★★★☆☆ 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.

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