The Hidden Girl and Other Stories
Ken Liu
★★★★★ 3.5/5
Fiction: Sci Fi, Fantasy, Short Stories
Should’ve followed my advice
On completing Ken Liu’s previous collection of shorts, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, I had declared that it was unlikely I would pick up another Ken Liu book. This conclusion was based not on his writing abilities—Mr. Liu is a masterful writer (you only have to read his introduction to realize he has profound empathy, especially with suffering)—but on the inescapable sadness in all his stories. Melancholy by itself is not a disqualifying factor, but rather it is the ‘sadness without hopefulness’ that is characteristic of most of his stories, that I am averse to. This pervasive sadness is likely shaped by his worldview of the universe being “unfeeling and accidental”. The stories in The Hidden Girl and Other Stories are unfortunately not fundamentally different. In hindsight, rather than giving in to my urge for acclaimed Sci-Fi and the (deserved) high ratings Mr. Liu’s new book has received, I should have kept my distance from it purely on the grounds of our differing world views—I much prefer life affirming stories to ones colored by hopelessness.
The best stories of the lot:
The twenty stories in the collection cover a wide range of themes, many of them with Asian cultural settings. There’s a set in this collection that can be read as a single story starting with The Gods Will Not Be Chained, dealing with a dystopian future when physical human survival on the earth is threatened, forcing the migration of human consciousness from biological bodies to data centers! I found the premise to be somewhat flimsy especially since it entirely skirts the issues of free will and the nature of consciousness.
These stories stood out in my reading:
Seven Birthdays: tells the story of a mother with terminal illness who wishes to see her child grow up and prolong her influence through her life using time dilation from relativistic travel. The story and idea brilliantly capture the compulsive longing of a parent to not miss their child growing up and the heartbreaking tradeoff to be made between total time spent with a child and the span through their life. You can read the story here on Tor.
Real Artists: Adroitly poses the question of human relevance in the creation of art in the future when AI is advanced enough to predict human taste and create art to meet it. This story has apparently been made into a short film.
Byzantine Empathy: Perhaps the most well thought out and artfully constructed piece in the entire collection: deals with the possibility of a blockchain and VR based crowdsourcing of aid for refugees in an attempt to take out political machinations from the who-to-save equation. You can read this story on the LightSpeed Magazine site here.
Thoughts and Prayers: you can guess what this one’s about from the title: the aftermath of a mass shooting, told through the voices of survivors of a victim of a mass shooting, trying to keep her memory alive through technology while advocating for gun control. It takes the current climate of political polarization and continuous spread of disinformation through social media trolling to an extreme and heartbreaking conclusion. You can read this story on Slate.
Never say never
Since I did not stick to my resolution the last time, I’m not going to declare this as my last Ken Liu book, but there is every possibility that it is.