The Hidden Girl and Other Stories by Ken Liu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Sublime SF and Human Choices, Changes, and Relationships Ken Liu says about The Hidden Girl and Other Stories (2020), “Rather than worrying about which stories would make the ‘best’ collection for imaginary readers I decided to stick with stories that most pleased myself.” Is that why I ended up preferring his earlier collection The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories (2016)? The more recent collection makes a neat “meta-narrative,” as its nineteen well-written stories coalesce around ghosts, identity, memory, morality, technology, civilization, nature, and families, but the result is less varied than his earlier collection. 1. Ghost Days Three times, places, and protagonists: 2313 Nova Pacifica and a "human" girl bioengineered to suit her toxic world; 1989 East Norbury CT and a Chinese immigrant trying to fit in to high school; 1905 Hong Kong and an anglicized young man trying to understand his father. Past and future, parents and children, immigrants and aliens, story and authenticity: “Digging into the past was an art of comprehension, making sense of the universe.” 4 stars. 2. Maxwell's Demon During WWII, the US authorities force a Japanese American woman to “defect” to Japan to spy on Japanese scientists, one of whom hopes to find a “demon” to separate fast moving air molecules from slow ones to get more energy. Can or should Takako train the ghosts of Chinese slave laborers killed by the Japanese? “No matter what she did people would die.” 4 stars 3. The Reborn Aliens who conquered Earth are now seemingly benign immigrants marrying cooperative earthlings. The human protagonist’s job catching vengeful xenophobic humans leads him to upsetting questions about his past, memory, and identity. 3 stars. 4. Thoughts and Prayers A family falls apart when a mass shooter kills one of two daughters, and the mother has a VR documentary made about her daughter’s life, so internet trolls target her despite her digital “armor,” all highlighting memory, reality, technology, and American “freedom” and guns. 5 stars 5. Byzantine Empathy Virtual reality, crypto currency, human disasters, charities. Liu tells the story from the point of view of two women who were university roommates and now have very different ideas about how to make the world a better place based on empathy or reason. 4 stars 6. The Gods Will Not Be Chained Bullied at school, Maddie is missing her deceased father when she’s contacted via chat window and emojicons by his digitally uploaded consciousness. Will such post-humans be content doing the same work they did when human? (Liu imposes a dramatic limit on his digital mind stories: consciousness cannot be uploaded without destroying the original.) 4 stars. 7. Staying Behind A small number of mortal human beings refuse to have their consciousnesses uploaded to join the digital post-human colony of immortal minds. What happens when the mortal narrator has to deal with his daughter and her boyfriend making a different choice? 4 stars. 8. Real Artists Satire on the use of computers and technology in making movies that strike emotional chords with the audience. Are the movie makers artists? Or is the software the artist? 3 stars. 9. The Gods Will Not Be Slain An unseen digital war: resentful uploaded post-human gods decide to destroy human civilization by goading mutually hostile countries into starting wars, while some uploaded post-human gods like the father of Maddie from the earlier story try to thwart them. 4 stars 10. Altogether Elsewhere Vast Herds of Reindeer Real Earth reverts to flora and fauna as 300 billion “human beings” live in a data center as uploaded consciousnesses, communicating via thought and designing multi-dimensional worlds. A mother takes her daughter on an eye-opening real world day trip: “Anything real must die.” 4 stars 11. The Gods Have Not Died in Vain Maddie and her cloud-born digital sister Mist (“a creature of pure computation, never having existed in the flesh”) try to prevent the uploaded “gods” from returning to life, but life in a data center without bodies, death, or rich/poor is appealing after a world of scarcity. Aren’t we all just electric signals anyway? 4 stars 12. Memories of My Mother A strange and moving relationship: a 25-year-old mother with two more years to live makes time with her daughter last longer via lots of fast space travel, so that, while not really aging, she meets her daughter when she’s a little girl, 17, 33, and 80. 4 stars 13. Dispatches from the Cradle: The Hermit Forty-Eight Hours in the Sea of Massachusetts A wealthy hermit philosopher floats around on “Old Blue” (earth) above Sunken Boston after all the ice caps have melted and drowned most of the cities. Humanity’s capacity for adaptation to and exploitation of nature: “We dare not stop striving to find out who we are.” 3 stars 14. Grey Rabbit, Crimson Mare, Coal Leopard In the far future, a midden-miner sifts through the detritus of the ancients like plastics and electrical circuits, until to save her brother she becomes a hero wererabbit in a world where godlike wereanimals abuse their powers as they rule over and exploit the common people. 4 stars 15. A Chase Beyond the Storms Not a story but a cliffhanger appetizer from the third novel of the Dandelion Dynasty: princess Thera of Dara and her fiancé prince of Agon make it past the wall of storms only to discover they’re being pursued by an enemy city ship equipped with flying dragon-cows. 2 stars 16. The Hidden Girl A general’s daughter from 8th-century Tang Dynasty China is stolen by a nun who trains her to be a multi-dimensional super assassin. Morality and power and ramifications. What will the girl do when told to kill a governor as her graduation test? 4 stars 17. Seven Birthdays The narrator’s relationships with her “mad scientist” mother and her own daughter through birthdays, from age seven to age 823,543 (!), when digital post-humanity has spread throughout the galaxy terraforming worlds and turning planets into giant solar-powered computers. “There is always a technical solution,” but there’s also always human darkness. 4 stars 18. The Message A father who’s never met his 13-year-old daughter Maggie (Liu’s third red-haired Maggie, including The Paper Menagerie stories) takes her to work with him, recording 20,000-year-old alien ruins and translating their message on a planet soon to be blank-slated and terraformed by humanity. The neat ideas on alien human “contact,” uranium, and parental responsibility cross into contrivance and sentimentality. 3 stars 19. Cutting A prose poem story: for generations some monks have been cutting “unnecessary words from their holy book so that over time it has come to look like lace, “like a dissolving honeycomb,” and only words like “experience,” “is,” and “forget” remain. 5 stars In his stories Liu pushes human boundaries and explores ways in which technology transforms society, relationships, and identities. What will happen to humanity if we abandon our bodies to become digital minds or expand throughout the galaxy terraforming planets? He views such issues from multiple sides, making it difficult to decide what we’d do. And his relevant ideas and sublime sf are grounded in human relationships (e.g., parents and children) and experiences (e.g., losing loved ones to time, work, or violence). The four readers of the audiobook are all fine. View all my reviews
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