The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “All life is an experiment” The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories (2016) by Ken Liu collects fifteen stories ranging from Stapledonian cosmic exploration and evolution through steampunk alternate histories and cyberpunk serial killer thrillers to Chinese legends and postmodern “documentaries.” It features clear writing, convincing characters, unpredictable plots, serious themes, and neat plays with genre elements. His stories often foreground intercultural interaction and exotic Chinese culture, including foods, superstitions, paper money offerings for spirits, and written characters. The character for autumn is composed of the characters for fire and for rice/millet, because in the north of China in autumn they harvested grain and burnt the stalks to fertilize the fields. And the character for autumn combines with that for heart to make sorrow or worry. Liu’s Preface explains that the stories show his interests and that any story is a translation: we can’t be sure how people who read it understand it, but writing and reading stories bring people closer together. “The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species” explains the writing and books of interstellar species, including ones who write and read with their proboscises, mechanical ones whose stone brains are books, energy “field potentials” who read stars and planets and black hole event horizons, and a tiny people who collect other species’ obsolete books and turn them into tiny cities. (4 stars) In “State Change” Rina is a quiet young woman who believes that her soul is an ice cube. If it melts, she’ll die, she thinks, so she keeps it in a refrigerator by her bed at home and in a freezer by her desk at work, where she is completely ignored—no one knows her name—until a friendly new guy starts working there. Could she be wrong about souls? (3.5 stars) In “The Perfect Match” a search Engine called Centillion has become a lifestyle tool based on data collection. Sai’s virtual assistant Tilly plays wake up music for him, sets him up with compatible women, and suggests discounted products for him to buy. Ala Fahrenheit 451’s Clarisse and Montag, Sai’s neighbor Jenny makes him see his life in a new way. (3.5 stars) In “Good Hunting” the son of a demon hunter narrator tells his story over many years, as the traditional Chinese superstitions and magics and supernatural beings like fox demonesses are dying out and being replaced by seemingly more powerful western technology of trains, engines, and clockwork. The story has a weird, transcendent climax. (4 stars) “The Literomancer” is about a Texan girl in Taiwan, the magic power words have to affect the world and our lives in it, the awful things done by one group to another for “noble” reasons, and the tragedy of children discovering that their parents are not admirable. (5 stars) Through the plot lens of a new kind of camera and the fraught relationship between inventor father and estranged daughter, “Simulacrum” explores the nature of reality in the context of human attempts to capture it (and probably thereby to lose or avoid it). (3 stars) In “The Regular” a meticulous serial killer of prostitutes is sought in Boston by a 49-year-old private eye with a traumatic past requiring a spinal implant “regulator” to control her emotions. The story is too much of its genre, lasts too long, and ends in a too pat climax. (3 stars) In “The Paper Menagerie” the American narrator recounts how his relationship with his Chinese mother changed from loving, imaginative, and fun when he was little and speaking Chinese and playing with the paper animals she made for him and animated with her breath, to distant as he aged, became more American, and forced her to speak English. (5 stars) “An Advanced Readers’ Picture Book of Comparative Cognition” features an account of memory and cognition in different species (like one made of uranium), while the narrator tells his daughter why the child’s mother went on a mission out into the solar system to try to catch alien communications. After all, the world is a boat. (4 stars) In “The Waves,” the people traveling on an exploratory generation ship evolve through renewable flesh, uploaded consciousnesses, and steel bodies and silicon brains to become beings of light, while Maggie tells ancient origin stories from earth. (4 stars) “Mono No Aware” is about the last 1000 or so human beings in the universe traveling on a “habitat module” called The Hopeful to 61 Virginis. We get the background for all this and a message about the transience of life (we’re all ephemeral cicadas) from the narration of a young Japanese man: “a kitten’s tongue tickles the inside of my heart.” (3 stars) In “All the Flavors: A Tale of Guan Yu the Chinese God of War in America” Lord Guan, the 3rd-century Chinese hero God of War, (possibly) appears in frontier-era Idaho City. As in “The Literomancer,” a red-haired white girl called Lily meets a kind Chinese man who introduces her to Chinese culture, though here he learns the Irish song “Finnegan’s Wake” from Lily’s father instead of being tortured by him. (4 stars) Set during the golden age of the Qing Dynasty, “The Litigation Master and the Monkey King” features a “legal hooligan” who helps the poor in their legal conflicts with the rich. Egged on by the trickster Monkey King, the master has to deal with a verboten book and an exiled student as the comedic story turns heroic. “We are all just ordinary men faced with extraordinary choices.” (4.5 stars) “A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel” recounts how a 1938 trans-Pacific submarine tunnel linking Japan, China, and America prevented World War Two, maintained Japan's East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, and led to various technologies being innovated earlier than in our world. The Formosan narrator who worked on the tunnel tells the source of his nightmares to his American lover. (3 stars.) “The Man Who Ended History” uses an sf time travel breakthrough (photons, sub-atomic particles, the human brain, etc.) to relate the Japanese Unit 731’s appalling experiments (exposure, amputation, syphilis, etc.) on living and unanesthetized Chinese children, men, and (pregnant) women during the World War II era, killing up to 500,000 people. The story explores hegemony, history, memory, narrative, truth, and human nature. Does the Chinese American scholar of Japanese history Evan Wei end or free history via his and his Japanese American physicist wife Akemi Kirino’s invention? The “story,” a documentary composed of excerpts from interviews, news shows, hearings, and articles, warns that calling men like the doctors of Unit 731 “monsters” distances us from them when really anyone is capable of such behavior. The story devastated me--I’ve been living in Japan for thirty years. (4.5 stars) The audiobook lacks the reproductions of the Chinese characters described in “The Literomancer” and the notes and dedication (“to the memory of Iris Chang and all the victims of Unit 731”) after the last story. The readers Corey Brill and Joy Osmanski are capable. View all my reviews
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