★★★☆☆ Clever, cruel stories

The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

Ken Liu

The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories contains 15 stories, selected from more than 70 (according to the Reader's Guide) written by Ken Liu. Although they are diverse, there are recurring themes and they have what I will vaguely call a consistent feel -- I suspect that if I read another Liu story without knowing who wrote it, it would feel familiar. Most but not all of the stories use elements of Speculative Fiction (F&SF). Some of the stories concern aliens as weird as Liu can think up, but most are about humans and Earth. Most in one form or another concern the meeting of cultures, and in most cases those cultures are China, Taiwan, Japan, and the USA.

My favorite two stories were the title story, "The Paper Menagerie", and "Good Hunting", which was the basis for my second-favorite episode of the animated series "Love, Death, and Robots". (My favorite episode was "Three Robots" because it was funny, but Liu is a serious person who doesn't do humor.) "The Paper Menagerie" is one of the shortest stories in the book. It is firmly in Liu's wheelhouse, being about the relationship between a Chinese-American mother and her son, growing up American. It has a light fantasy element. "Good Hunting" combines traditional Chinese folklore -- fox spirits, 狐狸精, huli jing -- with steampunk. And it is about how Chinese people fared under the English colonization of Hong Kong. It's a good rousing F&SF story that I think most lovers of Speculative Fiction would enjoy.

At least five of the stories, "The Literomancer", "Good Hunting", "A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel", "The Litigation Master and the Monkey King", and "The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary" are about historical atrocities. In two of those ("Good Hunting" and the alt-history story "Trans-Pacific Tunnel") the specific atrocities described are fictional, although they are reminiscent of real things that happened. The other three describe real atrocities. Two of them, "The Literomancer" and "The Man Who Ended History" describe atrocities in sickening detail. I use the word "sickening" not as a judgment, but a literal description -- reading these stories may literally make you feel sick. "Trans-Pacific Tunnel" contains a kind of an explanation: "Make the secret a bit harder to keep. That counts for something." In my opinion, these are good stories, but they are not easy to read.

Indeed, most of the fifteen are good stories. But the bottom line is, Ken Liu has published another collection of stories, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories, and I have no plans to read it.

Amazon review

Goodreads review

Comments

★★★★☆ Alana in show-biz

Saga, Volume 4 Brian K. Vaughan, Fiona Staples (Illustrator) If you're like me, your first question on seeing Saga, Volume 4 is, "Who is that woman on the cover?" That, my dear friend, is Alana. About halfway through Volume 3 Alana and Marko had a brief conversation about The Circuit, which is a performance venue of some kind that people can tune into with a virtual reality helmet. Before she became a soldier, Alana harbored ambitions of performing on the Circuit. Now that their lethal pursuit has been temporarily distracted or put out of commission, they're focused on making some kind of living. Marko encouraged her to audition. So now Alana is performing on the Circuit, and what you see on the cover is her bewigged with wings bound and hidden in order to perform. She's the family breadwinner. Marko is a househusband, staying home and taking care of Hazel. The Marko-Alana-Hazel story in this volume is a bit dull. Without giving away any spoilers, it's kin...

★★★☆☆ Lacking the common touch

100 Selected Poems: John Keats John Keats Well, that was disappointing. I am ready to admit that this is an "It's not you -- it's me," case. Since I suspect that some other readers, even readers who love poetry, may likewise find Keats disappointing, I will try to explain why he disappointed me. Thus you can judge whether you, too, might suffer the same fate. First thing to say is that the young John Keats was not really that great a poet. (By "young", I mean up to and including Endymion .) That, of course, is a judgment many readers will disagree with, but don't discount it! It was Keats 's own judgment. In his preface to Endymion , he says "I apologize for the lousy work, but I just had to get this out of my system." (Obviously I'm paraphrasing.) You may dismiss that as false modesty, but I am more inclined to accept it as the judgment of a man who knew what he was talking about, especially because the quality of his poetry abr...

★★★★☆ Courage and principle, betrayed by history

Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South Elizabeth R Varon My first knowledge of Confederate general James Longstreet came as a result of reading Michael Shaara 's splendid historical novel The Killer Angels , which Elizabeth Varon , in Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South describes thus A finely grained fictional account of the Gettysburg campaign, the book conjured the strained relationship of Longstreet and Lee, casting Longstreet as a prescient pragmatist oriented toward the future, who symbolized modern warfare, and Lee as the prideful romantic, backward-looking and resigned to fate. Why had I never heard of Longstreet? Because the USA doesn't want to remember him. At the end of the Civil War, Longstreet, unlike the huge majority of Confederate officers, accepted defeat. Longstreet was a great friend of Union general Ulysses S Grant, and he was inspired by Grant's generosity in victory to behave in such a way as to d...

