safe journey, Sophia." He fades out of my room.
A man with a broken heart, one who loves where he is no longer...not...loved in return, will sound the same wherever he lives. 4 stars
The Gods Have Not Died in Vain (2015) brings us that one step closer to the virtual world of "Staying Behind" with Maddie's new little sister "Mist." It's heart-rending to know the world will end; it's also inevitable, it's been staring at us since before I was born, but I'm still impressed that Maddie has the strength to plow on in that cage of knowledge she shared with her father.
"You can't feed billions of people with backyard gardens," said Mist. "Nostalgia for a Garden that never existed is dangerous. The mass of humanity depends on the fragile, power-intensive infrastructure of civilization. It is delusion to think you can live without it."
It's really very simple. The equation won't ever balance. It's time to change the terms. 4 stars
Memories of My Mother (2012) does more with "time travel" than The Time Traveler's Wife or "Story of Your Life"/Arrival did, only in just a couple pages. Time behaves differently when you move at relativistic speeds; but, like Maugham's "The Appointment in Samarra" tells us, there is only so much running one can do before it's too late. Pithy, pungent, powerful...4.5 stars
Dispatches from the Cradle: The Hermit - Forty-Eight Hours in the Sea of Massachusetts (2016) is set 500 years after the Climate Crisis, in a world so different...coral reefs on Harvard Common, submersible refugee pods to ride out now-lethal cyclones the world over...that it seems like an alien planet entirely. Are Maddie & Mist in their digital paradise in Svalbard? Permaybehaps, but no sightings or intersetions in this one. Instead we have a Thoreauvian scary-rich dropout from Humanity's Solar System spanning civilization, Asa < whale >-< tongue >-π, as she floats around the tropical seas over Boston.
The fact that the refugees remain stateless, so many generations after the wars that stripped their ancestors of homelands, seems to make it impossible for a solution to be envisioned by anyone from the Developed World—an ancient label whose meaning has evolved over the centuries,but has never been synonymous with moral rectitude.
I concur with story main character Asa < whale >-< tongue >-π when she says, from her billionaire's imitation of poverty aboard a refugee pod, that "Nostalgia is a wound we refuse time to heal." 4 stars
Grey Rabbit, Crimson Mare, Coal Leopard (2020) visits those outside the technoparadise, the scavengers whose last contact with the wildly advanced nanotech-meets-CRISPR future's last-ditch effort to manipulate the material world has resulted in...what else?...new castes and classes of people who can, after drinking "Revelation wine," change into spirit-animal-like forms rooted in their...psychology? anyway, inner world. Permaybehaps a bit over-the-top in its bog-standard superhero genesis-myth borrowing. In the end, I could see the comic-book art too clearly to enjoy the amazing episode of Love, Death + Robots that I'd been watching in my head until that last Dedication to the Cause scene. 3.5 stars
A Chase Beyond the Storms: An excerpt from "The Veiled Throne", Book 3 of the Dandelion Dynasty is exactly what it says it is. Its existence has me AGOG for this long-awaited entry into the technological fantasy-world action. If you haven't read The Grace of Kings https://tinyurl.com/GraceOfKings, start there. Amazing, wonderful stuff. 4.5 stars because *squee*
The Hidden Girl (2017) changes scenes to 8th-century China...or is it a Klein bottle in the UI universe...either way, it is a beautiful, supremely filmable tale of stealing your own life from those who want to dictate what it should be. I hate that word "should" with its freight of guilt & coercion. Marred by some speechy dialogue but a glittering gem withal.
I emerge into the space above space, the space within space, the hidden space.
Everything gains a new dimension—the walls, the floor tiles, the flickering torches, the astomished face of the governor. It si as if the governor's skin has been pulled away to reveal everything underneath: I see his beating heart, his pulsating intestines, the blood screaming through his transparent vessels, his gleaming white bones as well as the velvety marrow stuffed inside like jujube-stained lotus paste. I see each grain of shiny mica inside each briak; I see ten thousand immortals dancing inside each flame.
Tell me you can't immediately see the VFX and feel the cold of Space at the same time. Solidly 5 stars
Seven Birthdays (2016) wonders if Erich Segal wasn't right after all, fifty-odd years ago, when he penned the deathless aperçu "Love means never having to say you're sorry."
Bona Dea Nutrix creates and destroys from a cold distance with warm love and blazing, unending passion powering her. In the end, we're all someone's child, someone's parent, with eternal connections and consequences.
Ave Imperatrix, morituri te salutant.
I had once thought the Singularity would solve all our problems. Turns out it's just a simple hack for a complicated problem. We do not share the same histories; we do not all want the same things.
I am not so different from my mother after all.
I believe the profoundest truths are most effectively said in the simplest terms. Recursion rules. Another 5 stars
The Message (2012) privileges parenthood in a fairly heavy-handed way. "You're very much like your mother" is only a short mood-swing away from "You're JUST like your MOTHER!!" & is as destructive, if not as caustic.
Interesting setting of a long-dead alien civilization's death-palace. Also a very honest look at the cost of Humanity's itch to know. Just...sentimentalized. 3 stars
Cutting (2012) is a short concrete poem to the unstoppable power of loss.
The act of remembering is an act of retracing, and by doing so we erase and change the stencil.
It is too short to be a story, but functions very well as a coda to a collection of work dedicated to exploring the boundaries of our dimly perceived illusion-of-reality. 3 stars
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