★☆☆☆☆ Petty Evil 101: Corporate edition

Power Jeffrey Pfeffer I read this eleven years ago (21-Sep-2011). At the time, I wrote this brief note to myself: Based on the first chapter or two, a singularly repulsive little book. It's basically "Petty Evil 101: Corporate edition". Amazon review Goodreads review

★★★☆☆ Advice I am not going to follow

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals Michael Pollan Michael Pollan is a person who cares deeply about food. I am not (which is a little strange, since I worked 31 years as a neuroscientist studying feeding behavior). “Thou shouldst eat to live; not live to eat.” ― Socrates I am definitely a person who eats to live. There are a few books in what I call the "history of substances" genre, for instance The True History of Chocolate , A Perfect Red , or A History of the World in 6 Glasses . I find these fascinating and would be happy to find more. I picked up The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World and The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals because I thought they were books in this vein, and The Omnivore's Dilemma was getting a lot of love from my friends. Well, my hopes were not completely disappointed. The Omnivore's Dilemma does indeed contain fascinating information a...

★★★★☆ Making heroes of Rednecks and Hillbillies

Demon Copperhead Barbara Kingsolver You already know that Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver is a retelling of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens . Indeed, it is so faithful a retelling that, if the publisher had not already spilled the beans, I would feel compelled to mark this review a spoiler because of mentioning David Copperfield . If you have read David Copperfield at all recently, then you will recognize the characters and the major plot points as you read Demon Copperhead . (I last read David Copperfield when I was a kid in the late 1960s, so I was blessedly free from this detailed anticipation as I read Demon Copperhead . I did, however, check out the Wikipedia plot summary of David Copperfield on finishing Demon Copperhead , so I'm up to speed on both plot outlines.) And this, I say, is absolutely fine! If you're going to steal, by all means, steal from the best! I am co...

★★★☆☆ Drivel with occasional brilliance

Songs of Innocence and Experience William Blake I have to begin with a disclaimer. Usually I read poetry very slowly, one or two poems a day. This gives me the time to savor it. However, I had surgery two days ago and brought William Blake 's Songs of Innocence and Experience along to read while waiting for the surgeons to slice me open. It is possible that these are not the best conditions for appreciating Blake . With that caveat, I was more disappointed than pleased by this volume of poetry. It consists mostly of drivel like this: When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy, And the dimpling stream runs laughing by; When the air does laugh with our merry wit, And the green hill laughs with the noise of it; interrupted by occasional flashes of brilliance like this O rose, thou art sick! The invisible worm, That flies in the night, In the howling storm, Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy, And his dark secret love Does thy life destroy. or this The human d...

★★★☆☆ The Great Geometer

The Impossible Man: Roger Penrose and the Cost of Genius Patchen Barss If I were asked to name the greatest physicists of the second half of the twentieth century, I would probably choose three: Richard Feynman , Steven Weinberg , and Roger Penrose . (I am a neuroscientist and a mathematician with a long interest in physics. I'm not the best person to choose great physicists, but I'm not the worst.) Thus when my local Theoretical Physics Institute (every town should have one!), the Perimeter Institute , announced a public presentation by Patchen Barss , a science journalist who has written this biography of Penrose , I immediately snagged a ticket. Barss wounded my confidence by emitting that cliché of the science popularizer: that you make science interesting by telling the "human story." Oh, please! I don't read a biography of Penrose for the sake of the human story. Why do science popularizers find it so hard to believe that there...

★★★☆☆ What a difference a few inches make...

Fed Mira Grant **Spoilers for Feed follow ** (Also spoilers for Deadline and Blackout , but I will protect those in spoiler tags. Fed is an alternative ending for Feed . It is available free from Orbit books as a PDF download. At 53 pages it's either a long short story or a very short novella. When I reviewed Feed , I wrote, "The book ends well". Feed ended with Shaun Mason putting a bullet in the brain of the love of his life, his sister Georgia Mason, because she had become a zombie. (That's the big spoiler for Feed I promised above.) I thought this was a splendid ending. Tragic, yes, Gruesome, yes, but Feed is, after all, a zombie novel. I added the remark, "While I say, 'The book ends well,' I'm pretty sure that many readers are going to be unhappy with the ending." That was certainly true. For instance, one Amazon reviewer, following in the long tradition of people inventing ar...

★★★★☆ Clothes make the Victorian girl

The Case of the Missing Marquess Nancy Springer The Case of the Missing Marquess is the first book in Nancy Springer 's Enola Holmes series . Thus, its main business is to tell us who and what kind of person Enola Holmes is. Mystery purists (I am not one) may be disappointed by the shallowness of the mystery of the Missing Marquess, which is less than half of the book and which Enola solves almost instantly simply by virtue of being a teenage kid herself (like the Marquess -- well, actually, he's 12, but close enough) and guessing correctly what he would do. The much bigger mystery, which is not solved here, concerns Enola's mother Lady Eudoria Holmes, who is also the widowed mother of Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes. Lady Eudoria is known to associate with suffragettes, and to wear "rationals" -- that is, comfortable and practical clothing of a type that is widely considered inappropriate women's wear in Victorian society. On Enola's 14th birthday Lady Eud...

Search This Blog